Christians most persecuted group in the world as vicious attacks grow

Perry Chiaramonte:

The recent Palm Sunday bombings at two Egyptian churches that killed 44 worshippers and wounded more than 100 others are the latest in a spate of deadly attacks targeting the world’s Christians.

Nearly 90,000 of the faithful were killed for their beliefs in violent and gruesome attacks last year, according to a report by the Center for Studies on New Religions, making Christians the most persecuted group in the world. While some were killed as part of state-sanctioned persecution, as in places like North Korea, nearly one-third of the Christians who died in 2016 were executed at the hands of Islamic extremists like ISIS.

The study also found that as many as 600 million Christians were prevented from practicing their faith in 2016.

“There are many places on Earth where being a Christian is the most dangerous thing you can be,” Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project told Fox News in January.

Nov. 17, 2016: Iraqis, who fled the fighting between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants, gather around flames to warm themselves from the cold, as they wait to cross to the Kurdish controlled area, in the Nineveh plain, northeast of Mosul. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla )
Some of the more violent attacks on Christians include: terror groups in Nigeria taking out the eyes of Christians before butchering them; a mob of Muslim worshippers in Uganda — mad over conversion efforts — entering a church and beating parishioners and raping at least a dozen women; and the numerous bombings of Coptic churches in Egypt.

The violence against Christians has been on the rise over the past two years, with assailants growing more ferocious with each attack.

In October 2016, more than 40 Christians were killed in the village of GodoGodo, Nigeria, by Muslim Fulani Herdsman. The mostly Christian town was burned to the ground and crops and grazing land was destroyed by the herdsmen, who shot and slashed dozens of the fleeing villagers. In addition, more than 300 were left severely injured.

In the war-torn Central African Republic, more than a dozen Christian refugees were hacked by machete-wielding militia fighters, also in October 2016. Fighters from the republic’s largely Muslim Sleeka militia attacked refugees living in the village of Kaga Bandoro. More than 50 people were injured and another 13 were killed before U.N. peacekeepers from a nearby camp stopped the bloodshed.

In February 2015, a video was released by the Islamic State showing the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya.

The tape showed the victims — who were migrant workers kidnapped in the city of Sirte — kneeling in orange jumpsuits on a beach along the southern Mediterranean coast before they were beheaded.

“Oh people, recently you’ve seen us on the hills of Al-Sham [Greater Syria] and on Dabiq’s Plain, chopping off the heads that had been carrying the cross delusion for a long time, filled with spite against Islam and Muslims, and today we… are sending another message,” said one of their captives in English before the decapitations.

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