Trump signals new foreign policy priority: Combat the persecution of Christians



The Biden-Harris administration has prioritized the advancement of the LGBT agenda and climate alarmism in its foreign policy. President Donald Trump has identified a different priority for his future administration: Combat the brutal persecution of Christians around the globe.

Trump noted Wednesday on Truth Social, "Kamala Harris did NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced in Artsakh. Christians around the World will not be safe if Kamala Harris is President of the United States."

"When I am President, I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan," added Trump.

The Republic of Artsakh, which is also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, is a region in the Caucasus Mountains that lies within Azerbaijan's borders.

While internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan — whose close ally Turkey, formerly the Ottoman Empire, killed 1.5 million Armenians in what is regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century — the region was, at least up until September 2023, home to over 100,000 Armenian Christians who contested Azerbaijan's territorial claims.

The region became autonomous in 1923 while Armenia, the world's oldest Christian country, and Azerbaijan, whose population is 97.3% Muslim, were both still members of the former Soviet Union.

Two bloody wars were fought over the area in the last 30 years — the first in 1988 and the second in 2020.

Azerbaijan — given military assistance by the Biden-Harris administration despite its war crimes and torture of Armenian prisoners — launched a blitzkrieg on the region on Sept. 19, 2023, and saw to the dissolution of the Armenian enclave by Jan. 1.

Azerbaijani forces killed hundreds of ethnic Armenians and added insult to injury by destroying churches and cemeteries. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians were forced to flee.

'Vice President Harris — whose Administration armed Azerbaijan's genocidal blockade and attack on Artsakh — did not lift a finger or even raise her voice against Azerbaijan’s 2023 aggression.'

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been engaged in peace talks in the months since.

While there has been some grumbling in recent years from the State Department — an official claimed in a September 2023 Senate hearing that the U.S. would not "countenance any action or effort, short-term or long-term, to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh" — the Biden-Harris administration was less than helpful where Armenian Christians were concerned.

The Armenian National Committee of America blasted the Democratic administration in July over its "two-faced policy."

The ANCA said in a statement:

There is no clearer example of the Biden-Harris administration’s two-faced policy towards Armenia than the spineless inaction of USAID Administrator Samantha Power during Azerbaijan’s blockade and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. As Azerbaijan deprived Artsakh’s 120,000 Armenians of access to food, fuel, medicine, and humanitarian goods in a brazen violation of international law — Administrator Power refused to acknowledge the dire humanitarian crisis unfolding. The genocidal ethnic cleansing of Artsakh’s entire Armenian population was a humanitarian catastrophe the United States had every opportunity to prevent but instead chose to enable — sacrificing the existence of the region’s indigenous Christian Armenian population for misguided geopolitical interests.

The ANCA noted further that the administration's inaction "will weigh heavily on the minds of Armenian American voters this November — including those in the key swing states of Nevada and Michigan as well as in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

As of 2021, there were more than 2 million Americans with Armenian heritage.

In late September, Harris signaled support for Armenian Christians' return to Artsakh.

ANCA executive director Aram Hamparian said in response, "As Vice President, Kamala Harris has had a full year to act on Artsakh's right to return — via a U.S.-led resolution at the U.N. Security Council — yet she has only started talking (to Armenian Americans, not U.N. member states) about this right 40 days before an election in which Armenian voters across key swing states may prove decisive."

"Notably, Vice President Harris — whose Administration armed Azerbaijan's genocidal blockade and attack on Artsakh — did not lift a finger or even raise her voice against Azerbaijan's 2023 aggression. Even at the level of campaign rhetoric, she has not said a word about cutting U.S. military arms and aid to Azerbaijan, or otherwise holding Baku accountable for its crimes," added Hamparian.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) echoed Trump Wednesday, writing, "The United States should fight against the persecution of Christians all over the world, and it will when President Trump is back in the White House. Kamala Harris has done nothing."

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, "Very gratified to see President Trump speak out about the persecution & displacement of Armenian Christians in Artsakh. It’s our job to call out the hypocrisy of the foreign policy establishment & we refuse to simply sweep this issue under the rug."

Artsakh is hardly the only place where brutal regimes and radicals have sought to crush Christians and their faith.

According to the persecution watchdog Open Doors, 317 million Christians around the world face very high or extreme levels of persecution. Last year, 4,998 Christians were reportedly slaughtered for faith-related reasons; 14,766 churches and Christian properties were attacked; and over 295,000 Christians were displaced.

The top 10 worst countries for Christians in terms of persecution were, in this order: North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Supposedly developed nations farther up the list aren't a great deal better. China, for instance, subjects Christians to routine torture, detentions, and executions.

Persecution and attacks have also been on the rise in Western nations, including the U.S., Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.

Arielle Del Turco, director of the Family Research Council's Center for Religious Liberty, indicated in a report earlier this year that between 2018 and 2023, there were nearly 1,000 acts of hostility against American churches.

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'We are frogs in the kettle': Persecution watchdog sounds alarm on growing threat facing American Christians



Open Doors, the watchdog group born of an effort to smuggle Bibles into communist-occupied Poland, indicated in its latest annual report that one in seven Christians worldwide faces "high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith." That amounts to over 365 million Christians with targets on their backs. Things appear to be getting progressively worse, granted five years ago, the statistic was one in nine.

The 10 worst countries for Christians are reportedly North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan in that order. While a Christian faces a good chance of torture, imprisonment, rape, and death on account of their faith in any one those oppressive nations, supposedly civilized countries further up the rankings are not much better.

China's 96.7 million Christians, for instance, have in recent years been subject to harassment, torture, detentions, and executions. Since Christianity is regarded as a foreign threat to the communist regime, churches are frequently desecrated, destroyed, or closely surveilled.

In India, anti-Christian attacks have spiked, frequently executed by Hindu nationalists. According to the Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, numerous pastors and and believers have been arbitrarily detained and savagely beaten while their churches are wrecked, especially in Uttar Pradesh.

Christian persecution is not just a foreign phenomenon. It's a problem in the United States as well and — according to another watchdog group — poised to worsen.

Forbidden prayers

Jeff King, president of the Washington, D.C.-based International Christian Concern recently suggested to the Christian Post that American Christians are right to get their hackles up.

"Basically, we are frogs in the kettle, and the bubbles keep coming up under us," said King. "Too many people are not aware politically, and they're so used to thinking of how things were that they can't figure out where these bubbles are coming from, not realizing they're being cooked."

King's sense that things are getting worse in the U.S. is reportedly informed, in part, by Staci Barber's case in Texas.

Barber is a teacher who has spent the past eight years of her 26-year teaching career at the Katy Independent School District near Houston. According to her lawsuit against the district, filed in March on Barber's behalf by the American Center for Law and Justice, she desperately wanted to create a chapter of Students for Christ at Cardiff Junior High, having previously sponsored a chapter at Alief ISD.

The principal, Scott Rounds, allegedly shut her down on multiple occasions. However, in the 2023-2024 school year, Barber and some Christian students prevailed in starting a Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter, which Rounds apparently reluctantly approved.

In September, there was a prayer event on campus called See You At The Pole, which was scheduled to take place before school hours. Ahead of the event, Rounds allegedly sent out a memo stressing "district personnel shall not promote, lead, or participate in the meetings of non-curriculum-related student groups." The principal apparently also sent an email to Barber, stressing that she could not take part as she would be "on campus visible to students in [her] role as an employee."

Barber ultimately met at the pole to pray before work hours on Sept. 27, 2023, and was joined by two other teachers.

According to the complaint, the principal chastised Barber and "forbade the teachers from praying in the presence of students," indicating the purpose of the prohibition was to avoid the risk of students potentially joining in.

Following the prohibition, Barber apparently faced more antagonism from the administration.

"The Supreme Court has made it clear that student and teacher prayer, including prayer at SYATP events, is undisputedly a protected form of speech that school officials may not ban," says the lawsuit.

The American Center for Law and Justice said in a statement, "The primary goal of this lawsuit is to ensure that the school amends its policy to reflect what the Constitution actually requires. This school policy strips teachers and school employees of their fundamental right to express their faith freely, and must be struck down. We need your support in our legal battles for your right to pray."

King told the Christian Post that Barber's case not only "highlights the depth of ignorance among school boards and even at the principal level of what rights the Constitution grants people" but also a wider hostility toward Christians.

"The big picture, and what people need to grasp, is that's what's going on here in the West, and that's what a lot of people who dislike Christianity are proposing and trying to push forward," said King.

Hated for His name's sake

King suggested that countries whose leaders are antipathetic toward Christianity and enjoy influence over a politically weaponized judicial system can suppress Christians' speech and even prompt them to withdraw from public debate.

The president of the watchdog highlighted how India, for instance, has religious freedom in its constitution, "but it doesn't matter."

"It's what happens in practice," continued King. "And so when pastors are often attacked in the streets or in the churches, guess who gets arrested? It's the pastor. What happens is you keep your head down. So this is what we're seeing in the States."

"People learn that you do not stick your head up, and you start being quiet because the process is the punishment," added King.

Extra to an increasingly antagonistic justice system, King suggested that Christians face legislators keen to shut them up or handcuff them linguistically. He cited as examples hate speech legislation in other Western nations as well as Democrats' proposed Equality Act.

The Equality Act, which resembles in spirit the recent Title IX rewrite announced by the Biden Department of Education, would have defined sex to include gender ideology.

"It's strategic, it's banana republic, and these are political enemies of Christianity," said King. "They've gained power, and they're using the very laws, the very power of democracy, to go against their political enemies."

While anti-Christian forces are advancing in legislatures and courts around the country, they are also active on the streets.

Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, noted in a February report that between 2018 and 2023, there were at least 915 acts of hostility against American churches. The attacks ranged from vandalism and arson to bomb threats.

Blaze News previously highlighted Turco's finding that between January and November 2023, there were at least 436 such attacks — eight times as many as there were in 2018 — such that 2023 ended up being the worst of all six years reviewed by the FRC.

The FRC observed 315 incidents of vandalism last year; 75 arson attacks or attempts; 10 gun-related occurrences; and 20 bomb threats.

Tony Perkins, president of the FRC and a former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said of the observations in the report, "There is a common connection between the growing religious persecution abroad and the rapidly increasing hostility toward churches here at home: our government's policies."

In the way of a remedy, King thought beyond legislation or politics, stating, "This really comes down to revival, and it starts with us personally."

"We've all got to turn back and cry to the Lord about not the political state of our country, but the religious state," said the watchdog. "We desperately need revival, and that all starts with us personally looking to the Lord and saying, 'Call me back and I'm completely yours, whatever you would have me do. All of my life is yours.'"

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Islamists continue to massacre Christians in Nigeria. European Parliament suggests climate change is largely to blame.



Islamic terrorists butchered hundreds of Christians throughout Nigeria on Christmas Eve. In their hours-long attack, Muslim Fulani militants gunned down Christian farmers, hacked up defenseless women and children with machetes, and torched churches.

While willing to express "solidarity" with the victims, the European Parliament appears more than willing to displace blame from the savage ideologues responsible and to instead pin the atrocities on so-called climate change.

A genocide of Christians

According to Open Doors International, Nigeria is the sixth most brutal place in the world for Christians — bad news for its roughly 100.4 million Christian inhabitants. In and outside the country's northern Sharia states, Christians are routinely subjected to enforced Islamization, forced marriage, murder, torture, abduction, rape, and other ideologically motivated brutalities.

Nearly 5,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria just last year, accounting for 82% of all Christians killed for their faith in 2023, reported the National Catholic Register.

In 2022, Genocide Watch indicated that jihadists slaughtered 6,000 civilians, mostly Christians, in the first three months of the year, then kept adding to their tally.

Nigerian Bishop Wildred Anagbe of the Makurdi Diocese reckons this bloodletting amounts to a genocide, telling CNA that the Christian population is being "gradually and systematically" reduced by Islamists through "killings, kidnappings, torture, and burning of churches."

Mark Lipdo, program coordinator at the Stefanos Foundation, a Christian charity that supports Nigerian Christians, told Christian Today, "These attacks are being seen by local Nigerians as a jihad, like the jihad of 200 years ago. This is why they are targeting Christmas and targeting churches."

"What is happening is a religious war," added Lipdo.

Genocide Watch indicated that terrorists killed over 350,000 in Nigeria between 2009 and 2022.

Climate change massacres

At least 200 Christians were reportedly murdered between Dec. 23 and Christmas Day, 2023, in a series of terror attacks in 26 Christian communities in Nigeria's Central Plateau State. Other estimates put the number at over 230 dead.

Magit Macham, who returned to the area to celebrate Christmas with his family, told Reuters, "We were taken unawares, and those that could run ran into the bush. A good number of those that couldn't were caught and killed with machetes."

After the marauders shot his brother in the leg, Macham dragged him into a bush, where they hid for the night.

Alliance Defending Freedom International noted that hundreds more were injured, eight churches were burned to the ground, and another 15,000 people were internally displaced by the attacks.

As the footage of the mass graves circulated online, Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Sokoto Diocese told Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, "You have no excuses before God or the people of Nigeria," reported CNA.

Empty gestures

Western outfits have suggested that while often acknowledged as an ethno-religious conflict, the attacks are largely driven by bad weather patterns.

Citing nameless experts, Reuters floated the notion that "the conflict is based on the availability of resources rather than ethnic or religious differences."

The International Crisis Group, whose work is supported by George Soros' Open Society Foundations and cited by the Biden State Department, claims that "climate change has aggravated" "farmer-herder violence."

"Increasingly, the security implications of changing weather patterns are visible in deadly land resource disputes between farmers and herders across the continent," added the group.

The European Parliament appears willing to similarly cast the persecution not as a sustained jihad but as a resource dispute caused by the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

Members of the climate alarmist political group Green/European Free Alliance introduced a motion for a resolution last week that grossly underestimated the Christian death toll and criticized the description of the conflict in religious terms. After all, "several factors are to be taken into account such as competition for land fuelled by rapid climate change."

The proposed resolution would have the parliament warn "against an instrumentalisation of the farmers-herders conflict for spreading religion-based hatred" and "cal[l] on the Nigerian authorities to take meaningful steps to identify and address all root causes of the violence in Plateau state, such as competition for scarce resources, environmental degradation and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes."

The climate alarmists' resolution would also have called on European authorities to make African migration to Europe easier and to "ensure humanitarian assistance for those affected and displaced by the violence and climate change."

The European Parliament ultimately passed a modified version of the resolution, which starts strong with an acknowledgement of the murder of Nigerian Christians by "Islamic terrorist groups" and the destruction of 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools since 2009. However, the resolution largely reverts to the language of the climate alarmists' original draft.

"Factors fuelling the clashes overlap and are rooted in, among other things, territorial disputes, ethnic tensions, access to scarce resources and environmental degradation," says the European resolution.

The parliamentarians also acknowledged "the role of climate change, competition for scarce resources and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes in aggravating the farmer-herder conflict."

ADF International highlighted that various parliamentarians have criticized the resolution.

Bert-Jan Ruissen, a Dutch politician and MEP, stated, "Saying that it is a mere conflict between farmers and herders fails to acknowledge the other causes. It is Muslim extremists causing death and destruction."

Hungarian politician and MEP György Hölvényi said, "Blinded by ideology, some people are totally insensitive to human suffering when it comes to Christians. The timing of the attacks, brutal killings, and destruction of churches cannot be misinterpreted and can only be understood as the persecution of Christians, and we should be able to say so."

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Biden is DEPORTING a law-abiding, Christian family despite leaving the borders WIDE OPEN for illegal aliens



A Christian family from Germany who fought for asylum to homeschool their kids in the United States is now facing deportation, even though they have been living in Tennessee for 15 years.

The Romeikes pulled their kids from Germany’s public school system over concerns that it was indoctrinating their children and attacking family values. Germany has strict education laws, which effectively ban homeschooling.

In 2014, the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security granted “deferred action” status to seven members of the family, but the government is now going after them.

Without any explanation, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer told the family they had four weeks to apply for German passports ahead of their deportation.

Glenn Beck is disturbed that the Biden administration is going after a law-abiding, Christian family while keeping the border wide open to illegal immigrants.

“With the hundreds of thousands that are coming across our border every month illegally, and the left says it’s all about asylum and persecution: This case IS,” he says, before being joined by the persecuted father, Uwe Romeike, and his attorney, Kevin Boden.

Romeike tells Glenn that if they are forced back to Germany, they would face losing custody of their children, fines, and possible jail time.

He goes on to explain that what his children were being taught in school “was diametrically against what we as Christians believed, so there were so many reasons we didn’t want them to go there again.”

Even the two eldest Romeike children, who are both adults who married Americans, are facing deportation.

“They applied for citizenship, but the paperwork hasn’t gone through yet,” Romeike tells Glenn, “so they are now all included in the deportation order.”

“I am so disgusted by this. This is truly a family that needs asylum. They don’t have the First Amendment in Germany. We have it here to protect people. This is what it means to bring in those who are persecuted, not the hundreds of thousands of young men without families coming across our border in the middle of night,” Glenn says.

“This is one I will go and camp outside of their house and surround their house with like-minded, loving Christian people who will just not break arms on our knees. We just go and kneel around their house in droves and we lock arms and we just pray for this family.”


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