A New Perspective on Constantine

by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A Christian accused of blasphemy in Pakistan, who spent 5 years in prison for allegedly insulting the prophet Lut, was released and acquitted of charges June 6th.

The original charge developed out of a conversation Nazir Masih, a cleaner in a school for blind children, had had with Shahid Mehmood, a barber next door to the school with whom Masih would sometimes have friendly chats.

After recounting the biblical story of Lot to his friend one day, Mehmoud decried Masih as a blasphemer of the prophet Lut (the Islamic version of Lot found in the Quran), leading to Masih’s indictment.

Sections 298 and 295 of Pakistan’s legal code, otherwise known as the “blasphemy laws,” include highly sensitive prohibitions against any perceived misuse of religious objects, epithets, or inflammatory remarks against religious personages perceived as wounding the religious sentiments of Muslims in any way.

The case of Asia Bibi, who spent nearly 10 years in solitary confinement on a similar charge and was only released and granted asylum in Canada in January, made famous the series of laws, which are often used by Muslims in Pakistan to settle personal grudges against Christians.

The post Christian Imprisoned for 5 years for Blasphemy in Pakistan Granted Release appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – As part of the new sanctions on the regime promised by President Trump Wednesday, the US will revoke waivers for Iran’s non-military nuclear program.

While the waivers have permitted other countries in the past to support Iran in its pursuit of nuclear energy, which it has said is for civilian purposes only, administration officials seem to have taken a different tack in recent days.

“We don’t think Iran has ever had a right to enrichment, at any level, and so certainly removing any waivers that support that concept, we are very supportive of,” a source in the Trump administration told the Washington Examiner.

The change of tone was welcomed by Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who penned a letter to President Trump July 2 urging him to invoke the so-called “snapback mechanism” of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which was an addendum to the 2015 nuclear deal and allows the US to unilaterally “snapback” all previous sanctions against Iran.

The senators said that the net result of the waivers has been hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment in Iran’s regional proxy activities, which support terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and countless others in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

The post 'We Still Have Things Up Our Sleeve,' Senior Administration Official Says as Trump Rolls Out New Sanctions on Iran appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – China’s Communist thought transformation camps were recently exposed in a BBC report that toured one of the facilities where more than a million Uighur Muslims have been imprisoned.

“Students” of the “school” were bright and peppy for the cameras, saying the uniformed academy for adults where students practice Mandarin by rote till 8 pm and write devotional lyrics to the Communist Party of China was completely voluntary.

One Uighur woman who had escaped to Kazakhstan for asylum told a different story to BBC reporter John Sudworth, however.

“If any of you speak out, you will go to a worse place than this,” she had reportedly been told by officials before another, similar tour by Western media.

The school’s curriculum, into which one Uighur Muslim woman was conscripted for as little as having WhatsApp on her phone, teaches a 2 to 4 month course on “how to make a bed,” and apparently intends to drill “religious extremist” thoughts out of the heads of the predominantly Muslim ethnic group of China’s western Xinjiang region.

An officer from the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Office told reporters that the inmates or students had been adjudged “pre-criminals” by Chinese jurisprudence, which now seeks to punish crime before it happens in a philosophy reminiscent of the movie “Minority Report.”

“Some people before they commit murder already show they’re capable of killing,” Zhang Zhisheng, the Xinjiang official, told the BBC. “Should we wait for them to commit the crime? Or should we prevent it from happening?”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its annual report for 2019 released in April, highlighted the Chinese detention of between 800,000 and 2 million ethnic Uighur Muslims, noting that in the commission’s first-ever report in 2000 Uighurs were still being “imprisoned for their religious belief, association or practice.”

The post 'You Will Go to a Worse Place Than This': Muslim Uighurs Conscripted into China's Communist Schools, Report Reveals appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a wider military offensive in the Gaza strip to be launched shortly, seeking to alleviate concerns of residents in the coastal enclave of Ashkelon Thursday.

Netanyahu assured attendants of the city hall meeting that the effort would not be part of any political calculation in light of the premier’s upcoming reelection bid in September, but rather an answer to longstanding criticism of the Israeli leader for his apparent laxity in confronting the Hamas terror group militarily.

“A feeling and a reality of security” for southern residents will be the object of the operation, Netanyahu said, which he enigmatically promised would be “not only broad, but also surprising.”

Israel reached a tenuous ceasefire with the Gaza-based terror group Hamas last month, after Israeli firefighters put out 383 fires between April and June of this year started by incendiary balloons from the Gaza strip.

On Tuesday the militant group conducted massive military exercises in what some said was an unprecedented drill.

The post Netanyahu: 'We Are Preparing for a Campaign' Against Hamas appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – Gallup released its annual public-opinion poll on abortion policy, and its results contain some good news for abortion opponents. According to the survey, a plurality of Americans now identify as pro-life, with 49 percent of respondents calling themselves “pro-life,” and 46 percent calling themselves “pro-choice.” This is the first Gallup poll since 2013 in which a higher percentage of respondents identified as “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice.”

The new survey also found that the percentage of Americans who think abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances” increased from 53 to 60 percent between 2018 and 2019. A Gallup poll conducted in May, meanwhile, found that the percentage of Americans who consider abortion immoral reached 50 percent for the first time since 2012. [ Source: Christian Post (Read More…) ]

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