Benjamin Weinthal
21st February 2013 - Fox News
21st February 2013 - Fox News
Saudi
Arabia’s notorious religious police, known as the mutawa, swooped in on
a private gathering of at least 53 Ethiopian Christians this month,
shutting down their private prayer, and arresting the peaceful group of
foreign workers for merely practicing their faith, FoxNews.com has learned.
The
mixed group of men and women was seized in a private residence in the
city of Dammam, the capital of the wealthy oil province in Eastern
Arabia, and Saudi authorities charged three Christian leaders with
seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity. The latest crackdown on
Christianity in the ultra-fundamental Islamic country comes on the heels
of a brutal 2011/2012 incarceration and torture of 36 Ethiopian
Christians, and drew a sharp rebuke from a U.S. lawmaker.
"Nations
that wish to be a part of the responsible nations of the world must see
the protection of religious freedom and the principles of reason as an
essential part of the duty of the state," Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb.,
who sits on the Caucus on Religious Minorities in the Middle East, told
FoxNews.com.
During
Advent in 2011, Saudi authorities stormed a prayer meeting at the
private home of one of the Ethiopian workers in the Red Sea city of
Jeddah. The Saudi mutawa imprisoned 29 women and six men for more than
seven months in barbaric prison conditions, where the men faced severe
beatings and the women were subjected to sexually intrusive torture
methods. After Christian organizations and human rights groups, as well
as the United States government, complained, the Saudis deported the 35
Christian Ethiopian workers in August 2012.
Last
March, Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, declared it is “necessary to destroy all the
churches in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Still,
Saudi officials claim to tolerate other faiths even as the mutawa, or
Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, mount their crackdowns,
said Dwight Bashir, deputy director for policy at the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom.
"During
an official USCIRF visit to the Kingdom earlier this month, Saudi
officials reiterated the government's long-standing policy that members
of the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, also known as the
religious police, should not interfere in private worship," Bashir said.
"However, the past year has seen an uptick of reports that private
religious gatherings have been raided resulting in arrests, harassment
and deportations of foreign expatriate workers.
“The
U.S. government and international community should demand that any
expatriate worker detained and held without charge for private religious
activity in the Kingdom should be released immediately,” Bashir added.
A spokeswoman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington said she “is not allowed" to give her name and referred a FoxNews.com query to Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington. He did not immediately return FoxNews.com telephone and email requests. Diplomats from Ethiopia’s embassy in Washington told FoxNews.com they are looking into preparing a statement about the arrests.
Nina Shea, the director of the Washington-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told FoxNews.com
that the arrests in Dammam are “part of Saudi Arabia’s policy to ban
non-Muslim houses of worship and actually hunt down Christians in
private homes.”
Shea,
who was in the Saudi capital Riyadh as part of a U.S delegation two
years ago, sharply criticized the Saudis for breaking their 2006 pledge
to the U.S. government to not disrupt non-Islamic religious practices.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom termed in its
2012 report Saudi Arabia a “country of particular concern”-- along with
other authoritarian states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, North
Korea, China and Sudan-- for repression of religious freedom.
The
Saudi government adheres to a strict form of Sunni Islam called
Wahhabism that has animated many followers to engage in terrorism across
the globe. The 9/11 terrorists, 19 of whom were Saudis, followed the
Wahhabi school of militant Islamic ideology.
Shea
said “the U.S. government does not raise its voice in protest” as part
of the U.S.-Saudi strategic partnership. She added the failure to push
the Saudis to change their intolerant behavior “has taken the backseat
to oil and the war on terror. The Saudis are playing a double game --
cooperating with the war on terror and working against the war on terror
campaign.” A telling example, she stressed, involves the Saudi
government sending text books around the world that contain extreme
forms of Islam.
Benjamin
Weinthal is a journalist who reports on Christians in the Middle East
and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow
Benjamin on Twitter: @BenWeinthal.
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