Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Christians arrested for evangelizing Muslims...in Michigan

Difficult to believe and there are two sides to the story...

From Mindy Belz in World...

...last month's arrests of four Christians attending the city's 15th annual Arab International Festival...laid bare the social and legal upheaval afoot in Middle America, especially in cities where Muslim-dominated immigrant communities more recently have taken hold...

Police arrested three men and one woman, all members of a group called Acts 17 Apologetics, at the festival on June 18, and charged each with breach of peace. The four claim that police arrested them based on complaints from other festival-goers—presumably Muslims—and not because they broke the law...

A 2009 YouTube posting of the pair's interaction with Muslims and security officers has received nearly 2 million views. They were not arrested then but that incident, according to eyewitnesses at this year's festival, is why some may have complained to police when they showed up again with video cameras. But it doesn't explain why they would be handcuffed...

Other Christians were quick to say that they participated in the Arab festival without incident. For the second year in a row, Christian author and popular speaker Josh McDowell had a booth there, and has handed out over 22,000 autographed books, he told me. "I must've answered 300 questions from Muslims, and not one person raised their voice, not one person argued."...

Haydar said Arab Christians who live in Dearborn don't appreciate the disruption brought by outsiders with no ongoing ministry in the city: "They come here once a year and create a problem we have to deal with the rest of the year. It is a waste and leaves the image of Dearborn distorted."...

3 Comments:

At July 22, 2010 at 1:04 PM , Blogger PianoMom said...

Wow. That is frightening.

Do you think the Security people were Muslim?

Seems as though it's not the fact that they were out-of-town evangelizers that bothered security but that they had a camera so they were ID'd as troublemakers and "set up"
And the police arrested them?

Freedom of speech applies to KKK and Skinheads but no longer to Christians?

 
At July 22, 2010 at 1:09 PM , Blogger Eric Schansberg said...

The weird thing is that other Christians were-- and have been-- fine in the same setting. So, it would seem difficult to tell whether the former were persecuted, the latter are compromising something, or it's just random.

 
At July 22, 2010 at 5:14 PM , Blogger PianoMom said...

Right. It seems from watching the footage that the camera had something to do with it; that's what the Muslims seemed upset about. I think the Christians may have been fine, minus the camera.

 

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