mwdegutis Loc: Illinois

Christian Persecution ‘Not Happening’ Here: Pastor Who Fled Persecution in Iran Arrested in Minnesota for Sharing the Gospel
Prophecy in the News ~ December 3, 2018
Late last month, Ramin Parsa, a Christian pastor who fled Iran as a religious refugee, was arrested for privately sharing his faith testimony in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. He fled persecution in Iran and Turkey, only to find persecution in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“I came to the U.S. as a political and religious — as a Christian — refugee. They oppressed me for my faith in Iran. I was stabbed in Iran,” Parsa told PJ Media in an interview on Tuesday. Then last week, he was arrested for a private conversation about his faith, handcuffed to a metal chair for four hours without water, and later charged with trespassing.

“These things might happen in other countries, oppressive dictatorships, but not in America,” the pastor said.

Parsa, a pastor at Redemptive Love Ministries International in Los Angeles, Calif., traveled to Minnesota for two days to visit two different churches. He went to the Mall of America (MOA) on Saturday, August 25, with an elder from one of the churches, and with the elder’s 14-year-old son. Shortly after entering the mall, he struck up a conversation with two Somali-American women.

“Our conversation was casual. At first, we were not talking about the gospel,” Parsa recalled. “They asked me, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ I said, ‘No, I used to be a Muslim and I’m a Christian now.’ I was telling them the story of how I converted.”

A passerby could not stand the discussion, however. “Another lady told the guard, ‘This guy is harassing us!’” MOA security came and told Parsa to stop soliciting. “I said, ‘We’re not soliciting.’ But we just left,” the pastor explained.

The pastor and his friends went into a coffee shop, bought a latte, and came out. Parsa told PJ Media he thought that would be the end of it. He was sorely mistaken.

“When we came out of the coffee shop, three guards were waiting for us, and they arrested me right there,” the pastor recalled. “They came after me and arrested me, and said, ‘You cannot talk religion here.’”

Parsa told security he was a pastor. “They told me, ‘We arrested pastors before,’” he recalled, still shocked by the answer. “It was something normal for them, they were used to it.”

Meanwhile, the two Somali-American women who wanted to hear the pastor’s story argued with the woman who reported him to security. They defended Parsa. Onlookers asked why the man was being arrested. “They said, ‘Because he’s a Christian,’” Parsa told PJ Media.

All this was bad enough, but the guards proceeded to abuse the pastor once he was in custody.

“They handcuffed both my hands to a metal chair that was bolted to the ground in a basement,” Parsa said. He said it reminded him of the KGB, the notorious secret police in the Soviet Union.

“They began to file a report and they wanted to take my picture. I said, ‘You cannot take my picture — you arrested me wrongfully,’” the pastor recalled. “They said, ‘Then you’re going to stay here longer.’”

Later, Parsa asked for a glass of water. They refused, unless he would allow them to take his picture. He asked to go to the bathroom. Again, they refused. Shortly before the police came, his captors relented.

I was arrested, handcuffed & tied to a chair by the Mall of America, I was refused water, Men’s room, attorney and they didn’t even tell me my rights, then taken to jail by Bloomington Police department only for sharing my conversion story with some Samimi Muslims. #MondayMotivation
— Ramin Parsa (@ramin_parsa) September 3, 2018

(Ed: Twitter has since suspended Ramin’s account.)

“He gave me half of a really small cup of water,” the pastor said. “He was trying to buy me out with that water.”

After nearly four hours, the police arrived.

“The police came to open my handcuffs, and the handcuffs were very tight. It was hurting my hands,” Parsa recalled. “The guard said, ‘I don’t think it hurts that much.’”

He suggested that the security guards treated him with special malice because he is a pastor. “I believe they treated me worse,” he insisted.

The Mall of America did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment.

After the police took the pastor’s mugshot and fingerprints, they charged him with criminal trespassing. He paid $78 to bail himself out, and his friends picked him up at 2 a.m. While that bail amount may seem low, the pastor insisted, “Every cent is too much for something I haven’t done.”

“I’ve gone through this before — in Muslim countries, I was arrested for passing out Bibles,” Parsa said. “I didn’t expect that would happen in America. As a citizen in America, I have rights. They denied my basic rights.”

The pastor compared the mistreatment he suffered in Minnesota to the persecution he faced in Iran and Turkey.

“When I became a Christian, I was stabbed, I ran away from Iran. I went to Turkey for two years as a refugee. We had a church and we were passing out Bibles. I was arrested,” Parsa recounted. He mentioned Pastor Andrew Brunson, an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey and charged with terrorism. “They thought the American government was paying us to pass out bibles. I said I wish they would,” he remarked, wryly.

When at last he came to America, he was relieved. “With tears in my eyes, I was so thankful to be in America, where I can express myself, nobody can stop me or oppress me for my faith… and then this happened to me,” Parsa said.

When his family heard the news, they thought it couldn’t possibly have happened in America. “When they realized it happened here, they were really shocked,” the pastor remarked.

Parsa posted about the ordeal on Facebook, and shortly thereafter, the government of Iran arrested his cousin for handing out bibles. “We are praying that my cousin will make it out. My nephew is in hiding,” he said.

The pastor became famous after capturing video of a plane crash in Mexico on July 31. As the plane crashed, Parsa’s video recorded him saying, “In Jesus’ name! In nomine de Jesus!” Miraculously, all 103 people on the AeroMexico flight survived.

Parsa insisted that persecution against Christians is real in America, and not just because of his story.

“We have a football coach who was fired because he prayed before the game,” he said, mentioning former Bremberton High School coach Joseph Kennedy, whose lawyers appealed his case to the Supreme Court in June. “We have a baker in Colorado who was upholding his faith and he was sued and fought for nearly six years,” the pastor added, referencing Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding and was vindicated by the Supreme Court but then attacked once again recently.

“It seems like the only people who can be bullied are the Christians,” Parsa said, noting that if the constant mockery aimed at Christians were to be redirected toward Muslims, “it would be an outrage.” He wondered why the LGBT activists do not request same-sex wedding cakes from Muslim bakeries. “In Muslim countries, they kill the gays. They throw them off the building. I saw with my own eyes, people being executed.”

“Christians are being persecuted and bullied, and nobody says anything to defend them,” the pastor said.

While Parsa lives in California, he will have to appear in a Minnesota court to face the charges. He told PJ Media, “We just consulted with a lawyer — we’re going to fight this, to drop the charges.”

If the pastor can confirm his story, it seems the Mall of America may end up facing charges.

bilordinary Loc: SW Washington

Christian Rights Matter!

Kevyn

Does anyone think this story smells a little funny? No police report, no incident report from the mall, no witnesses. What do you want to bet this is is an out and out work of fiction or if it is true this guy was causing a disturbance and refused to stop doing so when asked?

mwdegutis Loc: Illinois

Why don't you research it for us Kevy? I'll even help you...Google 'Pastor Who Fled Persecution in Iran Arrested in Minnesota for Sharing the Gospel'

woodguru

Christians have the right to believe whatever they want, that is the only right associated with that, their beliefs stop when they interfere with someone else's beliefs or civil rights. Kim Davis being the perfect example. She had a job to do, and issuing marriage licenses to gays is part of it. She, in this country, has the right to quit and find another job if the one she has subjects her to do something that is against her religious beliefs. Nobody in this country can subject someone else to their religious beliefs.

There is no point in trying to defend this guy without having the full story, you flat do not know what he was doing

woodguru

Can you imagine a headline such as "Muslim who came to this country to flee persecution arrested for sharing the Koran at a mall"? I can clearly see that happening.

woodguru

No matter how weak it's a much needed example of christian persecution in this country, they are few and far between.

Kim Davis? I'd have told the hater to do her job or go find another one where her beliefs were not offended. Her office tried to work with her and handle licenses she had a religious problem with but that wasn't good enough.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Hypocrite! You don't have the brains God gave a slug.

Killing Christianity in America
By Fay Voshell

The secular extremism characterizing much of the contemporary political scene sometimes makes it hard to realize Christianity was once the primary motivating force behind the great human rights movements of America.

Men and women of faith fought for decades to achieve victory over the great human rights issue of the 19th century -- freeing the slaves. The issue of slavery had festered from the time of its introduction into the colonies in 1619. It would be Pennsylvanian Quakers, who believed in the inner light of conscience, who filed the first formal protest against slavery in 1688.

Abolitionists fought ferociously because of their unyielding and undying belief that all human beings were made in the image of God and were entitled to equal protection under the law. Bolstered by the constitutionally guaranteed rights stated clearly in the first amendment of the American constitution, they fought to end slavery and to guarantee equality of all human beings before the law.

The roots of that great reform movement as well as many of the continuing reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries -- including the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s -- were profoundly Christian.

How radically things have changed.

Now, at the inception of the twenty-first century, constitutionally guaranteed rights of the exercise of faith and religious freedoms are jeopardized by a sex cult that has borrowed but completely distorted the underlying principles of the abolitionist movement and its heir, the Civil Rights movement.

The radical fringe of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s coincided and was parallel with the Civil Rights movement, gradually poisoning and then determining to kill outright the Christian religious conscience that was and still is the backbone of reform in America. The radicals behind the sexual revolution substituted in the place of Christian conscience answerable to God a militant view of self-determination that held to no god but the inner god of human will and power.

In an astonishing perversion of the Quaker idea of the inner voice of conscience answerable to God, the inner voice of the individual human being was determined to be infallible in matters of sex and practice -- “If it feels good; do it.” What any individual believed to be his or her inner voice granted unqualified authority to remold the world according to the latest revolutionary fatwa concerning sexual freedom.

Over a period of a few decades, activists for the LGBT movement transitioned steadily from their initial demands for equal protection under the law to demands for gay marriage, to denaturing the very construct of humanity by insisting on a gender free society, to promoting the right to force society at large to accept as infallible an individual’s ability to discern and to declare one’s self to be whatever sex one chooses.

To put it another way, the LGBT agenda will brook no contradiction from the rest of us mere mortals to argue about the inerrant inner light of the gods and goddesses who declare themselves to have divine ability to transform themselves into any sex they wish to be. The “right” to be or not to be man or woman resulted in the fanatical demand that bathrooms must be retrofitted to conform to “gender free” standards, meaning that in practice either sex could use public facilities as they wished, including those who are physically men but believe themselves to be women.

But even victories in the bathroom bill fights have not been enough for radicals. Encouraged by the recent decision of the Supreme Court ratifying a pillar of the LGBT movement; namely, the constitutional “right” of same sex couples to marry, the movement has set its sights on destroying Christianity itself. By insisting that no minister or priest can refuse to marry gay couples, and by asserting no organization or institution, including churches, can refuse to hire people diametrically opposed to Christian beliefs, the LGBT movement reveals itself to be a cult radically and viciously antithetical to Christianity.

And, yes, it is a cult.

A basic definition of a cult is an organization whose beliefs are so far separated from the real world, that if society were to incorporate those beliefs, it too, would go mad. Therefore, insane beliefs completely divorced from the ground of being can only be established by force of law and strategies utilizing persecution aimed at eventual elimination of entities in opposition to those beliefs.

The result is that open war has been declared on Christianity in America.

For proof of that war, we need only to look at the mad consequences we now observe in Georgia, where the governor of that state has vetoed a bill that would have offered absolutely minimal protection to ministers and churches. World Magazine reports:

“Claiming the bill would ‘give rise to state-sanctioned discrimination,’ Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal today vetoed a law that would have provided legal protection for pastors, faith-based organizations, and business owners who, in good conscience, refused to service gay weddings. The veto leaves Georgians with no statewide religious liberty protection and vulnerable to lawsuits over belief in the biblical definition of marriage.”

Apparently completely ignorant of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s clear statement of religious protection, the governor added: “In light of our history, I find it ironic that today some in the religious community feel it necessary to ask government to confer upon them certain rights and protections.”

Let that sink in.

In an era in which our Secretary of State has finally admitted genocide is being committed against unprotected Christians in the Middle East, the governor of Georgia says religious communities don’t need the government to confer rights and protections on people of faith.

Irony of ironies, Nathan Deal is a Southern Baptist -- a Southern Baptist who just gave over his own denomination to corporations for thirty pieces of silver. That his own church holds such retrograde and discriminatory positions as marriage being a covenant between a man and a woman and that the scriptures hold very pronounced views on sexual behavior seem to come as a surprise to Governor Deal.

But they do not surprise Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Seminary, and stalwart defender of orthodox Christian views on the sexes and marriage. One wonders if Deal -- what a perfect name -- is prepared to see Dr. Mohler sued and hauled away to jail for advocacy of orthodox Christian doctrine concerning marriage and sexual mores.

Certainly Deal’s capitulation to corporations and the LGBT radicals helps explain why a plurality of Georgian evangelicals, among them Southern Baptists, voted for shameless secularist Donald Trump. Apparently neither Deal nor the plurality of so-called evangelicals think faith and Christian doctrine have anything to say about the character of candidates who wish to lead a nation or about radical policies antithetical to and aimed directly at Christians.

The leftist rage directed at American Christians should come as no particular surprise.

Historically, the Left has always sought to eviscerate and even to eliminate Christianity. The all-out assault on Christians in America by the Left resembles the wars socialism and communism waged against Christianity, the most obvious example being is the attempt of the communist Soviet Union to bury Russian Orthodoxy.

A less noted example, yet a clear provider of an almost exact pattern of what is happening here in the U.S., is the persecution of Mexican Roman Catholics by radical socialists during the Cristero war of the 1920s. During that war, Mexican socialists sought to eliminate Christianity from Mexico, which at the time was 95% Catholic.

For over 70 years, from about 1917 onwards, the Roman Catholic Church was actually outlawed. It was not allowed to own property, run parochial schools or convents or monasteries. Foreign priests were deported, and many native priests killed outright. The Church was not allowed to defend itself publicly or in the courts.

As Catholic Gene writes:

[The Church] was hardly allowed to exist. According to historian Jim Tuck, “This was not separation of church and state: it was complete subordination of church to state”.

“It was not until 1992 that the Church was restored as a legal entity in Mexico. During the period of the strictest enforcement of these draconian laws beginning with the rule of President Calles in the late 1920s, Mexicans were often imprisoned for wearing religious items, saying “Adios” in public (which literally means “with God”), or even questioning the laws. Public worship was a crime punishable by hanging or firing squad.”

The Mexican Constitution of 1917 included the following restrictions on Catholics:

“According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance's effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice… All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage just the necessary assets to achieve their objectives... The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law.”

The new constitution obligated the registration of all churches, declared all priests and ministers were ineligible to hold state office; and stated they could not advocate on behalf of any political parties or candidates. The State would regulate the number of priests in designated regions and no priests could wear religious garb in public. Nor could religious ceremonies be conducted outdoors without strict regulation by the State.

One needs only to read the restrictions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 to recognize a similar pattern of persecution and restrictions against churches and people of faith in the United States, land of the free.

In retrospect Christians, at least partially, have only themselves to blame, as they have yielded time and again to state intrusions and restrictions with only sporadic guerilla warfare. On the whole, Christians have reacted to anti-Christian decrees and restrictions such as the SCOTUS decree on abortion, the elimination of Christianity from public schools, and the muzzling of priests and pastors concerning politics by retreating into a subculture.

As the attacks ratchet up, Christians urgently need to understand continued capitulation to the demands of the radicals who are pushing for the fringe demands of the LGBT movement means the death of religious freedom in America. It also means a cult’s radical doctrines replace Christian mores.

Are Christians in America prepared to see their pastors sued and/or sent to jail, their children continued to be subject to indoctrination in public schools, their state and federal governments continue to kowtow to extremists determined to eradicate the influence of religion; the free exercise of religion in the public square eliminated; Christians consigned to what would essentially be a caste system, with people of faith considered untouchables who are not worthy of public office or even employment?

If they are not prepared to strongly confront a cult’s takeover of America’s governments, churches, and major institutions; if they wish to see Christianity once again regain its status as a major influence for societal reform; if they want to once again see Christianity as salt and light in the society in which they live, they have no choice but to stand and fight.

Otherwise, the Church in America will die.

mwdegutis Loc: Illinois

They're not persecuted dumb butt. We kowtow to their every whim.

Kevyn

The exact same story is posted without a single bit of collaborating information on 4 right wing nutter propaganda sites. Not a single legitimate source for any of it. It is fiction, nothing but a lie.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

Kevyn is right.. this is nothing but an orange lie by right wing extremists to make our Nation look bad and try to make money on a scam..

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

From Ashes to Glory: THE TRUE STORY OF A FORMER MUSLIM FROM IRAN by Ramin Parsa.

bilordinary Loc: SW Washington

Monsanto knows best.

mwdegutis Loc: Illinois

Hey Kevie...maybe this is why you haven't heard anything.

http://theminnesotasun.com/2018/11/30/minnesota-media-ignores-story-of-ex-muslim-who-was-arrested-at-mall-for-sharing-christian-faith/