Iranian Christian women refuse to recant faith

Two female Christian converts from Islam are defying an order to recant their faith issued by Tehran’s revolutionary court on Sunday.

Posted: Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 8:51 (BST)

Maryam Rostampour, 27, and Marzieh Amirizadeh, 30, are said to have been returned to Evin prison, where they have been held since 5 March without charge, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reports.

The women were arrested by Iranian security officers on 5 March after their apartment was searched and their Bibles confiscated. Neither women have committed a crime as defined under Iranian or international law.

No verdict was given at the end of last week’s hearing according to Elam Ministries, although various reports indicate that the women have been threatened with apostasy charges.

Apostates - Muslims who convert to another religion - often face arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and a host of other serious human rights abuses in Iran.

A member of the Iranian church in London told Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW): “These are two adults who have decided to follow Jesus Christ and they have been treated very cruelly. It is completely unjustifiable. 

“The world should demand that Maryam and Marzieh should be free to follow the faith of the historic Christian Church, the faith of the apostles and the church fathers.”

CSW’s Advocacy Director Tina Lambert said: “CSW is urgently calling on the international community to demand the immediate release of Maryam and Marzieh. These innocent women have been unjustly kept in solitary confinement and subjected to harsh interrogation despite suffering from ill health. 

“They are held solely on the basis of exercising their most basic right, freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Our concerns for them are heightened by the current volatility in Iran, evidenced by scores of unlawful detentions and gross human rights abuses”.

Islamic Supremacist Group Holds First U.S. Conference

Friday , July 17, 2009

Diane Macedo

A group committed to establishing an international Islamic empire and reportedly linked to Al Qaeda is stepping up its Western recruitment efforts by holding its first official conference in the U.S.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Sunni network with reported ties to confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al Qaeda in Iraq's onetime leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It has operated discreetly in the U.S. for decades.

Now, it is coming out of the shadows and openly hosting a July 19 conference entitled, "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam," at a posh Hilton hotel in a suburb of Chicago.

Hizb ut-Tahrir insists that it does not engage in terrorism, and it is not recognized by the State Department as a known terror group.

But some terrorism experts say it may be even more dangerous than many groups that are on the terror list.

"Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the oldest, largest indoctrinating organizations for the ideology known as jihadism," Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com.

Phares said that Hizb ut-Tahrir, rather than training members to carry out terrorist acts like Al Qaeda, focuses instead on indoctrinating youths between ages of 9 and 18 to absorb the ideology that calls for the formation of an empire — or "khilafah" — that will rule according to Islamic law and condones any means to achieve it, including militant jihad.

Hizb ut-Tahrir often says that its indoctrination "prepares the infantry" that groups like Al Qaeda take into battle, Phares said.

"It's like a middle school that prepares them to be recruited by the high school, which is Al Qaeda," he said. "One would compare them to Hitler youth. ... It's an extremely dangerous organization."

Phares said Hizb ut-Tahrir has strongholds in Western countries, including Britain, France and Spain, and clearly is looking to strengthen its base in the U.S.

"The aim of this conference is to recruit within the Muslim community in America," he said. "The Middle East governments go after them, but in the U.S. they are protected, so having a base here is going to help their cells around the world."

Representatives of Hizb ut-Tahrir declined to comment when contacted by FOXNews.com.

Oren Segal, director of Islamic Affairs for the Anti-Defamation League, said the conference is cause for concern.

"While they're not, for the most part, engaging in violent activities, and they publicly say that they're against violence, there have been examples around the world where people who have spun off of this group have engaged in violent activity," Segal told FOXNews.com. "That's why they're banned in several Arab and Central Asian countries, as well as Germany and Russia."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is one of the group's most famous alumni, New Statesman journalist Shiv Malik reported, citing intelligence sources. In addition to plotting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he also is implicated in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Bali nightclub bombings and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Malik's report, the public policy institute the Nixon Center and the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation agree that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq until he was killed in June 2006, was also once a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

They say other former members include Asif Muhammad Hanif, a British man who blew himself up outside a bar in Tel Aviv, killing four people (including himself) and wounding more than 50; and Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical cleric currently banned from Britain who praised the 9/11 attacks, raised funds for Hezbollah and Hamas and called for attacks on the Dublin airport because U.S. troops transfered there on their way to Iraq.

Segal said Hizb ut-Tahrir is becoming more active online in the U.S. — particularly on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace — and now it may be able to add a significant number of Americans to its ranks.

But one place the group will likely not be recruiting is a local Islamic school that backed out of hosting the conference.

The non-profit Aqsa school in Bridgeview said Hizb ut-Tahrir had deceptively portrayed the conference as a bazaar-type event where traditional food and clothing would be sold.

"They misrepresented themselves and the event. We don't want to be in the middle of something like that," the school's business manager Rana Jaber, told CBS News.

The conference's new venue doesn't seem to mind.

Hilton Oak Lawn General Manager Rick Harmon said Hizb ut-Tahrir used its own name and was open about the nature of the event, which includes lectures entitled "Capitalism is Doomed to Fail," "The Global Rise of Islam," and the "Role of Muslims in America," when it reserved the room for the conference.

"We're United States citizens and an American business — if it's legal, we're able to host it, as long as it's nothing that disrupts our other guests' privacy and security," Harmon told FOXNews.com.

According to the Khilafah Conference 2009 Web site, the group aims to do neither.

"Hizb-ut-Tahrir is convinced that change must start in the minds of people, and therefore does not accept for people, or societies, to be forced to change by means of violence and terror," it reads.

The site, which includes a promotional YouTube video, says the group "does not work in the West to change the system of government, but works to project a positive image of Islam to Western society."

Click here to see the conference video.

But former member Ishtiaq Hussain said Hizb ut-Tahrir is repackaging itself as a moderate organization as a tactic, while in reality it is "extremist."

"They don't recognize countries like Israel, for example; they don’t believe Israel should exist," Hussain, now a trainer for the Quilliam Foundation, told FOXNews.com. "Some of their leaders have denied the Holocaust, and they believe homosexuals should be thrown off the highest building. ... It's actually a very dangerous group."

Hizb ut-Tahrir itself has also published writings that seem to contradict its tenet of non-violence.

In his book, "How the Khilafah Was Destroyed," Sheikh Abdul Qadeem Zalloom, the former global leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, says anyone who rules by a non-Islamic system should "either retract or be killed ... even if this led to several years of fighting and even if it led to the killing of millions of Muslims and to the martyrdom of millions of believers."

Click here to read the full excerpt.

Hizb ut-Tahrir's official ruling on the permissibility of hijacking planes says, "If the plane belongs to a country at war with Muslims, like Israel, it is allowed to hijack it, for there is no sanctity for Israel nor for the Jews in it."

Click here to read the full ruling (pdf).

And one of the organization's more recent leaflets, published in March, calls for the declaration of "a state of war against America."

Click here to read the leaflet.

But, despite these threats and calls to action, Hizb ut-Tahrir remains off the State Department's terror watch list, and it is free to host the Khilafah Conference and any other event like it.

"In other parts of the world where they're really very active, they've drawn tens of thousands of people to some of their events," Segal said.

"It'll be interesting to see to what degree they'll be welcomed here."

Music in Recession
Can the Christian music industry survive the economic storm?
Mark Geil

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Consider the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Now, think of the Christian music industry as the camel. As the economy continues to falter, might the straw be upon us even now?

An extraordinary number of things have worked against the Christian music in recent years, even before the recession—starting with illegal downloads. (Yes, even Christians steal music.) There was some relief when Christian music found its way into stores like Target and Wal-Mart, but sales didn't increase much, and Christian bookstores were hurt. Radio found a formula and a target audience, but record labels, feeling the pinch and afraid to take risks, focused so much on that target that music became homogenized. Now radio is pinched as well.

The camel's knees are starting to buckle. But is the recession enough to break the entire industry?


John W. Styll
"The money is just drying up," says John W. Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association. "And it's not being replaced."

EMI-CMG's John J. Thompson is more blunt: "In the last four years, the sky has fallen. The industry is not what it was, and will never be what it was."

New recording artist Stephanie Smith says she has to work an extra job because "it pays the rent. Music doesn't. I have a college degree and I have a record deal, and I work at Starbucks. That's my bread and butter. It's just not how I envisioned it."

"I know a few songwriters who are struggling enough that they're on the verge of calling it quits, which is tragic to me, kingdom-wise," laments veteran indie artist Andrew Peterson. "God has gifted these people to shine this light, and the state of the economy right now isn't allowing them to do that. That kills me."

Many Christian bookstores have closed their doors. Many at radio stations and record companies have lost their jobs. Trade show attendance is way down at gatherings like the recent GMA Week in Nashville, where Styll estimated that registration was down 25 percent, but others thought it was much worse than that; some observers said it seemed like a "ghost town" compared the typical bustle of a GMA Week.

Still, while some of the industry's "camels" have broken, the industry itself is still standing. But it's already a very different industry in many ways from even a couple years ago, and it may never look the same.

Bad news all around
Economic struggles have impacted every aspect of the industry:

Artists live a far less glamorous and opulent than most people think. "Once a quarter, I get a royalty check for like $200," laughs Peterson. "You don't make your living off of that, and you never know how much it's going to be from one quarter to the next." Artist income comes mainly from touring and from merchandise sales at those concerts. Lately, fewer people are attending concerts, meaning lower merch sales. Also, church giving is down, so honoraria for artists are smaller. And for a full band on tour, "the economics are totally different," says Rush of Fools' Wes Willis. "With a solo artist, it's one person or maybe a spouse, but in a band it's not one or two people, it's eight or ten, with spouses and families. The effects are multiplied because the income is divided."


Downhere's Jason Germain
Downhere's Jason Germain agrees. "It is much tougher to keep a band afloat than a solo artist. The economic stuff has hit us, but we've tried to stay close to the ground. We don't have a ton of overhead. We never bought ourselves a bus; we haven't done some things that other people think of as necessary. We wanted to be flexible enough to not hamstring ourselves." Nathan Clark George has taken minimization of overhead to an extreme—by living with his family in an RV and by playing smaller churches that can't afford big-name acts. "When they know they can't pay you, thankfulness is way up, because they know you're sacrificing, just like they are. People have been very generous. They have handed me a ham, or they've given me broken guitars, since I've blogged about how I like to fix old guitars."

Touring and festivals are also feeling the pinch, and some are cutting way back on their gigs. Festival producer Van Hohe dramatically scaled down his schedule, paring back from 23 dates to three last fall. Churches that host festivals are often faced with a choice between maintaining a regular schedule with lesser-known acts, or holding out for headliners. "There's a real impact on how much a church is able to afford," Hohe says. "Most are saying, 'Let's wait,' as opposed to, 'Let's make this less of an event.' They want the quality, not the quantity." Still, Hohe expects that touring might be the most resilient sector of the industry. "It doesn't matter what happens with the music business. You cannot download the live experience. We still have that to offer. There may be fewer shows, but people will come."

Meanwhile, smaller acts have actually benefited from the economic woes. Mitch Parks of After Edmund notes that upcoming bands are "less expensive" and are thus "getting more chances to fill bigger roles, play bigger tours and more dates." Smaller crowds may also mean stronger connections with an audience that prefers a niche.

Record sales are crumbling, even though music consumption is up 30 percent since 2004. But album sales—the physical product, like CDs—are "about half of what they were 10 years ago," says the GMA's Styll. "That is a function of people stealing music." But it's more than that. Copying CDs is a major issue, along with the ubiquity of music on the Internet, through satellite TV and radio, and on portable devices. "It's like All-You-Can-Eat music," says Styll. "People today don't feel the need to own music."

On the bright side, Christian music is doing slightly better than the music industry overall, with a current sales pace 5 percent behind last year compared to an 11 percent lag in the mainstream.

"Flat is the new up," says Bill Nielsen, VP for merchandising at LifeWay Christian Stores, noting the phrase used to describe sales of recorded music. "We hear this from nearly every key partner. Times like these really test everyone's resolve. It takes courage and creativity to continue supporting a declining category like recorded music to the degree that we are." John Mays, Vice President of A&R for Centricity, doesn't think that fight will last too long: "No one wants retail to go out of business. But down the road I don't see a lot of physical product being sold."

Record labels are in dire straits, with many restructuring and some disappearing altogether. As EMI-CMG's Thompson puts it, "The labels are bleeding out of the eyes, because they're spending money to make records and they're trying to market the records, but then the people who like the records just take them. It's gone from being a theoretical problem of what piracy is doing, to an actual body count." Centricity's Mays says the body count translates to his estimation that about 50 percent of record label employees have been laid off since 2000.

Thompson says the new economy has destroyed the old the "farm league" system, which enabled artists to develop through constant touring, improving production, and hard work over many years—the formula that worked for the likes of Switchfoot, Sixpence None the Richer, and P.O.D. "Labels can't afford to develop an act over five or six years anymore," he says. "Now it's like five or six months."


John J. Thompson
Since there's little margin for error, labels are taking fewer risks. "A few mistakes of creating something that doesn't sell can be terminal for your organization," says Mays. "I've never felt that before, but it's a reality for us all now. It used to be that you would miss on seven or eight things out of ten, and the others would pay for the ones you missed. That's not the case anymore." As a result, creativity and experimentation are getting hammered. "A freedom to fail has to exist in creative work, or you'll never hit," says Mays. "You must be able to experiment and try things you have a hunch about." But the recession has changed all that.

Radio may never be the same again. Mark Ramsey, president of Radio Intelligence US, speaks in nearly apocalyptic terms: "Recession assumes a cycle, and a cycle assumes it will come back up. But in this case, every observer of advertising acknowledges that it's not going to come back quite the way it was before." He observes a "new frugality" among advertisers that he says will not go away, and as a consequence, commercial radio is down 30 to 40 percent. "When you take 40 cents off the dollar and you've got to pay your loan, it's a lot." Stations are cutting jobs and trying to survive in this "new revenue reality." Ramsey believes commercial radio can still adapt, identifying digital models that will please listeners and advertisers.

Christian radio is different because most of its stations are non-commercial—immune to the pressures of declining ad dollars, but relying on donors who may be struggling financially. Still, the non-comms are doing surprisingly well. Share-a-thons are meeting their goals, and while stations report a decline in large donations, the number of average-sized donations is increasing and some stations are up over last year. Nonetheless, Ramsey highlights the need for innovation. "Some of the highest rated stations are simply background stations. If they disappeared, most listeners wouldn't notice. Any one of those stations can be fairly easily duplicated 1000 times over."

Ministry in challenging times

Matthew West
Recording artist Matthew West says many musicians are choosing not to tour during the recession, when that's just what many listeners might need the most.

"It's the opposite of what needs to be happening," he says. "We need to be out there." West did a 30-city fall tour to smaller crowds than usual, "but we feel like God had us there for a reason. You're on the road and thinking, How are we going to pay for this? But people are losing their jobs, they're in the audience, and they need encouragement."

Smith tries to focus on the ministry and not the money.

"There are times when I'm discouraged," she says. "But as much as I'd like to make a living off of this, it's a ministry to me. That's why I continue to work at Starbucks, so I can go do a conference for teenage girls, or be part of a tour. When doubts creep in, I refocus on God: You are God over the economy, and bigger than my dwindling bank account. Do I believe that or not?"

Downhere's Germain says the band tries to remain philosophical about the fiscal crisis.

"I think about the recession a little less than I think about deeper issues," says Germain, "like the entitlement of a generation that would get themselves into debt. Right now everybody's pointing fingers, and everybody's angry. People are pointing their fingers at government, or their state, and not many are pointing at themselves, asking 'Why did I buy this house with money I did not have?'"

Bandmate Glenn Lavender calls this "gut check time for the Christian music industry"—and because people will always need to be ministered to, the industry must figure out how to accomplish that task.

A silver lining
The boom of the 1990s might have actually done the music industry some harm. Once upon a time, artists—particularly in Christian music—never expected to make a living. They were in it with a passion for art and service. When some started to succeed, many saw Christian music as an opportunity to make money. A new economic expectation emerged, and the art and the passion were often diluted. Thompson thus sees a silver lining to the cloud of recession. "The lack of monetary benefit has filtered out some of the people who should not have been doing this in the first place," he says. "If the people who are in it for the money are gone, it leaves more turf for those who had something a little bit loftier in mind."

Motivation is now the key, says Thompson. "If you're waiting for the payday, it sounds like it. If you're really in it for something else, the payday takes care of itself. Either it comes, or it doesn't—but you've had such a good time doing it anyway, you don't care." Still, he concedes that "it's a little bit more difficult to make music after you're done at the factory and you're wiped out. It's hard to tour when you're working 40 hours a week. That's the thing about silver linings. There's still a cloud."

Downhere's Germain puts it this way: "I think you'll see people who have a valid voice finding it in a better place, people that didn't have a valid voice finding new careers in different industries, and artists that had nothing to say going away."


Nathan Clark George
Mays is upbeat about the improvisation he's seeing in challenging times. "The constraint of having less money has produced some fantastic creative solutions. The entire creative community is able to do things they didn't think they could do five years ago. I just did an iTunes exclusive track with an artist for $500, with a producer. I would have laughed at the idea three years ago, when we thought you couldn't do a single track for less than six, seven thousand dollars. The economy has forced us to be more creative about the way we go about things, and that's a really good thing. If we needed a reset, and I guess that would go for the church too, then praise God for it."

George notes another positive: "This recession, along with the general industry collapse, is getting rid of the whole stardom mindset, and that's a great thing. If I never make it big and sell 400,000 copies of my CDs, that's just fine. I don't think the Bible says we need stars. The Bible says we need servants."

For Mays, one positive outcome has been personal. "From a kingdom perspective, I am more keenly aware of being a good steward than I've ever been in 20-something years of doing this. The fact that we are able to make music and put it out to people is a precious gift. That we have money to do that is something that we need to be grateful for.

"We've all had to bend our knee to God's sovereignty in all this. God is saying, 'You be faithful with the gifts I've given you. I'll decide what reaches people and what doesn't.' All of us admitting our weakness and bending our knee to that has been a very positive thing. As an industry in general, I think we've turned more to God to sustain us than to ourselves."

Mark Geil is a freelance writer and the director of the Biomechanics program at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He lives in Kennesaw, Georgia with his wife and three daughters.