{"id":37752,"date":"2013-04-11T00:31:07","date_gmt":"2013-04-11T00:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/usa_today_kirsten_powers-middle_east_christians_need_our_protection\/"},"modified":"2013-04-11T00:31:07","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T00:31:07","slug":"usa_today_kirsten_powers-middle_east_christians_need_our_protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=37752","title":{"rendered":"(USA Today) Kirsten Powers&#8211;Middle East Christians need our protection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.&#8221; So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face a &#8220;particularly wicked program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Now, this is not about clerks who say &#8220;Happy Holidays&#8221; or bans of nativity scenes in public schools. Merkel spoke of real persecution of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, a 2011 Pew Forum study found that Christians are harassed in 130 countries, more than any of the world&#8217;s other religions.<\/p>\n<p>The just-released book Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians provides the gory details behind these statistics&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/opinion\/2013\/04\/02\/middle-east-christians-need-our-protection-column\/2047473\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.&#8221; So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=37752\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,50,144,114,203,151,108,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-watch","category-economics-politics","category-international-news-commentary","category-foreign-relations","category-law-legal-issues","category-middle-east","category-politics-in-general","category-religion-culture","category-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}