In this mailing: Raymond Ibrahim: Buried Alive: Persecution of Christians, August 2021 Amir Taheri: Iran Switching to a New Illusion Buried Alive: Persecution of Christians, August 2021 by Raymond Ibrahim  •  September 26, 2021 at 5:00 am       After sexually harassing a Christian sanitation worker, a Muslim supervisor threatened to file blasphemy charges — which carry a maximum death penalty — against her unless she withdraws her complaints against him." — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan. "Most sanitation workers in Pakistan are Christian.... Christian sanitation workers are routinely called derogatory terms... and face sexual harassment, discrimination, nonpayment of salaries, irregular work contracts and extortion by senior officers...." — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan. "[T]he Taliban are going door-to-door in Afghanistan, executing Christians on the spot.... Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they're Christians.... The Taliban have spies and informants everywhere." — Religion News Service, August 17, 2021, Afghanistan. "Women who disappear and are never recovered must live an unimaginable nightmare. The large majority of these women are never reunited with their families or friends because police response in Egypt is dismissive and corrupt. There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or... bribed into silence." — Coptic Solidarity, 2020, Egypt. Muslims murdered a man for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity by burying him alive. — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda. "What you have witnessed happening to your husband today is for the disobedience of your husband not heeding the advice given by the family that he should return to Islam, since Islam cannot tolerate infidels." According to report, "Police have taken no action regarding the killing." — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda. "Islam is now invading South Sudan. They're saying South Sudan is a strategic place and... the gate[way] to Africa [so that] Islam can go to all of Africa." — Local Christian, Vatican News, August 19, 2021, South Sudan. In Lebanon, Muslim supporters of Hezbollah threatened the Maronite Church patriarch, Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai (pictured), with death after he criticized the terrorist organization. On August 8, two days after Hezbollah launched 19 rockets into Israel, Cardinal Rai said it was unacceptable for "a party [Hezbollah] to make decisions on war" without the two-thirds quorum required by Lebanon's constitution. (Photo by Anwar Amro/AFP via Getty Images) Editor's note: The publication of this report marks the tenth anniversary of the "Persecution of Christians" monthly series, which Gatestone began to publish a decade ago, starting with the month of August 2011. Scroll to the bottom of this report to access the previous 119 reports, covering every month between August 2011 and now. The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of August 2021: The Sexual Abuse of Christian Women and Girls Continue Reading Article Iran Switching to a New Illusion by Amir Taheri  •  September 26, 2021 at 4:00 am       The "American illusion" of Rafsanjani, Khatami and Rouhani did great damage to Iran, principally by fostering the belief that the solution to Iran's problems could only be found outside Iran. That illusion is now being replaced by the "Russian illusion" which is based on the same analysis. However, neither America nor Russia nor China or any other power would be prepared to fully endorse a regime that tries to live in a fantasy world in which Khomeinism conquers the Middle East, wipes Israel off the map and leads in the creation of a "World Without America." US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama went out of their way to help the Khomeinist regime consolidate itself but were ultimately not prepared to endorse its fantasies. Presidents Putin and Xi treat Iran with even greater brutality by keeping it on a life-support machine and milking it as much as possible, but never accepting it as an equal strategic partner. The Rafsanjani-Khatami-Rouhani trio took 24 years to understand that. Raisi now has four years to do so. That Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi and his team should seize every scrap of feel-good news is understandable at a time that Iran is gripped by the Covid-19 disaster, a melting economy and sporadic protests by a population visibly frustrated by the repeated failures of a leadership besotted by ideology. Pictured: Raisi remotely addresses the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, 2021 in New York. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) Success, victory, achievement, triumph.... These are some of the words that Tehran's state-controlled media are using these days to describe the performance of Ebrahim Raisi, the new President of the Islamic Republic. The undertone is that Iran is just emerging from eight years of bad news under President Hassan Rouhani and his "New York Boys" and is braced for a rebound under the new team. The successes claimed include a dramatic move by the new Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian, to push his way through the first rank of some heads of state and government meeting in Baghdad, thus ignoring protocol rules. The move angered many, including the Iraqi hosts, but gave the Iranian mullahs an opportunity to claim that the Baghdad summit "adopted all of the policies suggested by the Islamic Republic." Continue Reading Article