Born in Cairo, Egypt into a prominent Muslim family of lawyers and following in the footsteps of his father and uncles, Majed El Shafie too chose to become a lawyer. Through the witness of his best friend he experienced the love of Christ and made the decision to give his life and service to the LORD and began a ministry which in just two years grew to 24,000 Christians. The Egyptian government did not tolerate this and Majed was arrested and taken to the torture section of the Abu Zaabel prison in Cairo. During his time in prison, Majed underwent severe torture for seven days in the underground prison... Now Majed is the president and founder of One Free World International which is a really unique international human rights organization based in Toronto, Canada, that focuses on the rights of religious minorities around the world. Their operations to set prisoners of conscience free in different countries are very dangerous and risky and according to Majed El Shafie they succeeded in getting all of them out of prison. In the exciting exclusive interview to Christian Telegraph (read interview right after the video) the president of One Free World International boldly declares that there are between one to two hundred million persecuted Christians worldwide and it is the world’s holocaust that the world has never known.
Operation to set Neeha free
How did you come to this way of helping Christians from Muslim countries? What was the beginning of this idea or vision from God? How did it all begin?
It all began back home in Egypt. I came to the Lord when I was eighteen years old. I was born as a Muslim man in a Muslim family. My father was a lawyer working for Egyptian government. My uncle was a judge in the Egyptian Supreme Court. My brother was a private lawyer. When you are born to the family like this you have a huge library in your bedroom full of books about justice and freedom and you believe in each one of these books. And I believed in justice. After I finished my high school my family was wondering where I would continue my education so I told them I would like to become a lawyer like the rest of the family. I went to the law school specializing in human rights. It was an international law. And during the first year at the law school I discovered that there was persecution happening to the Christian community in Egypt.
Why was it persecuted?
Let me put it this way. You do not persecute somebody unless you are scared of the truth they are carrying. I live in downtown Toronto. Jehovah Witnesses come and knock at my door every Saturday. And I smile at them and I say, “Oh, please come in, let’s have a conversation together.” And we have tea and we talk together. I am not scared of them. I ask them to sit down and smile at them. I am not scared of their theology because I feel like I am carrying the truth in my heart. What I am really saying is that when they persecute you, they don’t really persecute you, they persecute Jesus in you. And that’s what’s happening. So it bothered me as a young Muslim man. Why do they persecute the Christians? Like what do they have that we are so scared of? I don’t know if you know that or not but in Egypt there is a law which doesn't let you build churches. You can build bars, discotheques but not the churches. You cannot even rebuild old churches. So when a church collapses you cannot do anything about it. And to take permission to build a church you need to take it from the President.
But as far as I remember Egypt was a Christian country long time ago...
Yes, Egypt originally was a Christian country. At the seventh century a Muslim man named Amr ibn al-Aas from the Islamic region came to Egypt and conquered it and forced the people of Egypt to convert from Christianity to Islam and killed most of them. All of this makes me wonder why. Why is there persecution against Christians in Egypt? So I went to my best friend who was a Christian. We were born in the same neighbourhood at the same day, we went to the same school but we never spoke about religion. He was like a brother to me. And in Egypt you don’t really speak about religion. So I went to him and asked him: “Why is persecution happening to the Christians in Egypt?” And he told he could not answer my question because it was against the law but he told me, “I can give you a book, read this book and you will find answers to every question that you have.” So I took this book. I didn’t know a thing about this book. This book wasn’t all about rules and regulations and judgement. It was about love, forgiveness and sacrifice.
What book was it?
We call it The Holy Bible. I didn’t know the difference between the Old and the New Testament. I opened the New Testament. I just opened it on a guess. It was John 8. And in this chapter they bring a lady who committed adultery and throw her in front of the Lord and ask Him to judge her according to the law of Moses. And according to the law of Moses this woman should have been stoned to death. The Lord began drawing on the ground and they repeated the question again. So He answered, “ Let those of you who are without sin cast the first stone in her.” Now if you think about it for a minute the only person who can cast the first stone is Christ Himself because He is the only one who has no sin. But He didn’t do that. Of course everyone left and He looked at that woman and told her to go and sin no more. He said he had forgiven her. This was my first time I met Christ, His forgiveness and His love. I started studying the Bible, I started comparing the Bible and the Koran, the book of Muslims.
El Shafie, "I started comparing the Bible and the Koran"
So it was your first time opening the Bible...
Yes, I didn’t even know John 8 existed, I just opened it randomly. God has a sense of humour. So I started studying the difference between the Bible and the Koran and almost after eight or nine months I went back to my friend and said, “Now I know what is Christianity.” Christianity is not just going to church every Sunday. Christianity is not a religion. It’s a relationship with God. And Jesus is not just the Lord. He is the flower in the middle of the desert, almighty light in the middle of the darkness, that’s Christ to me. So I told my friend, “I want to be a Christian. I want to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” He was sitting in his chair and he jumped out of it when he heard me saying that. So he asked me what was on my mind and I told him, “Listen, the Bible said faith without actions is nothing.” So he asked me what I wanted to do and I told him I wanted to open an underground human rights organization to help the people. We started with seven members, most of us were students in the law school. In two years time we grew to twenty four thousand members in one organization. Forty percent of us which were Muslims came to the Lord. Forty percent of these twenty thousand people. We built two churches inside the mountains. Because as I said you cannot build churches by the law. So we built them inside the mountains, like caves. We built one medical clinic for the poor and one bible school for the kids. We also established a newspaper. And we started to ask the Egyptian government to give us our rights. I started to write a book about the difference between Islam and Christianity.
It probably was very dangerous. Did you have any fear about that?
Yes, it was dangerous but let me tell you something. I don’t share it a lot with the media. Just to give you a taste of our daily life. The people of Russia will understand me because they went through the communism but here in the West they just don’t understand. One time I was in my office in Cairo. My friend was a very soft-hearted man. I was the tough one. The organization had three leaders. I was the head and the other two were like assistants. Because as you said it was dangerous, if something happened to me, they could continue the work. So my friend came and he was crying. He was easy to cry, you know this kind of guys and the culture in the Middle East is a tough culture. So every time he cried I would always make fun of him. So he came and he was crying and I asked, “Oh, sweetheart what happened?” And I was teasing him. But usually when I tease him he smiles and life goes on. He is my best friend, he knows me. But this time he wasn’t laughing at all. So I thought it must be serious, what was going on? He told me that the preacher of the mosque – imam – would stand up and would insult Jesus, he would spit on the Bible and step on it with his feet. And it just broke his heart. So I told him, “Please, do me a favour. Go to a worship place.” So when he came back he asked what I was going to do. I said that we have to stop that. Nobody will insult my Lord. Anyway he asked me what I was going to do. I told him, ”Listen, two weeks from now I want you to send twenty five people from our group and divide them into five groups. Each group would consist of five people. Let those guys go to the mosque and sit in different positions inside the mosque. And after that you and I will enter the mosque.”
This is extreme...
He also told me, “Are you crazy? What will happen next?” I said I didn’t know at that time, just let’s do it and we’ll see what happens. So two weeks later we sent twenty five of our people, we made them sit in five different groups and positions inside the mosque and half an hour later my friend and I entered the mosque. According to the Sharia or Islamic law when you enter the mosque, you must take off your shoes because it is considered to be a holy ground. And if you do not take off your shoes, the Allah, the god of Islam, will punish you. I hope that Christians do understand that the god of Islam is not the God of Christianity. Because many people think that we worship the same God. If we worshiped the same God there would not be persecution of Christians today in Muslim countries. This is the bottom line. So they believe that if you enter the mosque with your shoes on the Allah will strike you. So my friend was getting ready to take off his shoes and I told him, “When you and I enter the mosque, our shoes will be on.” He was like, “Are you crazy, why?” I told him that I needed to do something to take their attention. So this was number one, the first reason. Number two was that I wanted to see if Allah would punish me or not. Well, life is all about experience. So I really wanted to experience the theory. So we entered the mosque with our shoes on. The prayer stopped and everybody started to stand up. My friend behind me was shacking. I told him, “Don’t look left, don’t look right, don’t make any eye contact, just follow me.” So all of them stood up and all of them were under shock. And it was a very extremist Muslim area as well.
So everybody was paying attention to you…
Yeah. When they were at shock you had two or three minutes before they would start to attack you. I actually mean you have like 59 seconds. So you need to act quickly, do what you have to do or they will react. So I walked straight to the imam, the Muslim preacher, and grabbed the microphone. So here I am with the microphone facing four thousand Muslim extremists inside their own mosque. And I told them, “Listen, I am not here to fight. I don’t carry any weapon, my people do not carry any weapons. I am not here to be aggressive, I am here to tell you something and to ask you a question. You are insulting Jesus, you are insulting my Lord. And I am here just to ask you one simple question. If you are walking on a road, street and this street is divided into two other streets – the left and the right. You are in the middle and you want to know which road to take and you need to ask somebody for the right direction. And you have two men in front of you – one is alive and the other one is dead. Which one will you ask for the direction? The alive man or the dead man? They said, “We will ask the alive man.” I told them, “Exactly, Jesus is alive but Mohamed is dead. His bones are still in the grave. But my Lord and Savior’s grave is empty.” What I thought was that I would be speaking for two or three minutes. But I was talking for thirty four minutes preaching the gospel in one of the biggest mosques in Egypt.
And what was the imam doing?
Everybody was listening. Thirty four minutes. I was counting them. And I was preaching the gospel like I was in a church until one of the guys held a piece of stone in his hand and when he did this everybody sort of like woke up. So those twenty five people who we asked to come first came and surrounded us and it was a good thing we had our shoes on because we could run out of the mosque. So we ran. And it was not a normal running. Did you ever watch Tom and Jerry?
Yes, I see your point…
You remember the cat when his legs take a hundred and eighty degrees, it actually seemed like 360 degrees. That was me. We had cars and we were able to run away with less damage. And it was because those twenty five came and surrounded us. They created what we call a buffer zone between you and the crowd basically. I don’t know who came to the Lord and who didn’t. You plant a seed and you don’t know whether it will grow or not.
Do they know the story of Jesus Christ?
Yes, but they know it differently. There are two campaigns in the world. God's campaign and Satan's campaign. There is no third campaign. So if you are not from God, you are from the other campaign. And sorry but you can’t be politically correct when it comes to the truth. I know that in our society, especially in North America or in Europe, we become society of being politically correct. The problem is that political correctness stays away from the truth. And it becomes sin because you begin to compromise. And this is the conflict. So there are two campaigns and the Muslim people do know about Jesus but only as a prophet. They don’t believe that he died on the cross. They believe that God took Him and put somebody like Him. But it doesn’t make sense. Jesus is considered to be the prophet who was sent to prepare the way for the final prophet, which is Mohamed. They believe that even Jesus was Muslim. If I knew we would be speaking about this I would bring a Koran with me. Do you have a Koran? No, you don’t carry Korans… (smiles)
I mean when you were preaching to them it was not all new to them?
No, but it was a completely different thing. For them He is just a prophet, they believe that He is a Muslim who came to prepare the way for Mohamed. But I am talking about Jesus, Son of God. I am talking about Jesus the Lord. So it was a different concept. His name is not strange for them, His name is in the Koran. But they don’t know the way we know it, they don’t believe in Him the way that we believe in Him. So anyway, this is just to show you our daily operations. This one was just one of our operations. After that I started to write a book in Egypt about the difference between Islam and Christianity. The problem is that once you start to write a book about Islam and Christianity you become dangerous in the society and the community. And on August 15, 1998 at 1:30 in the morning I heard a knock on my door. 1:30 in the morning was a very strange time so I went to open the door, somebody asked for a name. I told them there was nobody living here by this name, they apologized and went away. I was like, “At 1.30 in the morning?” Three minutes later five soldiers came to the front door, they arrested me from my office. They took me to the biggest police station in Cairo and it was behind the Egyptian government. They took every piece of paper, all the computers from the office, they took me into the investigation room and the officer came and told me, “Listen, we know everything about you. We know that you are the head of the organization, we know that you wrote the book. One thing we don’t know who are the rest of your friends, who is the rest of your group? That’s all what we need to know.” I said, “I don’t know what group and what friends. And if you know everything about me why asking me?” They told me, “Listen, if you want to play tough, we can play tough.” I told them, “Baby, tough is my middle name, so good luck with that.” They transferred me to Abu Zaabal jail. If you know people from the Middle East ask them about this prison, they will tell you it’s hell on earth. A very well-known jail.ut this prison, they will tell you it’s hell on earth. A very well-known jail.
El Shafie, "I prepared myself for pain and agony"
Without accusations?
Yeah. Forty five percent of the space of the whole jail is underground. It’s like a basement. And they call it the torture section. I will tell you something you will never see in any other media or will not hear it anywhere else. The officers that are torturing you they are always wearing masks, so you can never see their faces. They are always wearing black and they never call each other by name, they always call each other by numbers. So officer number six calls officer number seven. No names, no faces. They torture you everyday to a different degree. So if you did not speak on number one day, day number two is the higher level of torture. Day number three is a higher level of torture. They torture you for three or four hours, they give you rest for fifteen or twenty minutes and after that another three or four hours. Until the end of the day. The result is that a military doctor is standing behind you. You know he is a military doctor because he is wearing a uniform and his face is not covered. His mission is not to stop the pain or heal your wounds. His mission is to keep you conscious to the pain, so if you lost your conscience he would wake you up. His mission is to ensure that you are suffering. I spent there seven days. It was like seven hundred years.
So did they just want you to disclose the other names in the organization?
Yes. They know me because of the book and of all the events that I did. Day number one: they shaved the hair on my head and they had two big containers – one was very cold water and you could see the ice in it. It was not frozen, but it was very cold water. And the second container was with a very hot water, it was not boiling but you could see the steam. They tied my hands behind my back and they put my head for one minute in the very cold water and immediately they put me in the very hot water. Cold, hot, cold, hot. If they start to do it with your hair this would kill you. At the end of the day they asked me the last names of the friends and I said “No. To be honest with you I did not take a shower for long enough and I enjoyed the cold and hot water. And to be honest with you I am very handsome without hair.” And I smiled at their faces. And that drove them nuts because I was even making a joke. When you are facing your enemy you never ever show your pain or your fear. And the more you are smiling at your enemies’ faces at the time of the battle the more he gets confused and loses his own control. Next day they hang me upside down. They beat me with everything in their hands. It was 90 degree position, they burned me with three cigarettes, they took the nail of my right toe. Day number two I can't remember a lot. The only thing that I can remember was the taste and the smell of my blood. They put me back again in my room and they asked me to give them the names and I said, “No.” They told me, “Do you know what would be your torture next day?” And usually they tell you what your torture next day is going to be so you would not sleep and would be scared and nervous about it. They told me, “We will release three dogs against you if you don’t speak.” And they closed the door. What would you do if you were in my place and underground and bleeding?
And you were conscious during all this time?
Yes, I was conscious. I couldn’t walk, but when they grabbed me I could see the trace of my own blood on the floor. So what you do when you are underground and you know that the next day you are facing three dogs? And it’s not like small little dogs you have at home. These are German shepherds or Doberman that are trained to eat flesh. So I started praying. I told Him, “Lord, I want to thank you for Your love and Your mercy. I want to thank You even at the time like this that You took our pain and our sin and our disease away. And you rose again to give us the way, the truth and the life. Lord, now I know the small little taste, I am honoured by tasting a little bit of your suffer for all of us. I can taste just a little piece, a drop but You are the Only One Who could drink the whole cup. Lord but my fear under heavy torture is that I don’t know if will I mention any of my friends or not. And I don’t want to betray them. But I also don’t know the capacity of my body.” You see, my friend, Christians are like a bag of tea. You don’t know how strong they are until you put it in the hot water. So I didn’t know my capacity.
How old were you at that time?
I was twenty years old. I told Him, “Lord, I don’t know my capacity and I am scared to betray my friends. So would you do me a favour and kill me before tomorrow morning. Just take me home. This way they will not get any information of me.” And in Jesus name I closed my prayer. Next morning I woke up. Did you ever wake up in the morning not knowing whether to expect good news or bad news? So next morning I woke in my always very dark room. If the door opens you can see the light from the corridor. There was a red light from the corridor but my room was very dark. So I could see the shadows walking in the corridor. And I could hear another door opened and I could see the shadow of three big dogs coming closer and closer to my room. And I could hear their noises. I could hear them coming. So I went and sat down in the corner to protect my back. I put my feet toward my chest and I covered my face with my hands. What I was trying to do was to stay less damaged from their bites. This way they would just bite my legs, my knees and I would protect my chest and the rest of my body. So I was just trying to keep myself less damaged. I could hear their voices coming closer and closer. At this point my face was covered with my hands and I couldn’t see anything. I prepared myself for pain and agony. But I couldn’t feel anything. I knew that they were in my room, so I took my hand from my face little by little and that’s what I saw: the three dogs were sitting around me, none of them moved one single step. Not one single step. They were already released but they did not move, they were just sitting around me. And the officers and the soldiers started to scream at the dogs but they did not move one single step. So the officer told the soldier, “Well, maybe they are sick or something, go get another set of the three dogs.” He brought another set of three dogs and another set of three dogs were sitting in the same position with one little difference, the middle one took a step forward and licked my face. The officers didn’t understand what was happening, they received the same message that I received. Maybe I am alone but I am not lonely. Some of those who will read the interview will wonder what is the explanation of this. And allow me to tell you what’s happened. You see atheists or unbelievers always need an explanation. And my explanation is this, “These dogs have been trained to listen to their master. To obey their master. But there is no higher Master than Jesus Christ.” So they took the dogs, they closed the doors and I did not hear from them during the rest of the day.
And then day number 4...
Day number 4. Officer number 27, big and strong man. He came in, opened the door. He was a big huge man, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. So he opened the door very angrily and told me, “Listen, I am not scared of you.” I told him, “Of course you are not scared of me, I am the one who is supposed to be scared of you. You are torturing me.” So he told me, “I am here to make a deal with you.” I said, “I am listening, I like deals. What is it?” He said, “Well, you give us the names of your friends, their locations and I will release you from the prison and will make you a witness. Do you want money? I will give you money.Do you want a brand new car? I will give you a brand new car. Do you want a bigger house than the one you have right now? I will give it to you. I will give you whatever you want, just give me the names.” I said, “I like it. I like this deal. Who can refuse? But first before I give you all the names, you have been torturing me and beating for the last three days. Even if I want to give you information I don’t have the strength to say it. Get me food and after that we will talk.” So he said, “Whatever you like.” I told him I want shish kebab. He went and he brought the best Egyptian shish kebab. Did you ever try it? So I sat down and ate. And he said, “Come on, tell me the names now.” And I asked him for the cup of tea, so he brought the best cup of tea ever. So he said, “Now tell me the names.” So I said, “You see, I have a problem. My friends are a big group, I don’t even know all their names. But I can give you the name of our leader. You can catch him and he can tell you all their names because he would remember them.” They told me, “Well, we thought you are the leader of this organization.” And I said that I was just a servant. So he said, “Okay, give me the name of your leader.” I told him that the name of our leader is Jesus Christ. “You can catch Him,” I said. He wasn’t really happy like you when he heard this.
I can imagine...
Officer number 27 took me to another dark room. They put me on the cross for two days and a half. They took all of my cloths. At the second day they cut my shoulder to the bone and put salt in the wound. Mercy from God – when you are under torture your nervous system collapses. So when I woke up I found myself in a police hospital. The Egyptian authorities wrote the report that I was mentally ill and it’s all the game in the Middle East. In fact it’s just like it used to be in the USSR. It’s the same persecution. The same enemy, trust me. Different names, different countries but the same name. And why they do it is that if they kill you they will make a hero out of you. You become a big human right hero. So what they do is they destroy your reputation first. So they called me mentally ill, they put me under house arrest for eight months. And after everybody forgets about you, they start to make a military court – when you have no lawyer, in twenty four hours you receive the decision. I was given three charges – that I was trying to make a revolution against the Egyptian government. I don’t know what revolution if you don’t carry a weapon. You are not supposed to make a revolution without a weapon, especially in the country like Egypt. The army is very strong. Number two was that I tried to change the official regime of Egypt from Islam to Christianity. Number three was that I love and I worship Jesus Christ. And I tell you what, I told the judges that day, “If loving and worshipping Jesus is wrong, I don’t want to be right anymore. And if loving and worshipping Him is a crime, I am guilty as charged. I accept my charges.” I did not defend myself.
Is Egypt considered an Islamic country?
Yes. But of course on the West they try to show it as a secular country. At the end they gave me the death penalty by hanging in four days. The put me under house arrest until the death penalty would take place. The day before I was transferred to the prison and before the death penalty would take place my friends came to attack the house. There were five soldiers – two outside of the house, two inside of the house and one on the roof. So they attacked the house, nobody was killed but two of the Egyptian soldiers were hurt. And I was able to escape from Cairo from my house arrest. I escaped from Cairo to Alexandria. In Alexandria I was hiding behind the police station. Why there? Because this would be the last place the police would try to look for me. During this time the Egyptian police put my picture on every newspaper, every television show and they promised a prize to anyone who would find me. I don’t know how much I am worth now but at that time I was worth half a million Egyptian pounds, which is like 100,000 American dollars.
Quite expensive…
Yeah, it was like thirteen years ago. So my friends told me that I needed to leave the country. I could not stay there anymore. I could not go to the airport because I was on the black list, they would arrest me. Egypt is surrounded by Arab Muslim countries. The only non-Arabic country which was not Muslim was Israel. To escape from Egypt to Israel you have two ways. The only thing I knew about Israel at that time was that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Simple as that. So there were two ways to escape. Through the mountains but the mountains are very high. And through the sea…
Majed El Shafie is showing his way to escape
As Moses?
Yes, as Moses. But I didn’t have that stick, so it didn’t work, I tried it…smiles But then I remembered that Moses opened the sea and Jesus walked on the water. And there was a problem. There are too many military boats standing against each other. One is Egyptian military boat with five Egyptian soldiers protecting the boarder. And there were Israeli soldiers on the other side protecting the Israeli borders. And the fact is that in the Middle East if you try to cross the border they will shoot you first and ask the questions after that. They would not arrest you and ask you questions. So how do I escape. It’s like mission impossible. I got a jet ski. If you cross from here they will shoot, if you cross from there they will shoot you. There is just one place where you can cross and they can’t shoot you is between them. Because if they try to shoot you, it will call crossfire. They would shoot each other. And the last thing the Egyptians or the Israelis want to start a new war in the Middle East because of the guy crossing on the jet ski. So I waited until 5.30 pm, at that time of day the sun was behind me and that would give me enough time to put the jet ski in the water without any notice. By the time that I start to cross and by the time that they start to hear the machine, they would take action on each other, not just on me. So by the time they turned their boats around I was already crossing the border. It took three minutes. I surrendered to the Israeli police. They called the United Nations and Amnesty International. They put me in Israeli jail for one year and three months, fifteen days, twelve hours twenty four minutes until United Nations and Amnesty International made a decision because Israel and Egypt have a peace agreement and according to this peace agreement none of the countries can accept refugees from each other. So during this time Egypt was actually holding an Israeli spy and they were trying to exchange me for the other Israeli spy and the United Nations said that I was not a spy, I was a refugee. So the United Nations actually stopped the thing. To cut a very long story short after investigation United Nations Amnesty International recognized me as a political refugee. I was the first political refugee that came from Egypt during fifty five or fifty six years.
What year was it?
2000. I was released from the Israeli prison immediately after Amnesty International recognized me as a political refugee. And after that United nations tried to find the country to accept me as a political refugee. It was Australia, Canada or Denmark. And I prayed to the Lord and asked Him, which country. And He said, “Canada.” So eight years ago I came to Canada. I started One Free World International seven years ago. And not just to defend Christians in Egypt but around the world. And to build that human right organization. Today we have 28 branches around the world. It is number four biggest human rights organization in Canada. And we are just seven years old. We are the team of lawyers protecting persecuted Christians worldwide, we took over three hundred cases and we never lost one of them. We go to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, all the countries where there is much persecution – in China and we confront their governments. I just came back from Afghanistan three or four months ago and I confronted the Afghani government about the violation of human rights that is taking place – they have just arrested twenty five Christians. A lot of people don’t know that there is one persecuted Christian every three minutes worldwide. Just last year over a hundred sixty five thousand Christians were killed for their faith. But nobody knows about it. It’s just last year. Between one to two hundred million persecuted Christians worldwide is the world’s holocaust that the world has never known.
Why don’t secular media spread this information?
Because it’s not politically correct. Eighty percent of persecuted Christians live where? In Muslim countries. And you don’t want to upset the Muslim community, the Muslim congregation here. And you don’t want to upset the Muslim countries because they hold the black oil. So you don’t want to upset these people. And you become politically correct. It’s like in the old days. You think that many people spoke about persecution in the Soviet Union? They didn’t want to upset the Soviet Union. The same thing is happening here. Where is another twenty percent? It’s in the communist countries, such as China, North Korea, Cuba. We can beat the small guys like Cuba, North Korea but no one will speak against China. Because they all need their economic power. So we are the voice of the truth. No government will say it, secular media would not go through it. It’s worst than any holocaust that the world has ever known. And we are in the front line. We are fighting this.
Do you have a support from the government?
You mean financially? No, no, never take financial support from the government. They would control you, they would put their noses in every decision you make. Of course there is a private support. We have action alerts.
But is the government of Canada friendly to cooperate in this area?
The conservative government – yes. The immigration minister himself, the prime minister is also the man of faith. So we have a good echo with them. They care about human rights differently, more than the previous government. And they are less politically correct. So yes, the government of Canada is actually of a great help.
Don’t they fear of international conflicts?
Of course, and that’s where we come. We come to educate them and to push the envelope. That’s why we go to secular media. Like I didn’t take the story to Christian media. I need a crowd. Who is reading and watching the Christian media? Christians. But I also want to reach the secular people. You see the problem of persecution of Christians is that it’s being treated as a church matter. But it’s a human right matter. It’s like the holocaust. It’s the issue of everybody. It’s like rising of antisemitism. It is everybody’s issue. So is the persecution of Christians. It’s not the church matter. It’s not only a priest or a pastor’s matter. It is every regular person on the street matter. It’s a human right matter.
You find a suffering family, for example, so what is your check list? What are the steps to set them free?
The twenty branches that we have around the world are not all like this, when you can come and have a cup of coffee. Some of them are underground branches. We call them intelligent resources. So if there is persecution, like helping the twenty five Christians in Afghanistan, every branch, maybe five or six groups in it that don’t know each other, so if one of them gets arrested, they would not be able to name the rest of the groups with them. So all of them send the information about persecution in their country. And if the reports match each other from all five different groups then it’s true, but we need the evidence, pictures. And if the information matches, only then we start to move.
Do you start action even when a person is still in prison?
Absolutely and we succeeded in getting all of them out of prison. Sometimes we would even have to give bribes to let them out. And some people would say that bribes are wrong. But what do you want me to do – to let this person die? Isn’t smuggling the Bibles also against the law? And they used to smuggle the Bibles in Russia all the time. If it’s against the law of men but not against the law of God I will do it.
How can other Christians around the world help your organization?
They can join the organization through visiting our website and signing to receive the newsletter. Prayers are very important. It’s number one. There are seven points of prayer on our website. And prayers daily. Not once a year. Like they do a day of prayer for persecuted Christians in November. That’s nonsense! Are you remembering them just once a year? Make it every day. Number one is prayer. Number two is action, which is contacting your government, media, presidents, prime ministers. If you sign on our action alert, you will receive newsletters of what’s going on and where to write and what to do.
Do you encourage people for the physical action – like going to the embassies and have pickets or demonstrations?
Peaceful ones, yes. And of course donations would help because operations like the latest one – it cost us 77,000 dollars to bring this family here. Bribes and tickets and all of this stuff. Bringing us to your church to educate the people, to hold seminars because people need to know. When they face persecution it becomes different to them. It’s not just something that you read about in the Bible anymore. It’s something happening right now.
AT THE END OF THE INTERVIEW I WANT TO TALK TO THE GOVERNMENTS WHO PERSECUTE CHRISTIANS. The persecuted Christians are dying but they are still smiling. They are in very deep dark night. But they have the candle of the living God. After every night there is always a new day, after every storm there is sunshine, after every persecution there is victory in Jesus. Our enemy has a very strong arms, it’s true. Our enemy has a very strong weapon, it’s true. We cannot lie about that. But we have the Lord almighty and it’s a fact. Whoever persecutes Christians, I want them to remember this: as long as you live you can always kill the dreamer but you cannot kill the dream. You can always hurt our body and our flesh but you cannot touch our spirit and our soul. God bless you.
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