November 25, 2002

AP caption: Picture of the slain American Christian missionary Bonnie Penner, left, with her husband Garry Witherall on their wedding day.
Hundreds of people, including many Lebanese and some foreigners attend a memorial service held in the port city of Sidon, Lebanon Sunday Nov. 24, 2002 at the place where she was gunned down last week.
Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims

SIDON, Lebanon, Nov. 24 With hymns and prayers, fellow missionaries eulogized Bonnie Penner Witherall today, grieving for the 31-year-old American who was killed by a gunman last week at the prenatal clinic here where she worked.
Lebanese authorities, who have yet to make an arrest, say they are looking at the case in the context of the anti-Americanism that is raging across Lebanon and much of the Middle East.
But her death exposes another trip wire involving religion in the Middle East, this time in the conflict that has arisen from a renewed effort by evangelical missionaries from the United States to spread the Christian Gospel to Muslims.
[...]
The Rev. Sami Dagher, regional leader of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which ran the clinic where Mrs. Witherall volunteered, denies that she did any proselytizing outside the clinic. He sidesteps the general issue of conversion, however, saying the group merely seeks to expose people to the idea that Jesus Christ is their savior and let them decide for themselves.
But a somewhat more direct goal emerges amid the Web site postings of the previous pastor and his wife, Darrell and Cheryl Phenicie, who were here when Muslim resentment of missionary activities broke into the open last year, but have since moved back to the United States.
"Dramatic conversions are being reported," it says. "And nearly 600 women have received prenatal care and heard the good news of our compassionate Healer, Jesus Christ."
The Web site goes on to say that "new believers" are being persecuted and asks church members to "pray for a recent surge of persecution against the ministry in Sidon."
"The local `religious' leaders have written about us falsely in the newspapers and preached against us in the city mosques," it added.
[...]
Sheik Hammoud said Muslim religious leaders grew wary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance because its members combined computer lessons, English instruction and gifts of toys and candy with Sunday school classes for hundreds of Muslim children. "It was upsetting to hear about this because they were trying to exploit their poverty to get them to change their religion," said the sheik, who began denouncing the missionary alliance last fall from the pulpit.
After the initial outcry last year, the church agreed to stop sending its vans out to collect children from poor neighborhoods and Palestinian refugee camps for Sunday school. It considered the matter settled.

But Muslims continued to protest. The missionary alliance remained the target of Friday sermons and last spring a small but influential Muslim monthly called "The Pulpit of the Calling" denounced the group as a Zionist organization.

"They destroy the fighting spirit of the children, especially of the Palestinian youth, by teaching them not to fight the Jews, for the Palestinians to forgive the Jews and leave them Jerusalem," the article said. It also said the group lured the children and young men with promises of an education in the United States, and then threatened to take it all away if they did not convert to Christianity.

Thus, it has ever been: Christians proselityze by love and good works while letting people choose God and Christ of their own free will.
Muslims--some of them anyway-- prefer to "convert" non-believers to Islams at the point of a gun or a sword.
Most of the time they don't even try for conversion to Islam, but settle, as they've done here, for the simple murder of an "infidel."
Bonnie Penner was shot in the face 3 times because of her Christian Faith.
God rest the soul of Bonnie Penner: when we speak of being a martyr, she really is one now-- for the Lord.
And the NYTimes plays its part in helping the Islamists with their "Crusade" against Christians, Jews and Americans by not just portraying the "religious war" between the Judeo-Christians and Muslims as one of Moral Equivalence;
oh no, that would be almost "objective" of them.
Instead, the NYT gives the moral High Ground to the Islamists and seems to imply that this Christian missionary work which people like Bonnie Penner did is somehow sinister, wrong and completely suspect as a "good work."
Oh, brother! Why don't they just join forces with Arab News?
Yahoo/AP: "The covered body of American missionary Bonnie Penner, 31, is seen after she was shot dead at the clinic where she worked in the port city of Sidon, Lebanon Thursday Nov. 21, 2002.
Police had no suspects, and it was not clear whether the killing was politically motivated."
[Good old Liberal Media tool Yahoo! "politically motivated." Try this:" The victim was a Christian martyr to the "Religion of Peace™"]