Sheep and Goats

Tag: dennischristensen

  • A Dangerous Criminal That Everyone Can See is Not

    Okay, do I understand this correctly? Dennis Christensen presided over a Bible study meeting at a Kingdom Hall in Russia one year ago. He has been jailed for a year in pre-trial detention, after police broke in with SWAT team gear to arrest him. Several motions to have him released on his own recognizance have proved unsuccessful and bank accounts have been frozen, leaving his wife to fend for herself. Only now, after a year in prison, is his case finally coming to trial, having been postponed several times.

    And…a key prosecution witness is an individual who will testify out of sight, his or her voice garbled by electronic means. Are you kidding me? For a Bible teacher? Is it prosecution theatrics to plant the notion that Jehovah’s Witnesses are as dangerous as the mob?

    And then…more evidence that this escalation is unheard of, at least in the Orel court, it turns out that no one knows how to make the machine do what it is supposed to. The witness’s testimony is garbled to such an extent that nobody could understand it, and the trial was postponed until they either got someone who knew what he was doing or brought in a better machine. “Try speaking in syllables,” the judge (or someone) had said, but it was no good.

    Look, you want to fear the authorities, “for it is not without purpose that it bears the sword,” and it sure has been bearing it lately with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the subject of numerous SWAT team searches in various parts of Russia. One tries not to invoke images of Boris and Natashia from Bullwinkle, but with reports like these it is hard to banish the thought.

    Prosecutors attempted to restrict news media coverage to the trial. But Dennis doesn’t see himself as a criminal and stated such secrecy would impede a fair trial. The judge agreed with this and denied the motion of the prosecution.

    Christensen

    dennischristensen, #jwrussia, #stopJWban

    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why

     

  • It Just Might All Be True

    The most absurd accusations about Russia flow from Western media these days. Surely CNN’s report that Russia utilized the Pokemon Go game to undermine the American spirit takes the cake. ‘Is there no end?’ RT.com has, in effect, asked. ‘Is there no accusation too preposterous?’ Unfairly, perhaps, but predictably, Russia’s bullying of all minority religion and the outright ban of one suggests that the answer is that there is not, and that all accusations must be carefully assessed.

    All but the most repressive nations on earth have learned to accommodate the human urge to worship as each person sees fit. Russia sides with the forces of repression in this regard, and even surpasses them when, for example, it bans the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ website as extremist – the only country on earth to do so. Everyone else on the planet can visit and plainly see that it is not. How can Russia not lose face? A certain journalist laments the rise of Muslim terrorists run amok today. Of course! Everyone know what extremism is and they know that Jehovah’s Witnesses are not it.

    Columnist Andrew Sorokowski posed the question: “Why would a nation of some 144,000,000 risk its international reputation to persecute a religious sect numbering no more than 175,000 followers?” Yet Russia has done so. Religious repression hardly accounts for media accusations, of course, which are driven primarily by American politics. But it suggests to the unpracticed eye that all such accusations just might be true and that there is no accusation too ridiculous to be dismissed out-of-hand. People hear of Dennis Christenson, jailed 5 months without trial for merely leading a Bible study – how can they not imagine Russia capable of unlimited nastiness?  It is sad to see the self-inflicted decline of a great nation.

     

    See: I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why

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