By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST Ministries and the ASSIST News Service
CAIRO, EGYPT (ANS – April 28, 2015) – An extraordinary series of videos of Christians forgiving Islamic State have gone viral in the Arab world.
SAT-7
Egypt Director sees the impact of the “Resistance through forgiveness”
videos of a 10-year-old Iraqi displaced by Islamic State (IS/ISIS) and
of a brother of two Egyptian laborers beheaded in Libya both voicing
forgiveness for their persecutors have been watched by a million viewers
and have drawn the attention of mainstream Arab media which rarely
covers Christian news.According to SAT-7, under the title Iraqi Girl Myriam Faces ISIS with Love, pan-Arab broadcaster Al Arabiya told how the clip of young refugee Myriam had spread via social media and was impressing ordinary viewers and media commentators.
A columnist in the Lebanese newspaper Al Nahar said the SAT-7 interview with her “should be presented in Lebanese schools as a lesson in humanity.”
Farid Samir, Egypt director of Christian satellite channel SAT-7, which made both clips, said: “The massive interest in them shows the impact of “resisting violence through forgiveness.”
In her clip, Myriam says she “will ask God to forgive IS” and singing a worship song. It reached more than one million people and was watched by another 200,000 within 42 hours of appearing on the SAT-7 ARABIC Facebook page. Since then it’s been seen by more than one million viewers on SAT-7 web and social media pages alone.
The clip in which Egyptian Christian Beshir Kamel called a SAT-7 worship program and asked God to “open the eyes” of his brothers' killers was watched by at least half a million people and shared on news sites around the world.
Farid Samir said, “These clips provide a counter-shock to the horrifying videos of killings that people receive on mainstream media and to their effect on viewers. Myriam's and Beshir's calls are a form of resistance through forgiveness. Forgiveness is the core of the Christian message and the core of the message of SAT-7 at a time when mainstream media avoids reporting on Christians.”
SAT-7 Founder and CEO Terrence Ascott added “In a climate in which world media has highlighted IS' use of social media to recruit people set on violence and to document acts intended to spread terror, the SAT-7 clips spread a radically different message.”
Photo caption: Young girl forgives Islamic State
Dan Wooding, 74, is an award-winning journalist who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for more than 51 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and he hosts the weekly "Front Page Radio" show on the KWVE Radio Network in Southern California and which is also carried throughout the United States and around the world. He is the author of some 45 books, the latest of which is a novel about the life of Jesus through the eyes of his mother called "Mary: My Story from Bethlehem to Calvary". For more information, please go to http://marythebook.com/, where you can find details of how to order the book.
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