Morocco and Christians: A Long Catalog of Injustice

By Chuck Colson
Christian Post Guest Columnist
Sun, Jul. 11 2010

Imagine that you are a government official in a country I will call “M.” Despite your efforts to promote economic growth, unemployment and poverty rates remain high. As a result, many of your citizens have gone abroad in search of work.

What has been called “the human face of a long catalogue of socio-economic ills” are the many thousands of orphaned and abandoned children living throughout your country. Their plight has been the subject of news reports and even an award-winning film.

So what do you do about it? Well, if you are Morocco, you declare war on those seeking to help them.

In early March Moroccan police entered the Village of Hope, a Christian-run orphanage, and interrogated its children and staff. They asked questions like, “How do you pray?” They searched the compound for Bibles and other evidence of “proselytizing.”

They didn’t find any. An orphanage officer, Jim Broadbent, told Time magazine the orphanage took great care to obey laws against proselytizing. It didn’t matter: Broadbent and the rest of staff were summarily deported a few days later. The heartbreaking scene of the children being torn apart from the only family they had ever known was something Broadbent will never forget. the rest