Undercover religious missionaries in Yemen [Archives:2007/1061/Letters to the Editor]
By: Yahya Mohammed
[email protected]
It is unusually obvious that there are many internationally religious missionaries freely touring Yemen knocking doors and offering their “humanitarian” aides to poor and uneducated families using names that indicates that their work is totally humanitarian and does not carry any other religious or political activities.
For example some weeks ago a conference held in Sanaa purely to support the movement against women circumcisions which is minimally practiced by some tribes in Yemen and the conference that is being held now in Sanaa to prevent violation against kids and so on.
There are many religious organizations come to Yemen from different parts of the world including America, Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia etc.. Using various innocent names; but in reality their mission is to mislead families and convert them to other false religions and score some political goals.
Is it really more important to the Yemeni poor families to get information about circumcision? or to firstly get enough to eat, upbringing healthy educated family members, educate women about pregnancy, giving birth to a healthy baby, and know more about the cause of many women dying while giving birth in rural remote areas ?
Are we really having a crisis regarding violation against kids? To some extent, yes, and it is due to some families to have poor knowledge about their own religion but we cannot expect external religious missionaries to come knocking our doors and educate our families and children about easy alternatives to our religious beliefs.
For sure if we agree to support what is happening we will have only ourselves to blame. The expected outcome of acting passively to these movements will be painful and costly. We can not expect any good from external movement and brainwashed supporters, so-called “educated in the west.”
A live example is what is happening now in Iraq which exposes the real face of these movements and how dangerous can they be. I personally met religious missionaries in the west who told me that they have been on missions to Yemen and commented on how gullible Yemeni families were and how easy to conduct undercover activities. They even have memorized street names and different religious sects.
It is the responsibility of every Yemeni to do whatever they can to stop these missions from contaminating our societies with their unacceptable targeted propaganda.
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