Welcoming a new baby into the world is usually cause for celebration — but for Meriam Ibrahim, the arrival of her tiny daughter filled the family with even more fear and uncertainty.
Meriam, already mom to a 20-month-year-old son named Martin, has been shackled to a cell in Omdurman prison on the outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan for months, desperately hoping the U.S. government would intervene.
Her husband, an American citizen — along with both children — has plead for Meriam’s release from the grip of a ruthless Islamic regime, who jailed the 27-year-old for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. Now, subjected to the worst of conditions, Meriam’s cries seem to have fallen on deaf ears in her children’s homeland thousands of miles away. The prison where she and her two children now suffer are shocking by anyone’s standards.
SIGN THE PETITION! Save Meriam Ibrahim, Don’t Hang her to Death for Her Faith
Back in 2007, Human Rights Watch was appalled by the “chronic overcrowding, lack of sanitation, diseases, and death.” Most inmates receive one meal a day — if they’re lucky — in squalid rooms infested by mosquitos. As if giving birth there weren’t horrifying enough, Meriam’s husband, who traveled from New England to Sudan to see her, has been denied access since his daughter was born. Meanwhile, the Obama administration — which had more than enough time to throw a party in honor of homosexual activist Harvey Milk — hasn’t had a spare second to demand the freedom of two of America’s youngest citizens.
Just two months after relaxing the rules on asylum seekers with “loose ties” to terrorists, the White House is content to leave two U.S. children in the custody of third-world radicals. Making matters worse, the arrival of the Ibrahims’ little girl also resets the clock on Meriam’s execution, which the Sudanese government will order as soon as the child is weaned. If the hearts of the American people aren’t sympathetic to a toddler and newborn locked and brutalized behind bars, then our hearts have been hardened beyond hope.
These innocent children, whose only crime is being born to Christian parents, are at risk for nothing they have done. Yet still, the Obama administration does nothing. Are we now at a point, as a nation, that Islamic thugs can grab Americans and throw them in jail and our government simply says it’s too complicated to intervene? We’re working with our friends on Capitol Hill to force the Obama administration to take appropriate actions to defend American citizens and their mother, Meriam.
LifeNews Note: Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council.
