Mr. Joseph Maher Talked about Persecution Happened in Pakistan and China

My name is Joseph Maher, Joe Maher, and as I explained to the congressman and also the pastor of the Ukrainian church there, I'm a potential candidate for the seventh district of Pennsylvania for Congress. And I've been following all this through Aaron Beshar, who's running for comptroller in the city of Philadelphia. I figured I should mention that he organized a group that we went down and visited the Pakistani ambassador in the embassy down in Washington, D.C. back on August 25th. I had already prepared and researched it, and I have articles from the Spotlight paper, and it explained in about seven, eight pages exactly what had happened back on August 26th. The latest incidents were somewhere between 24 and 30 churches were burned. For the Catholics, it's the Archbishops of Lahore, which is one of the largest cities in Pakistan. It's about, and this town that has been mentioned here this evening several times, Jarawana Wala, it's about 50 miles west of Lahore. And extremist Muslims, that even the ambassador called, they committed crimes against humanity. False pretenses were never researched, never investigated, and they just decided to do a purge. Like I was telling the group earlier this evening, it reminded me of the things I read about back in the 1930s in Germany, where the brown shirts went out and burned down Jewish churches, synagogues, and so forth out there. And it's the same thing apparently is happening in Pakistan, and has been happening for a while. And the United States government should look at that kind of thing, like we watched other things in the Middle East, remember back in Iraq and so forth, where the Syrians and other people were also persecuted. And we allowed extra groups, those people, to come to the United States about three or four years ago. I don't see why any reason that same kind of policy shouldn't apply to the Pakistani Christians who want to come here, and they're being sponsored by very responsible people here. They're not going to be living on welfare or something like that, like the people that are just coming across the border, our southern border right now. So if I get to Congress, I'm definitely going to push some of these things. I'm going to put my back against the wall and say, look, we got to stop and we got to help the people in the world who are also supporting America. They're not out there parading and celebrating when 9-11 happened. They're the ones that are appalled by what happened there. And once again, that was extremist Muslims, you know what I mean? And they somehow, these groups get, you know, nobody practicing with them to say, hey, you got to stop this stuff. You don't want us to support your country and everything, and then you're going to turn around and stab us in the back about it. So we have to be careful about these kind of things. So hopefully something's more. I'm preparing a letter to write to the Pakistani ambassador. Now, it's been almost a month since we were down there and say, look, what's going on here? I've been talking to people in the Roman Catholic Church, Knights of Columbus, I belong to, like I said, it's the largest fraternal Catholic organization in the world. We support all kinds of Catholic groups around the world, because we're not just in the United States, but we're in countries all around. So hopefully we can get some other religious groups to get more active. There must be about 78 million Catholics in the United States that we can arm to say, look, our fellow Christians need your support. Thank you. It's like the Uyghurs there, essentially. We've heard a lot about it, not so much in the last year or so, but two or three years ago it was mentioned that the same slave labor conditions and so forth, they're making products and it says sold in America, like you mentioned before. And the same kind of situation's happening around the world. And those people happen to be Muslims, I believe, by ancestry. And the Chinese are persecuting all kinds of people from all different kinds of faiths. So we got to look into that and particularly, you know, we pay more money into the UN than anybody else. And we got to do something about it. It's like, wait a minute, we're doing all this and we're sponsoring all these organizations there and they got to start doing something. And I would suggest to the Congressman that we got to have people from the State Department. I assume we have a consulate in Lahore, because I think it's the second largest city. Yeah, after Karachi, I guess, at the mouth, we were talking about it here. And I guess there was some persecution down there recently, which is the mouth right on the coast there. And Bill Allen, my fellow group from the Pennsylvania Coalition, was talking about during his little talk earlier this evening. So we got to approach these kind of things and take activists. We got to start working on these things, not just sitting back and doing nothing.