“What they’re doing today is identical to what I remember growing up” under Soviet communism in Poland, lamented Pastor Artur Pawlowski recently. There is one difference, though:
The communists might have been a bit more even-handed.
Even in China today, religion is persecuted across the board; in fact, a million Uighur Muslims are in concentration camps. But, says Pawlowski, who was recently arrested the very moment he returned to Canada from a trip, while his church was shut down for violating COVID-19 guidelines, “mosques were fully operational” with thousands gathering together.
What’s more, Pawlowski warns Americans, “You’re next.”
Fox News reported on the story over the weekend:
The Polish-Canadian pastor who has been repeatedly arrested for holding church services in Calgary, Alberta, said Canadian border police confiscated his belongings and apparently broke into his personal computer.
When Pastor Artur Pawlowski landed back in his home city of Calgary on Monday following a four-month tour of the United States, customs officials were waiting to cuff him on the tarmac for two criminal charges, he told Fox News in an interview.
“They have fallen to a new low,” Pawlowski said of the Canadian authorities. “Our lawyers contacted them and asked them if there are any pending warrants for me when I was in the states. They said that there are no pending warrants, [sic] there is nothing outstanding.”
Pawlowski had been traveling throughout the United States over the summer to spread his warning that Western governments increasingly resemble the communist regime in Poland he fled as a young man.
His tour followed the international attention he received in April when officials went to his church in Canada during Holy Week to inspect it for COVID-19 compliance. Because they entered the sanctuary armed and uninvited during a worship service, Pawlowski refused to speak with them.
Instead, he accused them of being “Nazis” and shouted them down until they agreed to leave. Video of the encounter went viral.
But authorities weren’t done with Pawlowski. They returned three weeks later, and on May 8 (video below) the Calgary police pulled the pastor and his brother over and arrested them while the pair was returning home from church.
As for Pawlowski’s most recent arrest (video below), the “Calgary Police Service…said Tuesday that he was charged in relation to the following warrants: failing to wear a face-covering (March 13, 2021) and disobeying a court order (June 5, 2021),” reports Global News. The latter charge involves “contempt of court” for holding church services in violation of lockdown restrictions; a judge will decide on October 18 whether the pastor will spend 21 days in jail as a consequence.
Pawlowski spoke about his persecution on the Ingraham Angle’s Wednesday edition. As Fox News also reports:
“I came to the United States with a simple warning,” the pastor told [host Laura] Ingraham about his recent trip abroad.
“You’re next,” he said. “If they came for me, be sure of it, they’re coming for you as well.”
He called the individuals who arrested him “masked gangsters,” that he “couldn’t even consider them officers of the law.”
…Pawlowski told Fox News in April he was raised under Soviet communism in Poland. “It was a disaster,” he said about his childhood. “Police officers could break into your house five in the morning, they could beat you up, torture, they could arrest you for no matter what reason they would come up with … So, it was like a flashback when those police officers showed up at my church. Everything kind of came back to life from my childhood, and the only thing I could do is to fend off the wolves as a shepherd … We as lions should never bow before the hyenas, and that’s what they’re right now.”
“You came to freedom,” Ingraham said about the pastor’s journey to Canada. “This is feeling very Soviet to me,” adding that the process was incremental.
The pastor responded that he believed “What they’re doing today is identical to what I remember growing up” .
But then there’s that aforementioned difference. As The Christian Post reported Sunday:
Pawlowski told The Christian Post in June that police frequently monitored his church services to make sure he was abiding by coronavirus restrictions and social distancing guidelines. He said the intrusions weren’t necessary because he streamed the church services online. The livestreams illustrated that “I was not hiding the fact that we are not following those restrictions.”
As law enforcement repeatedly descended on his church services, “the mosques were fully operational.” He added that “no one harassed them, no one interfered with them.”
“Not one Imam was being harassed or intimidated. And to this day, there’s not one Imam or one Muslim that has a ticket, even though we have video evidence and pictures [of] them gathering … through the whole Ramadan by the thousands,” he said.
Pawlowski’s YouTube channel includes a video of a gathering of thousands of Muslims that took place on the last day of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim calendar, which police allowed without interruption. He estimated that “about 2,000 people, maybe more, were there.”
This pro-Islam, anti-Christian double standard is common now in Western nations. It’s the phenomenon that, for example,
- inspired British authorities to ignore Muslim rape gangs’ criminality for more than a decade while arresting a politician who dared quote a Winston Churchill passage critical of Islam;
- causes American educators to tout the “separation of church and state” when disallowing a child from writing about Jesus, but then allow Islamic immersion classes in government school; and
- is responsible for Christians being charged with hate speech for making statements that pale in comparison to what zealous Muslims routinely disgorge.
As for the Branch COVIDians, they’re almost as zealous about their “health” jihad as the Muslims whose efforts they facilitate are about their Islamic jihad. But not only is the coronavirus situation overblown, as regular New American readers know, but something else should be pondered:
Even if SARS-CoV-2 regulations did save lives (they actually appear to cost them), would it all be worth the permanent sacrifice of our Western traditions, rights, freedoms, and faith? What does it profit a nation to gain the world but lose its soul?
