Here’s one that will make you appreciate the casual Sunday stroll to your local church parish. World Magazine ran an article last weekend that discusses how Christians in North Korea are being persecuted and tortured at an increasing rate for their religion.

From both sides of the Korean border, underground Christians are speaking out against North Korean persecution. The executions and torture occur for the most part in the gulag, North Korea’s prison camp which is home to about 200,000 political prisoners, however they also occur in public places. Some estimates put the number of Christians the regime kills at 300 per year, with roughly 50,000 Christians sitting in prison.

The amount and level of torture these Christians are put through is gut-wrenching and heart-aching. One warden hung a man upside down and ordered him to deny his beliefs. Upon refusal, the warden stabbed him and pushed him to the ground, then ordered 6,000 prisoners to trample him to death.

In another example, eight prisoners kept their silence when ordered to deny the existence of heaven, which infuriated prison officials so much that they poured molten iron all over them.

In addition, informants claim that Christian prisoners are deliberately crippled so they cannot walk, and may be left naked and starved so that they are forced to eat the rats crawling around their cells raw. A troubling thought…

I can’t believe these types of stories never hit the mainstream media. How can reporters miss this stuff? International correspondents have a moral obligation to report on human rights abuses around the world. They have no problem running stories about the horrible atrocities of Darfur in the poor African country of Sudan, but when it comes to North Korea, with whom the West is embroiled in a nuclear dispute, they look the other way so as to not upset the North Koreans and scare them away from the negotiating table.

Not that the US government is any better though, on the contrary, we’re trend setters when it comes to mistreatment of prisoners enemy combatants, just look at Cuba and Iraq.