Religion: Missionaries Under Cover

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Intra-Christian recrimination also arose around the shocking death last November of Bonnie Witherall, 31, a nurse's assistant at the Christian and Missionary Alliance pre-natal clinic in Sidon, Lebanon, a facility funded partly by Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse organization. One morning as she arrived to open the clinic, an unknown assailant shot her three times in the head. Her murder may have been simple anti-Americanism, since it followed one of Osama bin Laden's bellicose edicts. But the New York Times reported that members of the Alliance--which flew a banner emblazoned with the Arabic for "And Jesus said to them: I am the bread of life, and who accepts me will never go hungry"--had received threats after local imams denounced them for allegedly handing out Christian literature and evangelizing to Muslim youth.

Such overtures are legal in Lebanon but are regarded by both Muslims and some Christian leaders as threats to the fragile peace among the country's sects. Thus the local Catholic Archbishop, while condemning the crime, felt it necessary to announce, "We don't accept this kind of preaching. We reject it totally."

"Sam," 46, recalls the day Israeli soldiers spotted his white Citroen van on the shoulder of a back road outside the West Bank town of Nablus and, hearing the murmuring behind its closed curtains, concluded they had stumbled on a nest of suicide bombers. At gunpoint, the American exited his vehicle and explained that the six Palestinians with him were a clandestine Christian Bible-study group avoiding the prying eyes of their neighbors. "They are in danger," he told the baffled soldiers--"in danger of being killed." Sam claims to have led more than 100 Palestinians to Christ but says that it is they who are heroic, not he. Some of the converts, say their co-believers and local diplomats, paid for their faith with arrests, beatings and torture at the hands of Palestinian forces. The same sources report that one man was then turned over to Fatah militiamen, who killed him.