What the person told you is true and I will give a few examples that will show this.
Here is an interview that appeared on CNN with Mark Arabo a few years back about Christian persecution in Iraq.
And now the story from someone who was actually there who was questioned about what Mark Arabo was claiming on CNN:
Your Beatitude, on CNN, Mark Arabo, a California businessman and leader in the Iraqi-American Christian community, spoke about a “Christian genocide” and a “systematic beheading of children” by ISIS, saying that “there’s a park in Mosul where they have beheaded children and put their heads on a stick.” Can you confirm or deny these reports?
Nothing like that. No beheadings. In Mosul money was stolen, but Christians have not been physically attacked. There was a large mass exodus and great panic in the Plain of Nineveh. People were literally driven out of their villages. There was one fatality—a man, during a tense moment as he was trying to cross a checkpoint.
An example from Nigeria:
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No, there is no evidence that 60,000 Christians been killed in a 'genocide' by "Fulani Herdsmen" in Nigeria
According to the International Crisis Group, political and religious claims of a jihad by ethnic Fulanis are conspiracies which have grown in response to the conflict, which is fundamentally about land-use between mainly nomadic cattle herders and sedentary farmers.
There are no reliable estimates for the total number of deaths since 2001 and no known estimates which divide the deaths along religious lines. The herders are mainly Muslim while the farmers are largely Christian.
The International Crisis Group reported around 12,000 deaths from 2011-2016. It said that in the first 6 months of 2018, 1,300 people were killed in clashes between herders and farmers.
In northern Nigeria, clashes have also occurred in states like Gombe, where the majority of farmers are Muslim, suggesting that the underlying causes for the conflict are not religious.
A number of US-based Christian groups and organisations have repeated similar claims, including Open Doors USA, the US branch of an international organisation that supports “persecuted Christians in the most high-risk places”.
Others include the Gatestone Institute, a right-wing think tank.
Articles and petitions repeating these claims have been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook.
And here are a couple of examples that I have first hand knowledge of from the Philippines:
If you google the term "60,000 Christians Philippines", you will get a lot of results like the ones below:
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The claim that 60,000 Christians had been "ethnically cleansed" in the Philippines is false.
I have first hand knowledge of this event because I have been working in the communities affected before, during, and after this incident took place. The villages where the fighting took place were Rio Hondo, Sta. Catalina, and Sta. Barbara which are all predominantly Muslim. There are a few Christians that live in those communities along with some Animist, but it wasn't Christians that were primarily affected or displaced, it was Muslims. And while Zamboanga City is a predominantly Christian city, the areas affected were not. Here's a local report that confirms this.
Zamboanga City standoff not a religious war
In Zamboanga City, the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s operations center reported that 62,329 persons are now staying in 20 evacuation centers in the city.
“A lot of people, about 90 percent Muslims, are suffering from this man-made calamity that Misuari is answerable for,” Hataman said. Hataman warned residents of Zamboanga City and Mindanao in general not to be misled by deceptive tactics aimed at driving deeper the wedge between Muslims and Christians. “We need to be informed properly and not to believe in deceptions,” he said.
This next example was shared by a website that claims it is fighting Christian persecution around the world.
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Stranded Boat Discovered With 8 Beheaded Fishermen - Walid Shoebat
While the article doesn't make the claim the fishermen were Christian, since it is a Christian persecution site and a sentence in the story says
"Remember, that the Muslims are constantly hunting after and killing Christians. Please help your brethren and donate now.", what would readers be led to believe?
The fishermen in this story were not Christians and the incident had nothing at all to do with religion.
Remains of 8 executed Badjao fishermen found
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines - Villagers and authorities recovered the remains of eight fishermen, who were executed by suspected pirates and were missing for 10 days, separately along the seas of the coastal village and island east of this city, according to police and officials.
The police said the victims were among the 11 local sea gypsies known as Badjao of the Muslim tribe in this southern port city who were executed by pirates on Christmas day.
When events like the examples I gave occur in far flung parts of the world, it's easy for media outlets and organizations that report on Christian persecution to misrepresent the facts to further their agendas. After all, how would someone living thousands of miles removed from the story know one way or the other if what is being reported is true or not?
Not all are guilty of intentionally publishing misleading information of course, but many are. Sometimes they rely on second hand information from sources they believe to be reliable and run with a story without doing any fact checking, in cases like that, they would not be at fault.
I'm in no way trying to downplay the persecution of Christians by making this post, there is a great deal of persecution taking place in the world, but many organizations do in fact inflate the numbers or exaggerate certain circumstances for their own benefit. When you hear sensational stories of Christian persecution, especially those that take place in remote parts of the world, it's advisable to do a little research before taking everything that's being reported at face value.
