“We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly. And they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al Shabaab, and they burnt down the house. They captured some of them, they took them onto the beach, and only two of them managed to survive, because they killed the rest of them.”

Charmaine Hedding is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids, protects, and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa.

“In 2014, I watched as the Islamic State swept over Syria and Iraq. And I watched as the Yazidi and the Christian women were taken as sex slaves and sold in the markets of Raqqa and in Turkey and across the Middle East. And I thought to myself, ‘Who’s going to do something about this?’” she says. “The greatest struggle in the Middle East and in Africa, at the moment, is this concept of freedom of religion and belief.”

Hedding was born and raised in South Africa, where her father and grandfather were outspoken anti-apartheid activists. Because of their activism, they were eventually forced to flee to Jerusalem when Hedding was a child.

“By the time I was 12, we were harassed by agents. And we had agents in the church. We were followed,” she says. “The question that I remember asking myself as a child after reading the stories of the Holocaust is: If I was a European, what would I have done? And would I have put myself at risk to save a Jewish family? And that’s what motivated me, that question.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.