CHRISTIAN LIFE IS UNDER ASSAULT THROUGHOUT THE EAST

CHRISTIAN LIFE IS UNDER ASSAULT THROUGHOUT THE EAST.

Paul Merkley

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On April 21, 2019, Easter Sunday, a group of about seven young men belonging to the Muslim majority in the Sri Lankan capital-city of Colombo set out on a mission to murder as many local Christians as possible and thereby win the accolades (they imagined) of the entire Muslim world. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1118884/isis-news-sri-lanka-bombings-attacks-donald-trump-pope-francis

Practically speaking, the most satisfactory way of accomplishing this task without being prevented was to make a suicide mission of it. So a volunteer, Jamal Mohammad, stepped forward; they packed his body with enough high-explosives to rock the city for miles in all directions and they sent him to walk through the doors of the building in which the congregation was meeting — to meet Allah in the sky.

This hero’s associates carried out eight other explosions across Sri Lanka that day.

On the day of its reporting, the death toll was calculated at two hundred and thirty five, but it has been re-calculated (when I last checked) at three hundred and fifty-nine, with five hundred wounded. A high proportion of the victims were children — almost surely specifically targeted.

(“The Sunday School Children: The Little-Known Tragedy of the Sri-Lankan Easter Attack, cnn.com/2019/05/04.)

More evidence (if any were needed) contradicting the notion persisting among our information elites that Islam, a source of humane thinking, somehow represents the cause of the downtrodden, is found in the apparent fact that all of the known participants were born into privileged families. One is believed to have studied aerospace engineering in the United Kingdom.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1117233/sri-lanka-easter…

One or two exceptionally alert commentators in our part of the world have noted the disparity between the minimal media attention given to this incident and the gigantic attention generated worldwide by the massacre carried out at the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand a few days earlier. (See Giullio Meotti, “Annihilation of Christian life and people: Where is the outrage in the West? Meeting Catastrophe with Indifference, Gatestone Institute, April 28, 2019.) Instead of expressing proportionate outrage at this most recent act of Islamist terror, our own government is preoccupied with the task of protecting from vulgar criticism the reputation of Islam. Our media have chosen to look the other way while Ralph Goodale, our Minister of Public Safety, got busy and erased from his Department’s Report on the Threat from Terrorism in Canada all the original references to Islam and derivatives of that radioactive word. Instead, there appears limp-wristed language about generic “extremism.”( Stewart Bell and Abigail Bimman, “Government removes all mention of ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’ extremism from terrorism threat report, Global News, May 2, 2019.) Scott Bardsley, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s spokesperson, explains that, before the Minister got to it with his blue pencil, the threat report had “unintentionally maligned certain communities” and the government wanted a “bias-free approach” to terminology.

The elephant in this particular room is, of course, the fact that it is Islam that has inspired most deeds of violence against our public and our institutions. It is not, par example, the Salvation Army whose deeds require this admonition to shut down the naming of names.

 

For as long as most of us can remember, our elected leaders have engaged in a conspiracy (I choose this word with care) to protect the reputation of Islam from open criticism – a policy that stands in contrast to their equally forceful policy of denying even minimal courtesy to the legacy of Christianity.

 

But there is worse: Inspiration for this wilful denial, by our government, of Islam’s hateful side is drawn from the policy pursued at the highest levels by our church leaders. Giullio Meotti, a brave and dogged Italian journalist, has worked a out a calendar of the occasions on which the present Pope has spoken out about the sad plight of migrants from the Muslim world and elsewhere—and he finds that, so far, in 1919 alone, there have been about twenty-five such moments…. “and maybe I missed some.” “I don’t understand,” he says: “it seems to have become the Pope’s only mission. An obsession. Meanwhile, Islamists are winning their war against the persecuted Christians.”

By way of example, Meotti notes that the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Sri Lanka, have felt compelled for three weeks now to cancel all masses throughout the land, so as to deny new targets to the deranged (but well-educated) champions of Allah, who imagine (no doubt correctly) that the Muslim majority in Sri Lanka as well as around the world supports such persecution of people who have come up with the wrong answer to the questions which religion asks.

Just as the assassins had hoped, the Christian people of Sri Lanka are now turning in large numbers to thoughts of exodus from the land where they were born. This state of affairs is reminiscent of Egypt, which once had a large Christian minority but has lost to emigration one-half of that population during the Twentieth Century.

Overall, the percentage of Christians in the Middle East is now five per cent of the total population (as of 2010) — down from 10% in 1900. Pollsters find that violence and ever-greater religious intolerance are the major  factors  behind this trend. Both in Syria and Iraq, which had a large Christian minorities in modern times, it has become almost impossible to celebrate mass anywhere in safety.

“I am sad to think that maybe the time will come in which Christianity will disappear from this land” – that is the upbeat last-quarter prophecy of Rev. Juan Solana,  the Vatican’s own envoy to this region (spoken to the Associated Press.) It is typical of the defeatist mindset of the church’s leaders there.

Accordingly, the current Pope, the man who wants us to think of him as the pre-eminent Pastor of the Christian people of the world, has chosen not to mention publicly the persecution of the Christian people in the Middle East.

Giullio Meotti brings this issue home to Christians in the West. He asks: “Should European civilization, attacked by the same butchers of Eastern Christians, not feel challenged by the persecution of these minorities which seem to be forgotten by everyone, even by their pastor in Rome?”

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