The following editorial was published on Wednesday in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, and has been kindly translated for Gates of Vienna by Henrik Ræder Clausen
Persecuted Christians
During Easter of 2003, the invasion of Iraq had already begun, designated by President George W. Bush as a crusade against terrorism — bringing up memories of the Christian Crusades from 1096 to 1272, and the words of Pope Urban II about the necessity of holy war against the infidels.
In particular among militant Islamists, whose ambition is to bring down Christianity as such.
Christianity lives on as the world’s largest religion. Of all the faith systems on earth, it remains the largest, with over two billion adherents, more than one third of all religious persons in the world. Islam is the second largest with 1.6 billion believers. And the influence of Christianity is growing, not least in China, where the number of Christians — in spite of their problems in the most populous country of the world — is projected to reach 400 million in 15 years’ time.
But Christianity is under threat in many countries, not least in the same Iraq that was the target of the war initiated by President Bush after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Since the invasion began, more than 70 Christian churches in Iraq have been bombed, over 700 Christians have been killed, 17 of these being priests, and an unknown number of Christians have been abducted. On Maundy Thursday of 2003, there were over one million Christians in Iraq. Today only one third of them remain, and most of those have needed to take refuge in the autonomous Kurdish regions in northern Iraq. Many have fled abroad. For years they have been unable to visit their relatives in Iraq.
But Christians also suffer difficult circumstances in countries other than Iraq. In most of the Middle East, the region that gave rise to the Bible, where Jesus lived and died as a person of the Middle East, Christianity is under pressure. Acutely in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, where the Apostle Paul gave Christianity roots outside of the Jewish world, and in Iran, where non-Muslims are forced to “submit or leave the country”.
Lebanon used to be a harmonious center for Christians, Muslims and Jews. It is now an Iranian vassal state, where Hezbollah, particularly in south Lebanon, is striving to remove every Christian cross, and where churches dating back to the time of the Apostle Paul have been torched, torn down or converted into mosques.
In Palestinian-controlled Gaza, Hamas is calling for “Islamic purity”, while Christian clinics are being shut down on the pretext that they are spy centers. In Egypt a couple months ago, a woman and her seven children were sentenced to fifteen years in prison for converting from Islam to Christianity — a warning of what Christian Egyptians may expect from the Muslim Brotherhood — and in Tunisia, militant Muslims cut the head off a young man who converted to Christianity. In Saudi Arabia, Bibles are being confiscated, while churches and Christian symbols are banned.
At the end of 2012, the English think tank Civitas warned of the dangers threatening Christians in the Middle East, and of the continuing silence about the violence and repression targeting them, not only in the Muslim Middle East, but also in Africa and Asia. It is deeply worrying that Western leaders are watching in silence while Christianity is persecuted in the part of the world where it arose.
And it is a regrettable fact that this silence about persecution of Christians in Muslim countries is a likely consequence of the fears harbored by Western leaders that any criticism will be interpreted as religious racism. And that in these years, the divisions between Christian and Islamic believers are being deepened.
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Lets get this straight, there is no money in Christianity, the Jews have got some but they keep it to themselves, it is Islam that is awash with money, and Islam that will pay for the bacon….
But Islamic money comes at a price – the bacon has to be made from turkeys…..
So if you need pork, then you need to buy influence, and turkey bacon will do.
No Senator or Representitive is going to bite the hand that brings home the pork, and with it the next election.
So, is the Capitol built of straw? or wood? or is it built of brick?
‘cos there is a lot of ‘huffin’ and ‘puffin’ around; maybe theres a wolf living next door.
regarding:
“Lets get this straight, there is no money in Christianity, the Jews have got some but they keep it to themselves,..’
actually Jews, per capita donate the most
and
how did you count all the money Jews have ?
[Redacted]
here, count the JEws
http://philanthropy.com/stats/topdonors/
http://philanthropy.com/article/A-Look-at-the-50-Most-Generous/137245
Jesus Himself said, “If the world hate you know that it hated me first, for I tell you a servant is not greater than His Master.” The world’s hate for the Christian and Christianity is increasing at a fever pitch. When we vanish at the sound of the Last Trump (commonly referred to as the Rapture) the world may very well rejoice at our departure. Their joy, sadly, will turn to horror and agony as the judgments begin, three sets of seven, three being the number of witness and seven being the number of completion. Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead this coming Sunday about 1800 years ago, is still the only way. My heart goes out to those who reject Him.
Listening to Bach’s St Mark Passion on Radio 3 here in England I thought you would like to know that there was a Passion Play staged in Trafalgar Square in London today. This took me by surprise because I thought that Marxist political correctness and our need since mass non-European immigration into England not to offend adherents of those religions of the Indian Sub-continent, Hinduism, Sikhism and particulalry Islam would preclude this. Even in the 1960s when England was still nominally much more Christian than it is today, I cannot imagine this taking place as it would be ridiculed by the agnostic or atheistic trend setters of that decade. So I saw it as a very positive sign and one in the eye for the Islamophiles in the House of Commons. Perhaps we are not going to see Marxist imposed apostasy here. They say that belief is growing fastest amongst the young. On the other hand, there was a great controversy when the city of Rio de Janeiro gave a scaled down copy of Christ the Redeemer to be erected on Primose Hill in London. This would surely offend the secularists, the muslims, the hindus, sikhs, pagans etc. So the news of this Passion Play warms the heart. Interested to hear that Christians still outnumber muslims. I said to my minister the other day that Russia would save us. He thought it would be China. My father always said they would being the oldest civilisation but I have always judged them too corrupt and cruel. Perhaps the growth of Christianity there will change things and then they and the Russians, who are already joined by a pact, can rechristianise and de-marxify and particularly de-islamify the West.
Don’t stop praying, there are still far too many corrupt and dangerous politicians in the western world being voted for by the voting public.
Yes and none more so than Britain’s Marxist New Labour tasked to turn Britain into a multicultural Afro-asian mixed race country from Land’s End to John O Groats. Now that one of the dreadful Marxist Milliband brothers has given up his seat to go and work in New York – probably for more money – there is to be a by-election in South Shields. This is the North East of England and as red as red can be where they will pin a red rosette on a donkey and think that UKIP are smarmy ex-Tories from the south. Pray now that they finally see sense and ditch the Labour Party that has been engaged in decimating the indigenous working class and replacing them in their own country since 1948 with the noble peoples of the third world whom they worship whilst they treat their fellow working class Brits with contempt and want to give their jobs away to Johnny Foreigner. Of course New Labour has nobody from the indigenous working class in it any more. They are all Marxist graduates, many with ancestry of an exotic nature, like the Millibands, Keith Vaz, Margaret Hodge etc.
It seems that Iraqi Christians fared better under Saddam Hussein than they do under the supposedly democratic American-installed government, while Muslim extremism is going from strength to strength in the country. Is this what so many lives have been sacrificed for in the Iraqi war?
It also seems that the much-lauded revolutions of the Arab spring are leading to the same result. Christians are persecuted with increased fervour in Egypt, they are being murdered by Syrian rebels supported by major European powers. The whole of the Middle East and North Africa is being de-Christianised. Is this a triumph of democracy? Then I don’t want democracy.
Madam, Sir,
I am french and member of the Syriac Catholic Church. I live in NANTES, in FRANCE. I write you because because I noticed that although numerous web sites denounce the persecutions against the Christians, they are still persecuted in the muslim countries, in a state of India and in several countries in Asia, like China and Vietnam.
I think the christian autorities, the christian associations, with christian politicians, in all the christian countries of the world, should organize one big protest march, that will happens, at the same moment, in all the christian countries of the world, during a long time, in order to protest against the persecution of these christians.
I hope your answer.
Best regards,
God bless you,
Michael HOMSY