Let them into the EU! From the BBC (thanks to all who sent this in):
A priest from Turkey's Syriac Christian community has been kidnapped in the country's south-east, officials say.Edip Daniel Savci's car was reportedly found abandoned near Midyat town in Mardin province on Wednesday.
A local clergyman had received a phone call demanding a ransom for his release, the Anatolia news agency said.
Attacks on Turkey's Christian minority have increased recently. A Catholic priest was shot dead last year and three Protestants were killed in April.
Five men accused of the attack on the Protestant missionaries went on trial in the town of Malatya last week.
A shame--I rather like Turkish beer.
Just another in a long line of repeated abuses and destruction of Eastern Christianity. Will such groups, due to a combination of low birth rates, intermarriage, forced and unforced conversion, and persecution even exist 100 years, or even 50 years from now? It would be nice to think that they could possibly go on, but I sincerely doubt it. The world--and Christianity--will lose a historical tie to the past as a result.
Turkey, where every month someone beats a priest or throws a molotov cocktail bomb into a church. Turkey, where recently three Christians were tortured and killed. Turkey, where Mein Kampf recently sold more than 100,000 copies and would have sold more if Germany had not prevailed on the Turkish government to ban the book. Turkey, where Prime Minister Erdogan refused to criticize that smash hit film in his nation, Valley of the Wolves, which depicts American soldiers murdering Iraqis to bring their organs to the medical market with the help of a demonic Jewish doctor. Erdogan's wife wife was reportedly so moved with praise for the film that she was in tears.
Yet Turkey is supposed to be an example of how Islam and democracy are not antithetical. True, the army in Turkey controls things more than it would in a truly free country, but apparently that can't be helped, because given a choice the Muslim population of Turkey would start to bring in Islamic law, and then freedom would really be beaten.
Freedom House gives Muslim Indonesia a better rating than Turkey, yet Indonesia recently sentenced 41 Christians to five years in prison for the horrible crime of proselytizing. Prison terms for proselytzing is freedom? And the destruction in Indonesia of hundreds of churches in recent years is freedom? What sort? Choose any religion you want, so long as it's Islam. Otherwise you might be decapitated, even if you are just a Christian girl on the way to school one morning. (Remember that charming Indonesian celebration of freedom?) And if you choose Islam, and kill hundreds in nightclubs in Bali, the anti-terror chief of Indonesia will wine and dine you a few years into your sentence. (Remember that?)
If Indonesia and Turkey are the great examples of Muslim democracy and freedom, that's an indictment of Islam, considering the notoriously low standard to which other Islamic nations fall in providing their citizens with civil liberties and political rights.
Why is the West letting in so many immigrants from a religion whose texts, traditions and current practice around the world are so hostile to religious and other freedoms? Are we suicidal? Maybe freedom has become too easy for us and we no longer appreciate it. Maybe many will have to lose it before a serious defense will mount.