The mainstream media habitually runs interference for jihadists, obfuscating their identity and goals, and under-reporting the atrocities they commit. This article is a particularly egregious example. “Christians ‘face extinction’ amid sectarian terror, minister warns,” by Matthew Holehouse for the Telegraph, November 14 (thanks to Anne Crockett):
Christianity is in danger of becoming extinct in its ancient homelands because of a rising tide of sectarian attacks, a senior minister will warn on Friday.
“Sectarian,” eh? So some other sect is attacking Christianity? What sect could it be? Scientology? Eckankar? Followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?
Violence against Christian worshippers and other religious minorities by fanatics has become a “global crisis” and is the gravest challenge facing the world this century, Baroness Warsi will say.
“Fanatics,” eh? PETA activists? Raw food devotees? Jogging enthusiasts?
“A mass exodus is taking place, on a Biblical scale.
An “exodus,” you say? So the Zionists have something to do with this?
In some places, there is a real danger that Christianity will become extinct,” she will say at a speech at Georgetown University in Washington.
In the new year, Lady Warsi, the Minister for Faith who sits in the Cabinet, will host an international summit to draw up a plan to end the violence against Christians – particularly in the countries where the faith was born.
Writing for Telegraph.co.uk, Lady Warsi highlights the bombing of All Saints Church in Pakistan, killing 85 congregants, in September and the gun attack on a Coptic wedding party in Egypt as the latest outrages by militants who have turned “religion upon religion, sect upon sect”.
“Militants”? The Symbionese Liberation Army? The Weather Underground? The Tamil Tigers?
“There are parts of the world today where to be a Christian is to put your life in danger,” she writes. “From continent to continent, Christians are facing discrimination, ostracism, torture, even murder, simply for the faith they follow.
“Christian populations are plummeting and the religion is being driven out of some of its historic heartlands. In Iraq, the Christian community has fallen from 1.2m in 1990 to 200,000 today. In Syria, the horrific bloodshed has masked the haemorrhaging of its Christian population,” she says.
Terrorists are subjecting Christians in the Middle East to “collective punishment” for American foreign policy. Worshippers are now regarded as newcomers and agents of the West, despite having lived there for centuries.
That’s not all this is about. In Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, Arab nationalist regimes adopted legal codes that granted Christians more rights than are accorded them under Islamic law. Now Islamic supremacist groups are working to reimpose that Islamic law and enforce the conversion or subjugation of the Christians.
The attacks come against a diverse background of political upheaval, local turf wars and social unrest — but they share the common trait of Christians becoming a “scapegoat” for extremists who are insecure in their own religious identity, she will say.
“Extremists”? What are they extreme about? Are they extremely involved in playing video games? Working out? And this is all because they are “insecure in their own religious identity,” you see. So some robust instruction in their own faith — whatever it is, as the article hasn’t bothered to tell us yet — will fix this problem right up, eh? They’re just “ignorant” of their own religion and “misunderstand” it, is that it?
It is the same mindset that motivated the Nazis to persecute the Jews and the Communists to suppress the Russian church, she says.
Similar, but not the same. Nazis persecuted Jews because of a Social Darwinist idolatry of race and blood, and because they scapegoated them for all of Germany’s problems. Communists suppressed the Russian church because it was an ideological competitor. Christians in the Middle East are not being persecuted because of an ideology of race and blood, but because of texts of the Qur’an and Sunnah that call for their subjugation. They are certainly being scapegoated, but are too small and persecuted to be a significant ideological competitor to Islam, although as we see daily in the West, Islamic supremacists are indeed so insecure that they cannot brook even the tiniest challenge.
Lady Warsi is the first senior British politician to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Arab world, and will call on other Muslims to defend Christians, citing the example of Christians who defended praying Muslims in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising.
Note that the first direct mention of Muslims in this article is in connection with Christians who protected Muslims. It is interesting that the Telegraph and/or Baroness Warsi is extremely circumspect about naming the persecutors as what they are, but not at all hesitant to use the word “Muslim” in connection with Christians who did the right thing toward Muslims. This is very, very common, of course. It stems from a fear of offending Islamic supremacists who feign offense at the slightest negative word, and shows how effective their campaigns of smear and intimidation have been to blunt criticism of jihad violence and Islamic supremacism. The reticence may also stem from a core assumption that the Qur’an and Sunnah couldn’t really teach warfare against and subjugation of Christians, and that those who say it does, Muslim and non-Muslim, must be Misunderstanders of Islam.
“A bomb going off in a Pakistani church shouldn’t just reverberate through Christian communities; it should stir the world,” she says.
The response must be a co-ordinated international effort similar to the campaign against Apartheid and for Civil Rights in the United States, Lady Warsi will argue. Extremists must be prevented from “twisting history” by claiming co-existence is not possible. She will hold up the example of her daughter, a Muslim who attends a convent school.
Her Muslim daughter who attends a convent school is not an example of what we need, which is true Islamic tolerance, but of non-Muslim tolerance of Muslims.
Her intervention comes as church leaders become increasingly alarmed at the rising numbers of sectarian attacks on churches in the Islamic world.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has described the victims of bombings in Pakistan as “martyrs”. “They have been attacked because they were testifying to their faith in Jesus Christ by going to church,” he said. Lord Sacks, the former chief rabbi, has described the continuous wave of attacks on Iraqi Christians by Al-Qaeda as “the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing”.
Then on the other hand we have this: “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.” — Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 2013
Around a third of Syria’s Christian population are believed to have fled during the civil war, after being lumped together as “pro-Assad” by Islamist rebels. Earlier this month 45 Christian civilians were reported to have been killed and their churches desecrated in a massacre in Sadad, near Damascus, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.
In Egypt, the Coptic Orthodox Church, which is the oldest in the world and was founded in 50AD, has come under attack from suicide bombers and arsonists since the Arab Spring.
In Kenya, the Al Shebaab gunmen who attacked a shopping mall in September, killing 61 civilians, asked Muslim hostages to leave before shooting their victims.