An article in todays In todays Times of London. The murder of Christians is our guilty secret Melanie Phillips Published at 12:01AM, November 17 2014 Barbaric assaults on religious liberty are greeted in the West with an embarrassed silence Canon Andrew White is one of the bravest people I know. For nine years this former Middle East envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has played a key role in freeing hostages in the region, has been the vicar of St Georges church in Baghdad. As such, he has been the emblem and body-armoured defender of Iraqs Christian community, which has been under murderous assault in the wars that have engulfed Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A few days ago, at a conference I chaired in Jerusalem, Canon White told me that the Archbishop of Canterbury has now forbidden him to return to his church in its heavily barricaded compound. Given the advance towards Baghdad of Islamic State (Isis) - which has now murdered a fifth hostage, the American Peter Kassig - it is simply too dangerous even for him. More than 1,200 members of his congregation and several of his staff have been murdered in the past few years. His flock has dwindled from 6,500 to 1,000 today, including the six remaining Jews in Iraq, who have lived under his personal protection. What is happening is a tragedy of extraordinary, historic proportions. In the place where Abraham was born, most of the 135,000-strong, three millennia-old Jewish community was forced to flee several decades ago. Now it seems that Christianity is about to be wiped out in a land where it has been cradled for more than 2,000 years. In 2003, there were more than one million Iraqi Christians. Their numbers have shrunk to about 250,000. Over the past 11 years, both Sunni and Shia Muslims have taken time off from murdering each other to kill Iraqi Christians and drive them out. Dozens of churches have been bombed. Priests and bishops have been murdered. Christian families have received death threats; their children have been kidnapped and held to ransom. Their plight is now even more desperate. Isis demanded that the Christians convert, pay a punitive Islamic tax as second-class citizens or be killed. Then it daubed their houses marking them out for slaughter. In July Canon White made an impassioned plea from Baghdad. The previous day Isis had killed 1,500 people. It is as if hell has broken out here and nobody cares, he wrote. It is not just in Iraq that Christians are under attack, however. Open Doors, an American group that supports persecuted Christians, has said that radical Muslims are the main source of persecution in 36 countries including Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In Syria, Christians have been crucified. In Nigeria, churches have been repeatedly bombed or torched, sometimes with their congregants inside. In Pakistan this month, a Christian couple accused of burning pages of the Koran were held hostage inside the clay-baking factory where they worked, then beaten and burnt alive in the kiln. A recent report on religious freedom produced by Aid to the Church in Need states that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. Launching this report, the Prince of Wales said it was an indescribable tragedy that Christianity is now under such threat in the Middle East. Yet the princes impassioned words sank like a stone. Astoundingly, the global onslaught against Christianity is going almost totally unremarked in the West. Both church and political leaders are silent, almost certainly through fear - including the fear of acknowledging the reality of Islamic holy war. For these global attacks on Christians destroy the Wests key claim that Islamic terror has nothing to do with Islam. In fact, we are surely witnessing the latest phase of the 1,300-year struggle between Islam and Christianity. Before the Crusades, Muslims compelled Christians in the Middle East and Africa to convert, be slaughtered or accept a second-class existence. By the 8th century, they had conquered North Africa and overrun Spain before the Christians in France stopped them in 732 at the Battle of Tours. The Crusades pushed them back further; but Islam was only finally repulsed in 1683 at the Battle of Vienna, when the Ottomans were defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and Polish forces. The Christian world then crushed Islamic imperialism. Until now. Religious liberty, the core value of western civilisation, is being destroyed across large parts of the world. Yet the West, myopically denying this religious war, is averting its gaze from the destruction of its foundational creed in the Middle East and the attempt to eradicate it elsewhere. It is therefore no surprise that, faced with jihadist barbarities abroad and cultural inroads at home, the free world is proving so ineffectual.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 17:47:46 +0000
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