To borrow from the musical group The Kinks, you know “it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world” when Russian president Vladimir Putin becomes the leading voice for stopping the violent persecutions against Christians while the president of the United States stands silent. Speaking at a meeting with Orthodox Christian leaders in Moscow last week, according to Life Site News, Putin said he noted “with alarm” that “in many of the world’s regions… inter-confessional tensions are mounting, and the rights of religious minorities are infringed, including Christians and Orthodox Christians.” In emphasizing the Middle East and North Africa, Putin said: “This pressing problem should be a subject of close attention for the entire international community. It is especially important today to make efforts to prevent intercultural and interreligious conflicts, which are fraught with the most serious upheavals.” Christians in Syria have suffered greatly amid a deadly civil war there, as have Coptic Christians in Egypt while under Muslim Brotherhood rule. There has also been a rapid decline of Iraq’s Christian population since 2003. All of which has largely been ignored by the Obama administration. Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom and a Hudson Institute Fellow, said during an appearance at CPAC in March that “religious persecution is the gravest human rights crisis of our day,” as reported by Breitbart News. Shea noted then that the Obama administration has been “silent” on the issue of global Christian persecution, and she had little hope of improvement. ”I have every expectation this problem will become worse between now and the end of the Obama administration,” she said. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., a co-chairman of the House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, has been critical of the U.S. government’s “anemic and at times outright baffling” response to the treatment of Christians in the Mideast, according to the National Catholic Register. “America has always been a friend to the oppressed, the persecuted, the forgotten. But, sadly, today, that allegiance is in question, as religious freedom and human-rights abuses around the globe increasingly go unaddressed and unanswered,” Wolf said last month. Yes, we may have passed through the looking glass if Christians must look to Russia for protection. A mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, indeed.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 18:14:11 +0000
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