Coptic Christians in Egypt have seen their churches set on fire, Christians in Nigeria have been massacred by the Islamist group Boko Haram, and still other Christians in Pakistan have been jailed on trumped-up charges of blasphemy.
Source/Credit: The Calgary Herald
By Editorial | August 14, 2014
No protests are staged. No rallies are held. No flags are waved. Nobody speaks out against the aggressors.
Instead, the world appears to regard the persecution of Christians with utter indifference. That goes for the media, who are too busy keeping the pot boiling with misplaced indignation over Israel’s refusal to let Hamas kill every Jew living there, to bother providing much coverage about the atrocities Christians are suffering.
Maybe it’s because Christianity has been seen for so long as a dominant world religion, one bolstered by the fact that the majority live in comparatively safe countries, that there’s a sense Christians will always be OK. There may also be an unspoken feeling that it’s just a few Christians somewhere in the Third World who suffer, so it’s nothing earth-shattering.
Yet, not even the recent flight of 3,000 Christians from the city of Mosul, Iraq, under pain of death at the hands of Islamist extremists for failing to convert, seemed to cause a ripple in the western consciousness. Writing in the British paper, the Independent, recently, Paul Vallely, a visiting professor of public ethics at Chester University in Cheshire, U.K., noted that “The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States estimates that 100,000 Christians now die every year, targeted because of their faith — that is 11 every hour.”
Vallely added that the Pew Research Centre found that in 2012, Christians “faced some form of discrimination in 139 countries,” and that the International Society for Human Rights states that “80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.”
Why the media and activists in the West — themselves predominantly Christian — seem hardly exercised by all this is a mystery. Even when a face is given to the persecution — as it was in the story of Meriam Ibrahim — it is met with silence in the public squares of cities all through the West. Ibrahim is the Christian woman who was imprisoned in Sudan, sentenced to hanging at the end of her pregnancy. She had committed the unpardonable sin — in that country — of marrying a Christian and supposedly renouncing her Muslim faith, although she said she was never a Muslim. Thankfully, she and her new baby were freed, leaving Sudan for Rome, en route to the U.S. and a new life with her American husband.
Coptic Christians in Egypt have seen their churches set on fire, Christians in Nigeria have been massacred by the Islamist group Boko Haram, and still other Christians in Pakistan have been jailed on trumped-up charges of blasphemy. No one seems to care. Vallely notes that a disabled Christian woman in Mosul was the last to leave after members of ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — “arrived at her home and told her they would cut off her head with a sword.”
Last week, a Canadian Christian missionary couple in China who sent humanitarian aid to North Korea were jailed on accusations of spying — and they were not the first Christian missionaries in recent weeks to be targeted for some form of harassment.
Attention seems to come very belatedly to every hot spot except Gaza — there is now a rush to highlight the looming genocide of the Yazidi people who, like the Christians in Mosul, have been driven from their homes into the northern Iraq mountains by ISIS and threatened with death for not converting to Islam.
Where are the protests, the gatherings, the rallies? Where is the anger?
Why is there only so much silence?
Read original post here: Editorial: Silence reigns
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