CHRISTIANS are being persecuted for being Christian. The persecution, if not state sanctioned, is ignored and tolerated by many governments, especially in the Middle East, across the Maghreb, the Arabian peninsula, in the Indian sub-continent and the prc. The worst right now is for the Christians of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and disturbingly, Israel (state sanctioned discrimination, violence by Jewish extremist). Our government must act to defend Christians in these areas, to make governments know persecution of Christians must stop and that they must protect their Christian citizens and treat them as equals in their nations. Our nation must do more for Christian refugees, offer them asylum in the U.S. and work with the American religious community to provide housing, education, health care, job training, all the social services they need from the government and charities to settle all who want to come to the U.S. There is a lesson for all of us to learn also, not only from these Christian refugees but from the plight of the Muslim refugees from Syria flooding into Europe. The Muslim refugees aren't going to saudi arabia or the Persian Gulf states or Iran because they belong to the "wrong" sect and because these countries are governed by theocratic tyrants who consistently violate their citizens human rights. They are making their way to Europe where they believe they will be able to practice their religion and make a better life for their families and live under the rule of law. Right wing Christians in America frequently claim they are being persecuted for their faith. I'd like to hear them share their stories of persecution with the Christian refugees from any of the countries mentioned above, one would hope they would quickly be shamed into silence. One can also hope the plight of both Christian and Muslim refugees would make Americans of all faiths and of no faith realize how fortunate we are to live in a Republic, with separation of Church and state, and not a theocracy. kim davis, you are not being persecuted for your faith, you are in jail because you refuse to follow the law. This tweet explains it perfectly.
The following from the +Washington Post .....
The harrowing lives of Christians in the Middle East
Witnessing
sectarian turmoil in the Middle East, and observing the back and forth
over which threat is most existential to countries in that religiously
sensitive region, a soft voice asks: “Don’t Christian lives matter,
too?” Depends upon how it’s expressed.
This
weekend, the Episcopal Church and other Christian denominations will
celebrate the Feast of Saint Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ,
and the Catholic Church will recognize Mary’s assumption into heaven.
Words
●
An Aug. 11 article by The Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief, William Booth,
featured Aviya Morris, a 20-year-old West Bank settler, described as “the fresh new face of Jewish extremism.”
According to the article, “in 2013 [Morris] was arrested on suspicion of involvement in vandalizing Jerusalem’s Monastery of the Cross, where assailants left behind the spray-painted message ‘Jesus — son of a whore’ on a wall.”
Morris, The Post reported, was released without being charged.
● An Aug. 10 Anti-Defamation League news release
expressed outrage at remarks made by Rabbi Bentzi Gopstein, director of
Lehava, which the ADL called “a far-right extremist organization in
Israel.” According to the release, Gopstein reportedly said he favored
the burning of churches and compared Christianity to idol worship.
The
remarks were made, the ADL said, during a symposium on Jewish religious
law on Aug. 4 in Jerusalem, when Gopstein was asked: “Are you in favor
of burning [churches] or not?” He replied: “Of course I am! It’s
Maimonides. It’s a simple yes. What’s the question?”
Jonathan
A. Greenblatt, the ADL’s national director, said in the release, “Rabbi
Gopstein’s views have no place within the Jewish tradition or in a
democratic society,” and Greenblatt called for an apology.
● A June 18 ADL news release
condemned a suspected religiously motivated hate crime against the
Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish at Tabgha on the Sea
of Galilee in northern Israel.
The ADL
said the 1,500-year-old church was set on fire early in the morning,
damaging the prayer room and outer areas of the church: “Graffiti
reading ‘False idols will be smashed’ — a line from Jewish prayer — was
spray-painted on one of the walls.”
“We
deplore this despicable hate crime against one of the holiest Christian
sites in Israel,” said then-ADL leader Abraham H. Foxman in the
release. Foxman also noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu had condemned the attack and promised to prosecute the
perpetrators.
Until those words
describing anti-Christian hostility appeared in The Post and the ADL
releases, I had never heard of Morris or Gopstein. They were made
prominent by the publications. There is no indication that more than a
small minority of Israelis shares such hatred. But it does exist, at
least among a few, in the region where Christianity was born, and it
finds expression in venom-filled words and desecrated churches.
Deeds
Christians beyond Israel are far worse off.
You wouldn’t know that is the case, however, from the attention that Middle Eastern Christians receive.
Followers
of Christ in Iraq, quiet as it has been kept, have borne a large brunt
of the pain resulting from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Before 2003, as many as 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. Today, because of killings and panicked flights from terror, that number is below 500,000.
The
Islamic State’s calling card to Christians in Syria and Iraq: Convert
to Islam or pay with your life. Recall the scenes on the Libyan beaches
where Ethiopian and Egyptian Christians were beheaded.
“We’re
certainly looking at the potential end of Christianity in the Middle
East if no one does anything to protect these ancient communities that
are dwindling now,” said Eliza Griswold, author of a recent New York
Times Magazine article about the dire straits of Christians in Iraq and Syria.
But
the international dueling over the Iran nuclear deal, sectarian turmoil
and Israel’s response to foreign threats overshadow the plight of
Christians.
Middle Eastern Christians have
no army of their own, no government that represents them in world
capitals, no voice in international parleys that have a bearing on their
fate. They are vulnerable; their plight is slighted by Western powers
fearful, as Griswold wrote, of “appearing to play into the crusader and
‘clash of civilizations’ narratives the West is accused of embracing.”
When all’s said and done, Christians in the Middle East have only their faith.
But
they know, as do the Christians who will pay tribute to Jesus’s mother —
a saint, not a whore — this weekend, that earthly powers don’t have the
last word, that a cup of strength lies within their grasp, and that
though they suffer, they, as Christians, actually matter to the one who
matters to them most of all.
Read more from Colbert King’s archive.
Read more on this topic:
Richard Cohen: The Islamic State is evil returned
David Ignatius: A strategy forms to combat the Islamic State
Michael Gerson: Can Muslim lands learn to tolerate Christianity?
Read more on this from Opinions:
The Post’s View: U.S. inaction in Syria could be far more costly than intervention
Shirin Ebadi and Payam Akhavan: In Iran, human rights cannot be sacrificed for a nuclear deal
Colbert King: Christians in the crosshairs
Richard Cohen: The Islamic State is evil returned
David Ignatius: A strategy forms to combat the Islamic State
Michael Gerson: Can Muslim lands learn to tolerate Christianity?
Michael Gerson: Can Muslim lands learn to tolerate Christianity?
In some parts of the world, Herod’s massacre of the innocents is a living tradition. On Christmas Day in Iraq, 37 people were killed in bomb attacks in Christian districts of Baghdad. Radical Islamists mark — and stain — the season with brutality and intolerance.
The violence, of course, is not restricted by the calendar. In recent months, we’ve seen Coptic Christians gunned down
in Cairo and churches burned. Thousands of Syrian Christians have fled
to Turkey. “Where we live,” said one refugee, “10 churches have been
burned down. . . . When the local priest was executed, we decided to leave.”
Across
North Africa and the greater Middle East, anti-Christian pressure has
grown during the past few decades, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt.
This persecution has gained recent attention from the archbishop of
Canterbury and the pope. “We won’t resign ourselves,” says Pope Francis, “to a Middle East without Christians.”
The most passionate advocate has been Prince Charles — an often underestimated, consistently thoughtful figure. “For 20 years,”
he said in a recent speech, “I have tried to build bridges between
Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding. The
point though, surely, is that we have now reached a crisis where the
bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested
interest in doing so.”
The growth of this
persecution is sometimes used as a club against the very idea of
democracy promotion. Middle East democracy, the argument goes, often
results in oppressive Sunni religious ascendancy. Majority rule will
bring the harsh imposition of the majority faith.
But
this is the criticism of a caricature. Democracy promotion — as
embraced by the National Democratic Institute or the International
Republican Institute or Freedom House — is about human liberty protected
by democratic institutions. Securing institutional respect for minority
rights is particularly difficult in transitioning societies, as we’ve
recently seen. But clinging to authoritarianism further hollows out
civil society, making the results even more chaotic and dangerous when a
dictator falls. And even marginally more favorable dictators can’t be
propped up forever, as we’ve also recently witnessed. So it matters
greatly whether America and other democracies can help pluralism survive
and shape the emerging political order.
This is a priority for both
humanitarian and strategic reasons. As William Inboden of the University
of Texas notes, there is a robust correlation between religious
persecution and national security threats. “Including World War II,”
argues Inboden, “every major war the United States has fought over the
past 70 years has been against an enemy that also severely violated
religious freedom.” The reverse is equally true. “There is not a single
nation in the world,” he says, “that both respects religious freedom and
poses a security threat to the United States.”
There
are a number of possible explanations for this strong correlation. The
most compelling is that religious freedom involves the full and final
internalization of democratic values — the right to be a heretic or
infidel. It requires the state to recognize the existence of binding
loyalties that reach beyond the state’s official views.
It
took many centuries for Christendom to achieve this thick form of
pluralism. Whether the Islamic world can move toward its own, culturally
distinctive version of this democratic virtue is now one of the largest
geopolitical questions of the 21st century.
Some
argue that Muslim theology — emphasizing fidelity to its conception of
divine law — makes this unlikely (or impossible). Others point to past
centuries when Muslim majorities and rulers coexisted with large
Arab-Christian populations — a thin form of pluralism in which
Christians were second-class citizens but not subject to violent
intolerance. Every major religious faith contains elements of tribal
exclusivity and teachings of respect for the other. The emergence of
social pluralism depends on emphasizing the latter above the former.
Promoting
democratic institutions is no easy task in the midst of revolution and
civil war. But even limited levers — stronger condemnation of abuses,
conditioning aid on the protection of minorities, supporting moderate
forces in the region — are worth employing when the stakes are so high.
America, however, seems strangely disengaged. “One of America’s oddest
failures in recent years,” argue Economist editors John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge, “is its inability to draw any global lessons
from its unique success in dealing with religion at home. It is a
mystery why a country so rooted in pluralism has made so little of
religious freedom.”
A recovery of that emphasis might begin with a simple commitment: not to resign ourselves to a Middle East without Christians.
Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .Read more on this from Opinions:
The Post’s View: U.S. inaction in Syria could be far more costly than intervention
Shirin Ebadi and Payam Akhavan: In Iran, human rights cannot be sacrificed for a nuclear deal
Colbert King: Christians in the crosshairs
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