A personal irony to report. Last night local CTV broadcast a lecture by Rev Dan Bryant a pastor with a deserved reputation for community leadership. However, Bryant has: (1) Never even once offered even muted criticism of Islam regardless of the scale of outrages perpetrated by Muslims against others, persists in an ongoing whitewash of Islam that has continued since 2001, and (2) Actively works against any and all exercise of free speech by those who are qualified to speak on religious subjects, that is, denies, on principle, anyone's freedom to openly criticize any religion, ever, unless it is Evangelical Christianity. Any and all public expression of religion, according to Bryant, must only be for the purpose of affirming any other faith as good, deserving respect, etc. Which is preposterous on the face of it -after all, the Koran strongly criticizes Christianity and Judaism, the Bible strongly criticizes Pagan religions, the Buddhist Kalachakra Sutra explicitly condemns Islam, and so forth with respect to still other scriptures of various religions. But, according to Bryant, honesty about one's deepest religious feelings in criticism of other faiths is sinful. Bad as this is locally, my best guess is that this sort of thing is national in scope, with examples of other "Dan Bryants" in just about every city and college town in America. B.Rojas -------------------------------- The Week January 23, 2014 The world's most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed — and no one cares Christians in the Middle East have been the victims of pogroms and persecution. Where's the outrage in the West? By _Michael Brendan Dougherty_ (http://theweek.com/author/michael-brendan-dougherty) |
Like many Coptic Christians in Egypt, Ayman Nabil Labib had a tattoo of the cross on his wrist. And like 17-year-old men everywhere, he could be assertive about his identity. But in 2011, after Egypt's revolution, that kind of assertiveness could mean trouble. Ayman's Arabic-language teacher told him to cover his tattoo in class. Instead of complying, the young man defiantly pulled out the cross that hung around his neck, making it visible. His teacher flew into a rage and began choking him, goading the young man's Muslim classmates by saying, "What are you going to do with him?" Ayman's classmates then beat him to death. False statements were given to police, and two boys _were taken into custody _ (http://www.aina.org/news/20111030133621.htm) only after Ayman's terror-stricken family spoke out. Ayman's suffering is not an isolated case in Egypt or the region. The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East's dictatorships would be succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The near-annihilation of the world's most ancient communities of Christians. The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West's Kindle Single "_The Silence of Our Friends."_ (http://www.amazon.com/The-Silence-Friends-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B00HDOF1DW) The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well. Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave. In Egypt, _a rumor_ (http://www.npr.org/2011/03/11/134440532/in-new-egypt-christians-face-old-discrimination) that a Muslim girl was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children were _held in police custody_ (http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Egypt,-two-Coptic-Orthodox-children-aged-9-and-10-risk-jail-on-blasphemy-charges-27271.html) for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted in Christian families leaving their homes behind. In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista Pizzaballa _reported _ (http://ncronline.org/news/global/shadow-war-targets-christians-syria) that "of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh... no more than 10 people remain." Two Syrian bishops_ have been _ (http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2013/12/03/syrian-bishop-says-nuns-kidnapping-has-shocked-christians/) _kidnapped_ (http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2013/12/03/syrian-bishop-says-nuns-kidnapping-has-shocked-christians/) by rebel groups. Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch _says_ (http://www.acnuk.org/news.php/447/syria-uk-parliament-hears-patriarchs-peace-appeal) that out of a population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their homes in fear. In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic. According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed, who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, _was murdered_ (http://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Isoh_Majeed_Haday_22_11_2006.htm) in his home. The number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the invasion. The decline of Iraq's Christian population since the first Gulf War is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion. The U.S. and the U.K. bear some responsibility in this catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq's postwar government and did little to protect minority faiths. West's book touches on the clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis. The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair toilets in them) without _explicit permission from the head of state_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamayouni_Decree) , almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time some of these militias were _executing a pogrom_ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24051440) against Christians. A Christian shopkeeper in Ma'loula summed it up in _a quote to the BBC: _ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrlYksVUXBw&list=UUBETSiGCH6dJhhdpDwekc6A&inde x=83) "Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us." In an email to The Week, Ed West says there are things America and its allies can and should do to aid persecuted Christians: Western countries should make clear that our friendship, cooperation, aid, and help depends on: 1) Religious freedom, which includes the right to change or leave religions; 2) A secular law that treats all people the same. That was not the case in Mubarak's Egypt, which the U.S. helped to prop up with $500 million a year. That is not the case in Iraq, which under U.S. control instigated sharia into its constitution. That shouldn't be acceptable. In 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup, a country where death for apostasy is still on the statute books. Why aren't we all boycotting it? [ Note: The Koran, regarded as God's very presence among humans, not just God's words, sacrosanct and prefect, which must be interpreted literally, forbids any Muslim from converting to another religion on pain of death, forbids any non-Muslim to even try to convert a Muslim to another religion also on pain of death, outright forbids free exercise of any religion regarded as "Pagan," like Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc., regards anyone who worships a Goddess as guilty of the sin of shirk, assigning a partner to God, which deserves death, demands the death penalty for Atheists, regards Christians as deserving only inferior status with restricted legal rights and subject to taxation as a form of 'protection' or extortion, regards Jews as swine or apes, subhumans, which is an explicit statement in the Koran, and regards all breakaway groups like Baha'is and Ahmadis as arch-heretics deserving death. For a Western gvt to demand freedom of religion is no different than a demand that Muslims denounce the Koran -which , of course, few if any Muslims are in the least inclined to do. ] The last request does put the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in global context. Western activists and media have focused considerable outrage at Russia's laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would only seem fitting that Westerners would also protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish people with death for converting to Christianity. And yet the Western world is largely ignorant of or untroubled by programmatic violence against Christians. Ed West, citing the French philosopher Regis Debray, distils the problem thusly: "The victims are 'too Christian' to excite the Left, and 'too foreign' to excite the Right." Church leaders outside the Middle East are afraid to speak out, partly because they fear precipitating more violence. (Seven churches were fire-bombed in Iraq after Pope Benedict XVI quoted an ancient criticism of Islam in an academic speech in Germany.) Oddly, unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. are the only powers acting in the Middle East that do not take any special interest in the safety of those with whom they have a historical religious affinity. These are the lands in which Jesus' apostles and their disciples made some of the first Christian converts. In an interview, West pointed out that these communities "were Christian when our ancestors were worshipping trees and stones." Now they are in danger of imminent extinction. In 2013, Raphael I Sako, the Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad, said the following at his installation homily, "Still the shadow of fear, anxiety, and death is hanging over our people." He warned: "If emigration continues, God forbid, there will be no more Christians in the Middle East. It will be no more than a distant memory." West's book is a sobering reminder that Western policy has helped shape this grim fate for Middle Eastern Christians — and Western silence allows it to continue. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
