ICC Note:

The West, notorious for its aversion to addressing the very real issue of Christian persecution in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, is too afraid of being accused of bigotry, argues Ed West. In the Middle East, the world’s oldest Christians are being decimated. In the 5/15 window of Africa, Islam is spreading south on the backs of armed militants bent on establishing “purely Islamic” caliphates in their wake, often at the eradication of local Christian populations. And in Asia, the Christians continue to be repressed by government officials, denied permits to construct places of worship and sentenced to lengthy periods of forced labor on charges of sedition for praying.

06/28/2014 World (The Spectator) – I agree with something Owen Jones has written, a confluence of beliefs that will next occur on September 15, 2319.

Addressing the subject of Christian persecution, he argues in the Guardian: ‘It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion of Iraq has been the purging of a Christian community that has lived there for up to two millennia. It is a crime of historic proportions.’

Most people have rather ignored this crime, as they have other incidents of anti-Christian persecution across Africa and Asia, for as the French philosopher Regis Debray put it: ‘The victims are “too Christian” to excite the Left, and “too foreign” to excite the Right.’

But in particular the issue of Christian persecution has been ignored because the Left feels uncomfortable discussing Muslim-on-Christian violence, and Muslim bigotry generally. Muslims, as (generally) non-European minorities in the West, excite their need to protect the vulnerable. Yet outside of the West, the men of Islam are far from vulnerable or weak – quite the opposite.

And the problem for the Left is that once you look into religious freedom around the world it becomes very hard to sustain the idea that Islam is a tolerant faith, as they would like to believe. There are tolerant versions of Islam, now and historically, and it’s right that the Islamist version of history is countered by appeals to more progressive traditions of the faith, but the religion has had trouble adapting to pluralism and liberalism.

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