WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

When we look at the widespread and growing persecution of Christians throughout the world we find that prominent amongst the enablers are Western governments, and foremost amongst them is the UK.

The 2014 World Watch List ranks the 50 nations where the greatest persecution of Christians occurs. They are designated as perpetrating ‘extreme’, ‘severe’, ‘moderate’, and ‘sparse’ persecution. Naturally enough North Korea gains top spot. Let’s face reality, it is difficult to compete with a country run by a bunch of communist gangsters as crazy as a box of frogs on steroids. North Korea is an aberration by anyone’s standards, who could beat them?

Give them their due Muslim countries have a jolly good try. After North Korea you have to go some way down to find a persecuting country which is not Muslim majority. Of the 50 worst nations for persecution, 37 of them or 74%, are Muslim. In the 13 other countries, even in Christian majority countries such as the Central African Republic, those doing the persecuting tend to be Muslim.

One can only suppose the reason a report on the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim countries was largely ignored by the media was because it is a commonplace fact that Muslims persecute Christians, not news at all. What other reason could there possibly be?

Interestingly for our Western governments Syria comes in third place, followed by Iraq in fourth and Afghanistan in fifth. Libya crawls in at 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation ‘extreme persecution’.

In three of these persecuting nations, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya the British government has been active in either creating or supporting the regimes which are persecuting Christians or allowing persecution to take place unhindered. In the case of Syria it was only a rare bout of common sense in the House of Commons following public outcry which prevented David Cameron and William Hague from linking the UK even more closely with the ‘freedom fighters’ against the regime, many of whom are more deserving of the label ‘terrorist’.

Our Syrian ‘Protoges’

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, says that in 2013 it documented 2,123 ‘martyr’ killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year. ‘This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm,’ said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

As a result of the activities of terrorist groupings, Syria a country which was once religiously tolerant, is now in the top three for the extreme persecution of Christians. Amongst Muslim nations only Somalia, the very definition of a failed state, ranks higher as a persecutor of Christians.

Even the slowest on the uptake should be aware by now that the supposed ‘Arab Spring’ so welcomed at the time by our elites has turned out to be less than billed and has failed to live up to its publicity. The unfortunate fact is that wherever Western powers have interfered in an Islamic nation, anti-Christian Islamists have come into power.

In Afghanistan the supposedly ‘moderate’ Karzai government, propped up by British and US service personnel, continues to enforce many of the laws initially imposed by the Taliban. The sharia based legislation includes an apostasy law which viciously persecutes any who convert to Christianity. In 2011, whilst British service personnel were dying and being maimed to maintain Afghanistan’s freedom from the Taliban the last Christian church in the country was deliberately destroyed with the connivance of Western governments.

The Last Church In Afghanistan

In Lybia, where the UK dropped bombs in order to help overthrow the dictator Qaddafi and succeeded in installing al-Qaeda backed terrorists, churches have been bombed and Christians have been tortured and killed for refusing to convert. Christians have in large measure fled the country.

In Iraq, where Western service personnel died in a war to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein, it is estimated that a Christian is murdered every two to three days. Terrorist groups with a stated aim of ridding Iraq of Christians operate with impunity, and are succeeding.

We should not expect the elites controlling Western governments and media to have any sympathy for Christians or any other minorities persecuted in the Muslim world. They, however, would do well to remember that wherever anti-Christian factions gain power anti-Western factions also gain power. As religious intolerance grows so does anti-Western sentiment.

At least Islamists recognise what our elites fail to see, that Western civilisation was founded upon Christian principles.

It is possible that the objective of Western intervention, to democratise the Middle East, may yet be realised. Sadly to date democracy in the Middle East is proving less tolerant than the dictatorial regimes it has succeeded. Unfortunately it is highly likely that these democracies will evolve into bastions of intolerance and violence to a degree not seen since the Germany of the 1930’s.

It is questionable that these democracies will progress inevitably toward liberty and pluralism, as some naïve optimists continue to forecast. Rather, they are more likely to end in the ordered barbarism of our ally Saudi Arabia where, according to Amnesty International, legal punishments include beheading and crucifixion.

“I Wish To Extend My Deep Regret”

The one good thing with regard to the abject apology made by the president of the United States to Karzai is that it was, as usual with Obama, intensely personal. “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. . . . I extend to you and the Afghani people my sincere apologies.” It is doubtful that the American people are quite so willing to make a wretched act of contrition over what was at most an administrative error.

I Just Want To Apologise - Again

What we in Britain do not get on the BBC is the story behind the burning. This was not the deliberate destruction by the US military of enemy religious artifacts.

The Korans in question were the property of the US military having been supplied by them to imprisoned jihaidis. The soldiers ordered to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had confiscated the books, they had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve them when the situation was brought to their attention.

The United States military is under no obligation to provide any reading material to its enemy prisoners, the people who are continually trying to murder them.  It is difficult to imagine many armies supplying their violent prisoners with the very written material they employ as a pretext for murder and atrocity. Importantly the military exercised its right to remove the books from its library after finding that were being used as a means of passing messages between prisoners.

This of course is of no interest whatsoever to the BBC. On the Sunday programme yesterday Edward Stourton, during an interview on the subject, gave the impression that the riots and murders in Afghanistan were down to the fact that the American military were not given enough ‘sensitivity’ training. It would seem for some the lack of ‘sensitivity’ by the American military towards those trying to murder them is far more worthy of attention than a religion which sees nationwide riot and murder as a proper and proportionate response to an honest mistake.

Mainstream Muslims Protest

We should remember that those rioting and killing because of the inadvertent burning of the books are not Taliban or Al Qaeda, rather they are what are termed ordinary ‘mainstream’ Muslims .The ‘religion of peace’ seems to operate on a system of proportionality which says, “You burn books, we kill people.”

If Afghan Muslims are unhappy with what happened maybe they should channel their anger toward the individual prisoners who “defiled” the Korans by writing in them.  It is unreasonable to expect that the U.S. military should be compliant with sharia religious law when the most fundamentalist of Muslims are apparently exempt from it.

The unintentional burning would not have occurred if these “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith” Afghans had not defiled the Korans in the first place. But it seems that we are supposed to keep quiet about intentional Muslim defilement of the Koran but make grovelling apologies for unintentional Kafir defilement of the Koran.

So far more than thirty people have been killed in the riots and hundreds injured. This is a normal reaction from within the religion of peace. Most Muslim violence, however,  is deployed against other Muslims. Sunnis and Shiites are constantly at loggerheads and no-one has any time for the Ahmadis. Often these Muslim on Muslim incidents are full blown atrocities involving not only murder but the deliberate torching of homes and ‘heretical’ mosques.

By necessity this means that Muslims are destroying Korans by burning. But this is OK for those who are “fiercely protective of their Islamic faith.”

We should also understand that it is all too common in Muslim countries for articles associated with other faiths to be burned, not in error but as a matter of deliberate policy. In our ally Saudi Arabia it is against the law for Jews and Christians to bring Bibles, crucifixes, or a Star of David into the country. If discovered such articles will be confiscated and destroyed. This is shameful and deliberate abuse of Non-Muslims and their religions.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology, either from the sharia controlled governments responsible or their willing apologists in the West. According to the logic of Obama, apology is the acceptable reaction to this incident because we must accept that Muslims have such an extraordinary ardour for their religion that barbaric reactions to trivial slights are inevitable and wholly understandable.

Meanwhile, in Iran, a Christian pastor sits in the condemned cell awaiting death for the crime of questioning the “Muslim monopoly on the religious instruction of children in Iran.” Despite threats and treatment which is barely human Youcef Nadarkhani, arrested in 2009, continues to refuse to renounce Jesus Christ, repent, and embrace Islam. As a result his death by hanging appears imminent.  The original charge of “protesting” was later changed to “apostasy” or abandoning Islam,- and “evangelising Muslims,” both of which carry the death sentence.

Obama should reflect that after his open profession of conversion to Christ, if he were in Iran in Nadarkhani’s place, he too would be facing the same fate for rejecting the faith of his Muslim ancestors.

Obama obviously cares deeply that some Korans were mistakenly incinerated. Perhaps he should also care deeply that Youcef Nadarkhani might hang.

Napier’s Multiculturalism

In Trafalgar Square there is a statue of General Sir Charles Napier. Sir Charles was a notably successful officer in the Peninsular War and later in the sub-continent where he rose to become Commander- in-Chief of British forces in India.

Once Sir Charles was approached by a delegation of Hindu notables complaining about the British prohibition of Sati (or suttee), the practice of burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. The essence of Sir Charles’ multicultural reply was:

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; [then] beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

The Hindus had one custom and the British had another, in this clash of cultures Sir Charles refused to allow practices he considered immoral to triumph over values he considered essential.

I would not be surprised if, in our days of cultural cringe, the stature of Sir Charles disappears from its plinth. His example of cultural confidence should not be lost. In the fuss over the events in Maza-e-Sharif more voices have been raised laying the responsibility for this action on the vain Terry Jones and his bunch of delusional acolytes.

What Jones and his followers did may have been contemptible and should be condemned. What we must not do is deny the importance of the right of free speech just because some cannot abide what we might say. Whenever progressives lay responsibility for the appalling acts in Afghanistan on Jones they send a message that the basic principles of our free society can be thrown overboard in the abject desire not to offend the religious sensibilities of the perpetually aggrieved.

There is a clash of cultural values here, If we fail to support the right of free speech we condemn our society to an existence of fear and moral degradation. We also condemn Afghanistan to constant control by medieval preachers of hate and misogyny, and tribal heroin cartels.

As I have posted previously ultimate responsibility for the atrocity lies with those who deliberately inflamed the mob. One of those is Ahmed Karzai leader of the corrupt regime controlling parts of Afghanistan.

The media in the West had for once acted responsibly and ignored the activities of Jones and his  benighted knuckledraggers. News of this event hardly percolated beyond the city limits of Gainsville Florida.

Karzai, however, saw it as a gift from Allah and an opportunity to bolster his standing with the Islamists who really rule his country. In an attempt to garner short term political gain in a violent war-ravaged country Karzai declared Jones’ deed “a crime against a religion” and “a disrespectful and abhorrent act.” He further said the UN and the USA were responsible for bringing Jones to justice. Which, given the USA’s First Amendment rights was not going to happen, unless if Jones had perhaps violated a fire code.

To recklessly incite people’s anger is irresponsible folly in a leader. Especially so when Karzai knows enough about the USA to know that Jones and his ilk represent a minute corner of Western society, and when he and other Muslim political and religious leaders urge us to remember that Islamic terrorists are a minority in their own society.

For all his considerable failings, Jones did not commit a single act of violence or cause any person physical harm, he burned a book. It was leaders in Afghanistan, who whipped their people into a frenzy, and the rioters themselves who are to blame for the deaths.

Mr. Karzai’s is not the only voice in Afghanistan. Where are the other leaders of that country who have the moral authority to condemn the violence and the courage to speak out against the bigotry and intolerance endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Sir Charles Napier may have been politically incorrect, but he was a leader who had the courage and clear sense of purpose to uphold the values of a civilised society, despite whatever political problems it might have led to. Perhaps those in leadership positions today may gain the same courage and clarity.