Western silence has condemned Christians to death
Western silence has condemned Christians to death

The English section of the NGO Aid to the Church in Need has just delivered a report to the House of Lords in London which says: “IS can wipe out Christianity from Iraq in five years”.

Yet, there is no outcry in Europe or anywhere overseas. A crime against humanity is taking place, a crime about which, strangely, nobody speaks. Barack Obama, always full of rhetoric and ecumenical emotions, has never said a word about the death of the Eastern Christians. And to quote the irony in the French newspaper Le Figaro, “European public opinion, so quick to mobilize, sign petitions and demonstrations of all sorts, in this case did not say anything. Silence, we are persecuting”.

For a long time, even the American mainstream press remained silent on the massacres of Christians. The silence was broken only by a dissident Muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who dedicated a masterful cover of Newsweek to this mass martyrdom.

Today it is quite easy to spend tears of emotion for the exile of Christians, but it is a bit late. The time for doing something was August of 2014, when the Caliphate banished the Christians from their lands. Even then, the Amnesty International report barely made mention of Christians, instead devoting ample space to the Yazidis, a minority also persecuted by Islamic State.

Almost all the Protestant churches of America, concentrated on demonizing Israel and its “apartheid”, did nothing to stop this genocide but used all their means to blame the Jewish State, although it is the only country between Casablanca and Mumbai where the number of Christians grows every year.

In France, it was impossible even to organize an event with the inscription “Au profit des chrétiens d'Orient”, which signaled that the receipts would be given in favor of the Christians of the East. Las Ratp, the operator of the Paris metro, has explained in good bureaucratic fashion that “the subway is a secular space, where they are not allowed political nor religious stances”.

In England, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has just reported that “those of us who ask for compassion for the Syrian victims live with great frustration because the Christian community, once again, is abandoned”.

Prime Minister David Cameron, in fact, announced he will welcome only those who are already in a camp for refugees under the auspies of the United Nations. "But so - continues the former Anglican primate - Cameron inadvertently discriminates against  the Christian

communities”.  

The problem of discrimination against Christians in the reception of refugees is not just Britain's but also is happening in France. Syrian expert at the University of Tours, Frederic Pichon, told Radio Courtoisie: “There are precise deliveries from the government to ignore the problem of the Christians of the East”. All the secular European NGOs such as Oxfam are also silent, leaving the defense of Christians to heroic but minority non-governmental organizations such as Barnabas Fund.

Why was the world ready to stop the genocide against the Yazidi and ready to watch passively the successful extermination and exile of Christians?

Jewry, on the contrary, is very active in supporting these Christians. They do it pratically, with organizations such as that of the Canadian millionaire Steve Maman, and rhetorically by raising the alarm in public opinion and  with interventions by European rabbis and US leaders.

Why can't those Christians from Syria and Iraq be offered sanctuary in the West? Perhaps Westerners are accustomed to think of those Christians as agents of colonial aggression and imperialism and not as its victims, so are deaf to their pleas for help, even to their tragic stories, so exotic and distant.

The disgust for our moral cowardice is balanced by the admiration for those Christians who continue to bear witness to their faith in a land that wants to expel them from history.

We in Europe are abandoning the Churches and converting them into Mosques, tearing down the crosses to be more “inclusive” with Muslims.

How tragic that the Christians in the East are being killed and expelled by those very same Muslims because they refuse to forsake their religion.