Hot Spots
10/03/2013
The War Against Christians
About a week ago as I write (9/30), the Taliban launched a suicide attack on a Christian church in Peshawar, Pakistan, that killed 85, the worst such attack on the Christian minority ever in the region. At the same time you had the Al-Shabaab attack on the shopping mall in Nairobi that has taken at least 67 lives as they still clear away the rubble that will reveal more bodies.
The London Times’ Rosemary Righter had some of the following comments days later in an op-ed.
“The much broader challenge of resurgent al-Qaeda can be met only if the White House comes off the hallucinogenic drug that befuddles Barack Obama’s foreign policy. And for that to happen, I suspect, something is going to have to change in all of us, because our political leaders are proving all too ‘responsive’ to public opinion. We must brace ourselves to bear a bit more reality.
“Because this grisly weekend presented a troubling question. While disagreeing, I can understand that a sense that we have ‘done our bit’ in Iraq and failed may account for our indifference to the violence there: 800 Iraqis met their deaths in August. Yet was a natural shrinking from unspeakable suffering the reason that, even as we glued our eyes to the footage out of Kenya, most of us failed even to register Sunday’s still deadlier Islamist outrage in Pakistan? There, as around 350 worshippers filed out of All Saints in Peshawar into the morning sun, two suicide bombers detonated their vests, killing more than 80 and wounding more than 120, half of them women and children, in the most terrible assault on Christians in Pakistan’s history.
“Most Pakistanis are appalled; yet most Pakistanis also support blasphemy laws that have been exploited to persecute scores of Christians. Western governments have had pathetically little to say about the increasingly suffocating religious intolerance that Pakistan’s Christians endure. Similarly, we tend to shrug off as a ‘local’ matter the deadly targeting of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria by the Islamist fanatics of Boko Haram (literally, ‘Western education is forbidden’). Days before the Nairobi shootings, Boko Haram sacked Benisheik town in Borno State and killed at least 161 people – many of them slaughtered at a roadblock as they fled. Even in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, we fail to be outraged at the torching of churches and destruction of whole Coptic Christian communities.
“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, when Christians are the victims, we in the West have become apologetic, even embarrassed, about speaking out. If this is so, it is worse than morally indefensible. It is a grave mistake. With what credibility can we appeal to the moderate Muslim majority to speak out against such atrocities if we, out of a misplaced nervousness about offending said majority, fail to be at least as robust in our defense of Christian lives and freedom of worship as we are of religious terrorism’s Muslim victims?
“Counterterrorism strategy has come a long way since the last Islamist atrocity in Nairobi, the al-Qaeda assault on the U.S. Embassy in 1998 that foreshadowed 9/11. But the politics has become ever more blurred, and collaboration more patchy. In Egypt, our pursemouthed reaction to the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood has enraged both Christians and those moderate Muslims we need as allies, in almost equal measure.
“After 9/11, there was a dreadful clarity about what we confront. We need to recover that clarity.”
Hot Spots will return in two weeks.
Brian Trumbore
