Captain49,914 posts
25 Apr 2019, 23:14
#1
25 Apr 2019, 23:14#1
This from the Telegraph......a conservative but not radical newspaper:
Easter Sunday was such a heavenly day. The churchyard was frothing with blossom. Young and old were there to celebrate. The anguish and suffering of Good Friday was banished. Even those of us whose faith is less a rock, more a comforting pebble, could enjoy belting out, “Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son.”
But not this year. Some wiped away tears as they sang. News had filtered through. Five thousand miles away, another Calvary. In Sri Lanka, hell had broken loose.
Islamist terrorists, bombs strapped to their backs, had gone into churches on the holiest day in the Christian calendar with the express purpose of murdering as many innocents as possible. There was also carnage at hotels popular with Western tourists. “It remains unclear who carried out the attacks,” the BBC website was still insisting 12 hours after the massacres. We knew. And they knew. But if you stayed tuned to the news all day, you would not hear the word “terrorist” and certainly not the most inflammatory term of all: “Christian”.
The contrast with the reporting of the mosque shootings in New Zealand could not have been more striking. Back in March, there was no doubt that the massacres in Christchurch, by a lone gunman during Friday prayers, were motivated by hatred of Muslims.
One evil man’s actions were swiftly used to extrapolate an entire theory of racism on the Right. Journalists like me, who had dared to criticise the burka, or the grievous failure of integration (finally admitted by Tony Blair this week, I see), were said by Leftists to be guilty of Islamophobia and therefore “implicated” in the murder of 50 men, women and children.
When it’s the other way around, though, the denial is deafening. Theresa May tweeted, “The acts of violence against churches and hotels in Sri Lanka are truly appalling, and my sympathies go out to all of those affected at this tragic time.”
But they weren’t acts of violence against buildings, were they, Prime Minister? If you detonate a bomb inside a church on Easter Sunday, the result does tend to be that you kill an awful lot of followers of Jesus Christ. When a vicar’s daughter decides that it’s wiser not to mention the C-word, you know that fear is now greater than faith.
Compare and contrast the reaction of Hillary Clinton to the two tragedies. On Sunday, she tweeted, “I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travellers in Sri Lanka.” Easter worshippers? That’s a clunking new euphemism for Christians. When the mosques in Christchurch were targeted, did Clinton talk of Ramadan worshippers? No, she wrote, “My heart breaks for New Zealand and the global Muslim community.”
I’m afraid that politicians like Clinton and May are paralysed by a terrible dilemma. It’s too scary to admit that militant Islamists are at war with Christianity and Western civilization, that vandalism of churches is rife across Europe and that, according to the Pew Report, Christianity is the world’s most persecuted religion.
Subscribe now for unlimited access to our Premium content
Enjoy this Premium article? Get all of our exclusive articles from our award-winning journalists by signing up to an All Digital Access subscription now.
Start free trial
In order to cover up this inconvenient truth, politicians and the police increasingly try to create a false equivalence between terrorism committed by the far-Right and by Islamists. It’s a downright lie. In the UK alone, intelligence officers have identified 23,000 jihadist extremists, at least 3,000 of whom are believed to pose an active threat. Scores of foul fiends must have plotted and carried out the Sri Lankan attacks.
This is deeply uncomfortable for the liberal media, which responds with shifty obfuscation. On Monday, The Washington Post ran a bizarre story about the Easter Sunday massacre with the headline, “Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-Right anger in the West”.
That was wildly premature, but it inadvertently revealed their overwhelming concern: not that so many had been slaughtered, but that such horrors would provoke a backlash against Muslims.
The Post continued, “far-Right groups began to describe the attacks in specifically religious terms”. Possibly not unrelated to the fact that the Sri Lankan authorities had just blamed a militant Islamist group. “To some”, the paper opined gingerly, “it was further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack.”
Well, yes, the cold-blooded murder of more than 290 people, most of them Christians in their place of worship, does tend to give credence to the theory that a certain religion is “under attack”. Sorry.
You know, we had been thinking of taking a holiday this Easter in Sri Lanka because so many friends, some of them Sri Lankans, had urged us to go. We could easily have been the Nicholsons. Mum, Anita with her adorable son and daughter, Alex and Annabel, having breakfast in their Colombo hotel while dad, Ben, popped up to the room, or back to the buffet. A beautiful family wiped out in a split second, leaving him to wonder why he was spared.
In that same restaurant, Anne Storm Pedersen, the wife of Danish billionaire, Anders Holch Povlsen, cried out for people to pray for three of her four children who had just been murdered. The mind melts at the thought of such intolerable suffering.
Most likely, though, we would have dragged the kids, protesting, to church at the nearby St Anthony’s. In typical CofE fashion, we would have tried to join in the familiar hymns and prayers, a quarter of a beat behind. “Though we are many we are one body, because we all share in one bread.”
It is still unclear how many of the thousand-strong congregation were killed. Video footage shows a man walking into St Sebastian’s church in Negombo carrying a bomb and entering a pew. Moments later, all the good, happy people around him were gone. At Zion Church in Batticaloa, 14 children at the Sunday school were among the victims.
They were my brothers and sisters. Sharing a belief in the love that passeth all understanding made them the target of a vast and incomprehensible hatred, which is a danger to each and every one of us.
They were not Easter worshippers. How dare cowards call them that, to avoid giving offence. At the very least, they deserve to be referred to by their rightful name. Say it aloud: they were Christians. May God rest their souls.