Dexter Van Zile – 3 June 2013
No matter how much the World Council of Churches dumps on Israel, Christians living in the Middle East are still being attacked.
Late last month, 150 Christian leaders met in Lebanon under the auspices of the World Council of Churches(WCC) to talk about the status of Christians living in the Middle East, where, as most people know, followers of Christ are suffering from terrible acts of oppression at the hands of Muslim extremists.
Some Muslims, particularly in Egypt, have stood in solidarity with their Christian compatriots after these attacks, but for the most part, attacks against Christians continue without much organized opposition from Muslim activists or governments in the Middle East. Egyptian police, for example, have stood by and even assisted in attacks against Christians and their churches.
Sometimes the anti-Christian violence manifests itself as poorly organized (but terrifying) mob attacks against churches and their members. These mob attacks often take place after an imam has incited anti-Christian hostility in his Friday sermon. Other attacks are well-planned jihad bombings perpetrated on Christian holidays (such as Christmas or Easter) that result in deaths of dozens of Christians at once.
Such attacks have a cumulative impact. Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, recently announced that more than 100,000 Christians are killed as a result of their faith each year. Tomasi didn’t mention exactly who was responsible for these deaths, but he didn’t have to.
We know who is responsible – radical Muslims intent on sending a very clear and simple message that Christians are not welcome or safe in Muslim countries.
Muslim violence against Christians is not a new phenomenon. It dates back to Islam’s founding according to Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (Regnery, 2013). “Under Muslim rule, from the seventh century to the present, tens if not hundreds of thousands of churches once spread across thousands of miles of formerly Christian lands have been attacked, plundered, ransacked, and destroyed or converted into mosques,” he writes.
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