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Persecuted Christians in Africa

Persecuted Christians in Africa
And the Western media’s deafening silence.
By Jack Kerwick

Globally speaking, as it has been accurately said, “religious persecution” is virtually synonymous with “Christian persecution.”

Yet the international journalistic class, as well as Christian leadership, is all but silent. At the very least, they don’t make nearly as much noise about this continuing outrage as they should and most assuredly would be making if it were any other religious group being besieged by a fraction of the violence to which Christians are routinely subjected in legions of countries around the planet.

Giulio Meotti is worth quoting at length. He asks: “Where has been the global outcry for the serial butchering of Christians just because they are Christians?”

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the Bishops’ Conference likened parts of the country to “the killing fields” plowed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Only in this case, it is the blood of Christians that is feeding those fields.

Meotti summarizes a recent spate of homicidal violence against Christian in Nigeria alone:

“First there was the beheading of 11 Nigerian Christians during the recent Christmas celebration. The next day, a Catholic woman, Martha Bulus, was beheaded in the Nigerian state of Borno with her bridesmaids, five days before the wedding. Then there was a raid on the village of Gora-Gan in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, where terrorists shot anyone they met in the square where the evangelical community had gathered, killing two young Christian women. There was also a Christian student killed by Islamic extremists who recorded his execution. Then pastor Lawan Andimi, a local leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria, was beheaded.”

Father Joseph Bature Fidelis, of the Diocese of Maiduguri, refers to the “immense extermination” of Christians that is occurring.

Meotti references Nina Shea, an “expert in Religious Freedom.” Shea informs us:

“An ongoing Islamic extremist project to exterminate Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is even more brutal and more consequential for the Church than it is in the Middle East, the place where Christians suffered ISIS ‘genocide,’ as the U.S. government officially designated.”

As one French philosopher has written: “A slow-motion war is under way in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality and the world has hardly noticed.”

Father Mauro Armanino, of the Society for African Missions in Niger, writes the following:

“The repeated threats to the Christian in the border area with Burkina Faso have achieved the aim they set: to decapitate the communities and then fall prey to the fear of professing faith in Sunday prayers in the chapels.”

Continuing, Armanino elaborates on the situation:

“On Tuesday January 14, in a village not far from Bomoanga, which for over a year has helplessly witnessed the kidnapping of Father Pierluigi Maccalli…a group of criminals, who went to settle the scores with the chief nurse who works in a dispensary in the area, took the nephew from his home and was beheaded.”

He concludes:

“In Bomoanga, people no longer go to church on Sunday. The ‘basilica,’ as Fr. Maccalli used to call it, [which was conceived, built, and inaugurated by him], is now deserted and the school [with which it was associated was] recently attacked.”

Meotti summarizes the glaring double standards of journalists and commentators:

“Western media stirred global indignation about Russia’s laws against ‘homosexual propaganda’ prior to the Winter Olympics in Sochi. But the same Western media never protested the Islamist regimes that punish people with the death for converting to Christianity or countries where Christians are threatened with death if they do not convert to Islam.”

Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s Foreign Secretary who ordered a report that informs us that anti-Christian persecution in some locations of the world is nearing genocidal levels, is not wide of the mark in accounting for why the phenomenon of anti-Christian persecution receives relatively scant media attention. He chalks it up to “an atmosphere of political correctness” (emphasis mine). Hunt elaborates:

“I think there is a misplaced worry that it is somehow colonialist to talk about a religion that was associated with colonial powers rather than the countries that we marched into as colonizers.”

However, Hunt notes, this way of thinking is sloppy:

“What we have forgotten in that atmosphere of political correctness is” that “the Christians that are being persecuted are some of the poorest people on the planet.”

Indeed.

As the political correctness of the Western media continues to thrive, Christians in Africa and around the world continue to suffer and die for their faith.

Original Article

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