Four Hotels Full of Foreigners; Three Churches Full of Christians – a setup for mass murder

 

By David E. Kaplan

From fallen masonry in Paris to fallen lives in Sri Lanka it has been a devastating week.

While an electric fault may explain the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris blaze, few were quick to speculate who exactly was behind the mass murder in Sri Lanka that so far has taken 260 lives and inflicted 500 seriously injured.

While predictably some of the initial ‘Security Sherlocks’ were expressing “these attacks cannot be predicted”, “the facts don’t reveal why it happened” or “by whom,’ there was a palpable reluctance – notably from world leaders – to publicly identity the category of the victims!

Yes, they would say “foreigners” – a safe and nebulous depiction and unlikely to solicit a rebuke – but hesitant to go beyond a whisper that they were mostly Christians.

There was no such verbal hesitancy from Israel’s state President, Reuven Rivlin, who got it spot-on expressing on Twitter:

 “We are all children of God; an attack on one religion is an attack on us all.”

In other words, whether the victims are Jews in Pittsburg or Muslims in Christchurch, Rivlin was identifying and publicly proclaiming that the victims in Sri Lanka were Christians.

The targeting of crowded churches on Easter Sunday hardly necessitated the detective talents of a Hercule Poirot to draw the necessary conclusions.

Christians In The Crosshairs

Given that three of the blasts occurred at churches and were timed for Easter services, at least a major part of the attack was aimed at the country’s 1.5 million Christians. The almost simultaneous blasts left no time to warn other churchgoers.

Reuters cited the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka – representing more than 200 churches – as having recorded 86 incidents of discrimination, threats, and violence against Christians last year.

The signs were evident – and were either ignored or hardly taken seriously.

Staying in the Far East, nearly 1000 churches in Indonesia, have been closed since 2006 when the nation passed a “Religious Harmony” law which requires churches to obtain several signatures from Muslims before they can obtain a permit. Nearly 85 percent of Indonesia’s 255 million population are Muslims. Only seven percent are Christians. Not surprising, many churches failed to garner the requisite signatures and were promptly shut down. Even the few that obtained the necessary endorsement have since been torched by radical Islamist groups.

Does anyone even remember or was even aware when these Christian churches were deliberately set ablaze?

And why?

Because to talk of Christians being persecuted, logically leads one to address who is persecuting them – and we are staring at the three proverbial monkeys: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”.

Reticence is not a remedy!

Facing The Facts

The Middle East is even more threatening to Christians, which led the head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to write last year in The Sunday Telegraph that millions of Middle East Christians are on the verge of “imminent extinction.”

He lamented that “In the birthplace of our faith, the community faces extinction,” calling it, “the worst situation since the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.”

In the early 20th century, Christians made up to 20% of the population in the Middle East; that figure has now dwindled to around 5%. It’s easy to understand why and see that Israel – despite lies to the contrary – has nothing to do with this exodus.

Before the ‘Arab Spring’, Christians in Syria were businessmen, engineers, lawyers and pharmacists, now there are leaving the country in their droves. In Iraq, 300,000 Christians have fled persecution since the downfall of Saddam Hussein and in Egypt, Christians face harassment leading them to emigrate in record numbers.

Egypt’s Christians or  Copts as they are known, are facing “unprecedented levels of persecution and suppression,” according to The Open Doors 2018 World Watch List Report.

In 2017, more than 200 Copts were driven out of their homes and 128 were killed because of their faith.

Should we be surprised if what happened in Sri Lanka this week, will happen next week in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or even Turkey, where President Tayyip Erdogan is stirring up Christian fear of Muslims by announcing his plan to change the status of  Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia -a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and once the foremost cathedral in Christendom for 900 years –  from a museum to a mosque!

Exploiting Murder

Looking at this tragedy from Israel, one could not escape the hypocrisy of the Palestinian leadership with President Mahmoud Abbas condemning from Ramallah the terror in Sri Lanka while rewarding monthly Palestinian terror against Jews.

Calling the tragedy in Sri Lanka “criminal and gruesome”, Abbas falsely called on the world to combat terror together:

“Terrorism is spreading as an epidemic across the world. I call on the countries of the world to cooperate to eradicate terrorism and not to tolerate with racist groups that incite violence and hatred.”

[WAFA, official PA news agency (English edition), April 21, 2019]

Abbas’ call to combat terror abroad, stands in stark contrast to his repeated vows at home to continue his financial support for imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists.

Abbas reiterates endlessly that the PA will support these terrorists even if the PA has only “one penny left”, and has demonstrated his will to do so by cutting salaries of public employees rather than salaries to the terrorists.

It should horrify the civilized world that the killings in Sri Lanka that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas describes as “criminal and gruesome”, when it comes to killing Jews, he rewards.

A world that tolerates this hypocrisy today invites further terror tomorrow.

 

While Easter celebrates the ressurection from the dead, this Easter in Sri Lanka will be remembered for mourning the dead.