Around the world, 369 million Christians are persecuted. Every day 16 are killed because of the faith they profess. These are the numbers that point to an emergency that is as real as it is ignored.
This is revealed in Open Doors’ Annual Report on the Persecution of Christians around the world: 5,898 Christians killed in odium fidei. For Christians, the most dangerous country is Afghanistan, closely followed by North Korea.
Christianity is also persecuted in the West. It is a creeping persecution, different, but hateful, pervasive and fraught with nefarious consequences, an insidious and constant persecution that especially affects the freedom to publicly profess the faith. A “polite persecution,” Pope Francis calls it. One who knows it, studies it and fights it is Paul Diamond, a British lawyer and a great defender of religious freedom.
You have followed some of the most prominent cases of discrimination against Christians, both inside and outside the United Kingdom. Do you find that discrimination against Christians has actually increased since the introduction of the crime of “homophobia,” which in theory aims to punish discrimination against homosexual people?
Since 1997, there has been a real attack on the Judeo-Christian cultural roots of our world in the United Kingdom, and at the same time a real renunciation of the use of reason.
The struggle for the “rights” of homosexual people has thus been an additional incentive for the persecution of Christians. No mediation was attempted. Indeed, the situation has weakened the very concept of civilization, and that is a pity. The resulting abandonment of the use of reason has gone so far as to make many feel compelled to say that a man can become a woman and vice versa.
Among the cases of persecution I have followed is that of a boy who was studying to become a social worker. An evangelical Christian, he made public on Facebook his opposition to same-sex “marriage,” citing the Bible. However, his post was noticed by students and academic authorities, and so the university decided to expel him, on the unacceptable pretext that Christians would not be suitable to be social workers because they would discriminate against homosexuals. But in the end we won.
The war against Christians is very real and knows no mercy. People are very afraid of the ideological drifts they are heading for in the name of supposed “human rights,” but, despite this, law enforcement, the media and academia are following a new political agenda very close to a factual neo-paganism.
Why is the repression of dissent mostly enacted against Christians and much less with other faiths?
The law is not always applied in the same way toward Islamic or other realities. And, of course, Christians are an easy target.
Since the first cases I handled early in my career involved the so-called “hate crimes,” I thus ended up specializing in this field. Several of these cases involved Christian street preachers condemning sins of a sexual nature. There have been many cases of Christians I have followed who have even been assaulted or even stopped by the police because they were speaking out against lust, for example.
I remember the case of a street preacher who used strong words in comparing Christianity and Buddhism, and for that attracted the amused attention of some policemen. Quite different, however, was their reaction when the preacher went on to attack Islam: they immediately stepped in to arrest him. In London a few years ago, during al-Quds Day, the annual march in solidarity with the Palestinians, the most shocking and disgusting things were said about the Jewish people. And it is inconceivable that the police did not intervene. In another case, some Muslim parents tried to prevent gender ideology from being taught in the schools their children attended by staging a protest outside the school. Yet LGBT+ dogmas were also imposed in elementary schools on Muslim children.
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