The gruesome beheading of seventy Christians in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo by an Islamist terrorist group in February and the murder of up to 3,000 people—some sources say 7,000—in Syria this month by Islamist militants have briefly focused the world’s scattered attention on the global persecution of Christians. Most of the Syrian victims were members of the Muslim Alawite minority, but a number of Christians were also killed, and as Benedict Kiely noted in the Spectator: “the old Syrian phrase has it, ‘first the Alawites, then the Christians.’”
Christians are the most persecuted group on earth. According to Open Doors, more than 380 million Christians face “high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” with 1 in 7 Christians persecuted worldwide, including 1 in 5 Christians in Africa and 2 in 5 Christians in Asia. Western countries, convulsed in a decades-long struggle session to reject the Christian foundation of our civilizational inheritance, have preferred to largely ignore these horrors. Christians complicate progressive oppression narratives and do not make convenient victims.
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