Christians

Dr. Can Erimtan
21st Century Wire

Russia Today and the BBC both report that the Hagia Sophia (The Church of Holy Wisdom), the single largest Church in Byzantium, is to be repurposed as a mosque. This move ends 86 years of the building serving a “neutral purpose” as a museum, where neither Muslim nor Christian was allowed to pray in open sight. This move is understandably tragic for Orthodox Christians, particularly the Greeks, but there are several ways to understand this situation.

President Trump is definitely a traditional, Christian, law-and-order kind of guy. A progressive he is not, though he is remarkably pragmatic. For all of his (hopefully) first term Donald Trump has been a man under siege from the Left, which has wielded all of its power in ever-greater levels of attack. The Blues have been after him in this new Civil War, doing everything imaginable to separate Trump’s supporters from Trump. Now, those attacks have taken the following forms over the years:

Israel has exploited the steady decline in the numbers of Palestinian Christians to advance its claim that they are being hounded from the region by Muslim extremists. But the real blame lies with Israel and the foreign Churches

They will run and not grow weary, is a quote from the Bible (Isaiah, 40:41) that adorns the homepage of Kairos Palestine. This important document, which parallels a similar initiative emanating from South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle years, has come to represent the unified voice of the Palestinian Christian community everywhere. One of the main advocates of Kairos Palestine is Archbishop Atallah Hanna.

While it’s widely known about Israel’s systematic persecution of Palestine’s native Arab population, only a very few Americans or Europeans are really aware of the well-documented history of Israeli discrimination against native Christians in the Holy Land.
This morning, embattled Israeli Prime Minister and Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted out this message to “Christians around the world.” Presumably he means his political support base of evangelical Christians, or more specifically, Christian Zionists, residing in America.

It is easy to report on the United States “from the outside”, by scanning the discussion from the major media outlets. It is a different matter to describe what is actually going on from the point of view of “ordinary Americans.” To do that, one has to be in the country talking and listening to people.

The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere, and the reason for this is Israel. Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: “The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective.”
One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine. 

The arrival of Nigerian televangelist T B Joshua to Nazareth represents a growing trend of foreign Christians, driven by apocalyptic readings of the Bible, interfering ever more explicitly in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – and in ways that directly aid the policies of Israel’s far-right government.

The mass murder of Christians is being censored by Western media, because those who control mainstream media consider Christians to be an obstacle to “progress”. As a result, most Americans do not know that 4,136 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons last year.