Attacks on Christians—Douglas Murray Direct Address 3/12/25 (Edited Transcript.) (I no longer do “threads” but this Direct Address deserved the reading space.) “I'm Douglas Murray. …I wanted to talk today about a story which I think has had far too little attention, but which has been much on my mind. That is the situation of the persecuted Christian churches, particularly in The Middle East and in Africa. In recent weeks, in one incident alone in Congo, Seventy Christians were abducted and beheaded by Islamist militia. In more recent days in Syria, the ancient Christian churches of that country have once again been under attack. It turns out that the Islamists who now run Syria aren't that great or greatly concerned about protecting Christian minorities and who could have seen that coming. But the real question about all this, which I hear from many people, including many readers, is why is there so little attention to this? Why is there so little news or reaction to atrocities like those I just described? …You'll find a bit of green stuff thrown in, of course. But next to nothing about the persecuted Christians of Syria, of Congo, and elsewhere, skip. …it's still rather striking to me that the Roman Catholic church also remains relatively silent about the killing and persecution of members of its own faith community. The Christian church has a long memory, but you don't have to have a especially long memory to go back to 02/2006. That's when the then pope of Benedict the sixteenth gave his famous Regensburg address. That address was a remarkable piece of work. Benedict among other things talked about the intersection of faith and reason. He talked about many things of great depth, but in the course of his remarks, he quoted, just quoted a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor who said something disobliging about the way in which Islam had been spread as a religion from the beginning. …Noting, by the way, that, Islam had very often been spread by the sword. Pope Benedict made it clear that he wasn't in any way endorsing the comments that he was quoting, but the reaction suggested that in fact, the quotation from the fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor wasn't that far off. As usual, it seemed that people around the world who were offended by the pope citing this Byzantine emperor were doing that usual thing of saying, you've got to say my religion is peaceful, otherwise, I might kill you. And indeed, there were attacks on Christians in the wake of the Ravensburg address, around the world. In the West Bank and in Gaza, Palestinian Muslims attacked Christian churches. In Iraq, Syrian Christians were also attacked and kidnapped and killed. And in Somalia, a 65 year old Italian nun was killed by some brave Jihadists who, again, were trying very hard to prove the peacefulness of their particular faith. In the wake of that response, that violent response to the Ravensburg Address, Pope Benedict and indeed most of the western churches decided not to tread into this terrain again. …The Pope's own foreign office advisers seem to have told him that if he wanted to make sure that no 65 year old Italian nuns were gonna get killed again, then he ought to perhaps not be quoting anything about Islam.
