Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Czechs Demonstrate Against the Persecution of Christians

Gates of Vienna is pleased to welcome a new Czech correspondent, Benjamin Kuras. His first contribution is a report from Prague on last night’s demonstration in Wenceslas Square against the worldwide persecution of Christians.

It’s gratifying to note that the demonstrators recognized the common cause shared by Jews and Christians against the danger of Islamic expansionism, and identified political correctness as the debilitating disease that has allowed radical Islam to infect a weakened Europe.


Dominik Duka in Wenceslas Square, Jan 18, 2011

Protesting the Persecution of Christians
by Benjamin Kuras


Some 3,000 signatures were collected in a week under an appeal to the Czech government to pay attention to the persecution of Christians and consider granting asylum to at least some of the worst affected Iraqis. The campaign, organised by the Young Christian Democrats (the youth branch of the small parliamentary Christian Democrat Party) and supported by a dozen Christian, Jewish and civic organisations, culminated on Tuesday 18 January in a Wenceslas Square demonstration attended by some 200 people.

Small but select. A line of renowned speakers was headed by Prague’s Catholic Archbishop who used the words “well-planned extermination amounting to genocide” and reminded the audience that “the map of the democratic world is identical with Biblical civilization”. He welcomed the participation of “our brothers of the Mosaic faith” who opened the meeting with blasts of the shofar (the ancient Biblical ram’s horn). The Archbishop emphasized that anti-Christianism and anti-Semitism were now closely related and that Christians and Jews must support each other.

Catholic Bishop Vaclav Maly, popular ex-dissident jailed by the Communist regime, reported on his recent visit to Iraqi Christians and warned of the threat of radical Islam, but spoke also of Christians persecuted in China and North Korea. The new Chairman of the Christian Democrat Party announced that he was appealing to the government to take action in support of persecuted Christians.

The threat of Islamism in Europe, fueled by political correctness, was highlighted by the Chairman of the ecumenical Christian International Solidarity, the Chairman of the Civic Institute (who is also the Prime Minister’s adviser on human rights) and the Chairman of the small non-parliamentary Conservative Party who also pleaded for solidarity with Israel as an outpost of Western civilization. The Chairman of the Christian Evangelical Alliance accused the media of a malicious bias in over-reporting a case of a preacher wanting to burn the Koran while keeping silent for years about church-burning in the Islamic world.

A popular writer and columnist appealed to liberals and secularists to join the campaign alongside Christians and Jews, since they were as much under threat. Quoting Niemöller’s famous “I did not defend them against the Nazis because I was not one of them — and when the Nazis came for me, there was no one left to defend me,” he reminded everyone that human indifference is the quisling of all persecutions.

Even though a respectable hard core of well-placed freedom defenders has undoubtedly arisen from this campaign, indifference still rules. With their small and barely visible Muslim community of not much more than 10,000, most Czechs would guess that hijab, niqab, and burqa are some Lebanese delicacies.

7 comments:

The Backward Bride said...

Bravo to Czech Christians for being brave enough to lead the way and demand that there is an open debate about the growing number of Christians being murdered in Islamic countries. Sadly, the Archbishop of Canterbury is an apologist for Islam, urging the recognition of Sharia law in Britain, so we can't expect the Anglicans to step up to the plate any time soon.

In my own little battle with Islam, the diocese in which I live is desperately hoping that appeasement will win the day. Maybe it's time for grass root Christians across Europe to kick out the church hierarchy who promote ideological relativism, not realising that the Muslims do not believe that all religions are equal?

Jardrich said...

I am proud of my Archbishop, Mr. Dominik Duka.

darcy said...

Please know that political correctness is a tool not a cause; it's employed by the left to erase Western culture through means of our language and to stifle dissent. To fight it, one must first tackle statism in all its pernicious guises. Conservatives, ones who seek the perpetuation of Western civilization, must know what they believe and why, and hold to it against the tide of nihilistic progressivism. Politically correct language should have been resisted from the outset, back in the very early '90s. But even by then the lies of the left -- percolating throughout Western institutions -- had so marginalized the right (think of the abuse heaped upon Ronald Reagan) and so brainwashed "the masses" that conservatives put up scant resistance to it, and went along with it not understanding where it would lead. Into the vacuum of their non-resistance, the left accelerated their great dismantling project, evidence of which plagues us today.

Profitsbeard said...

Dobre, pane! [Well done, sir!]

(With a litle v over the r, of course, to signal the fricative pronunciation.)

And a rucni granat for the jihadis. (hand grenade)

Richard said...

darcy it wasn't so much that the conservatives went along with the Marxists in their dismantling of the west as it was that the lefts almost total monopoly on the news industry kept them from getting their message out. Fox news wasn't around, in the US talk radio was just beginning (after President Reagen removed the fairness doctrine) and the internet didn't exist. Without an effective way to inform the public of what was happening all they could do was try and delay the fall of the west. A lot of us knew that we were going to have to fight for out lives, we just thought it was against Russia and not Islam. Of course after we manage to defeat Islam Russia will still be setting there intent on world domination.

Gregory said...

I am so thankful some of the europeans are waking up. Do it faster you guys! Faster!

darcy said...

Richard: I was a student in the early '90s and know of which I speak; the conservative college profs even then (at my campus, in the Rocky Mountain West) were vastly outnumbered by liberals and leftists. I was friends (being an OTA student) with a few of the conservative profs. I know for a fact, that beyond the particulars you cite, related to FOX news and the internet, that these right-leaning profs took extra care not to rock the boat and risk their jobs, at worst, or ostracism, at best.

The left, in other words, had a vice grip in academia and conservative professors, vastly outnumbered to be sure, were unwilling to stand up for their cosmological worldview.

The propaganda machine was in full sway going back even to 1951 when Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale. My contention is that conservatives have been intimated to the point of enabling our culture's decline -- as long as they could still enjoy "the good life" they were unwilling to read the handwriting on the wall and mount obstructions to the statist agenda.