they were apparently told 10 days or so in advance that there was going to be a terrorist attack. 
they could have at least had travel advisories. :roll:
they could have at least had travel advisories. :roll:Sri Lanka explosions kill more than 200
- Thread starter B00Mer
- Start date
Now there's a stretch ...
Why target Christians? That maniac in Australia sure as hell wasn't a Christian .... White, maybe but not Christian. The two don't necessarily follow.
Possibly not all muslims are terrorists either but it is damn hard to tell them apart when they all dress the same.
Probably for the same reason why a lot of people think brown people not from Africa = Muslim. I mean, Hindu's and Sikh's get mistaken for Muslims all the time and anyone from the ME is assumed Muslim, even if they might not be.
So, you know, all whites are Christians and they all want to kill Muslims.
Kind'a sucks to lump everyone in a group like that...
Sure doesn't work in Sri Lanka where most of the brown people are Buddhists and so are almost all of the Christians, there.
Which of the church disasters is ahead in the donations gathered?? Why is the Vatican at $0 for both events?
Have explain how all the christians are buddists. Fom what I know about christians it doesnt seem likely.
Most of the Christians there are also brown (as the Buddhists), so the ISIS "revenge against whitey" doesn't achieve it's goal, now does it?
Terry Glavin: It's all about hate and bloodlust that's never sated
At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters.
There is still much to piece together from what happened on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, about why the authorities did not respond to specific and actionable intelligence about an imminent jihadist attack, how it could be that clear warnings to and from Sri Lanka’s deputy inspector general went unheeded, and what were the names, even, of the terrorists. But this much can be said about them.
The atrocities they committed do not constitute some understandable if misguided act of resistance to Western imperialist hegemony.
This was not an eruption of “blowback” for the trespasses of Zionists or American oil companies, as one routinely hears whenever the blood of innocents is spilled at a bus stop in Jerusalem, or on the streets of London, or at a nightclub in Paris. These were not “chickens coming home to roost,” as it was fashionable to say, over and over again, in the days and months and years following the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
The murderers’ targets were innocent Sinhalese and Tamil Christians, mostly Roman Catholics attending Easter Sunday Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo’s Kochchikade neighbourhood, and at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, just north of Colombo. More were slaughtered at Zion Church, a small Protestant congregation in the city of Batticaloa. Four upscale Colombo hotels were also hit: the Cinnamon Grand, the Shangri-La, the Kingsbury and the Tropical Inn.
The death toll keeps rising, but as I write this it stands at 359 people. Hundreds more were seriously wounded. This makes the Sri Lanka bloodshed one of the worst terrorist outrages since al-Qaida’s 9/11slaughters in the United States. It’s arguably the worst single terrorist attack linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS, also known as Daesh, since the monstrous al-Qaida offshoot emerged in 2014.
A video released by ISIL’s propaganda arm, the Amaq news agency, shows the killers swearing their loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s genocidaire-in-chief. The ritual is overseen by Mohammed Cassim Zaharan, a vile Islamist hate preacher also known as Zaharan Hashmi, who headed up a Sri Lankan Islamist supremacist group known as the National Thowheeth Jama’ath.
While ISIL lost the last enclave of its horrific “caliphate” in the Syrian desert only last month, owing mainly to a bloody struggle waged by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces at a cost of 11,000 SDF fighters’ lives, the bloodlust that animated ISIL’s marauders is not satiated. Their death-cult fervour did not end in the rubble of Baghouz, the town that was ISIL’s last stronghold in the bleak and sprawling Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor, on March 22.
And it did not begin with al-Baghdadi, the shadowy, near-sighted 48-year-old former theology student formerly known as Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri, who arrived on the jihadist scene in August 2011 as the plotter behind the slaughter of 28 Muslims at prayer at Baghdad’s Umm al-Qura mosque. Neither will it end if anyone ever ends up collecting the $25-million bounty the U.S. has put on Baghdadi’s head.
It did not begin with al-Qaida, otherwise known as the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders, and it did not end when the Saudi multimillionaire construction magnate Osama bin Laden was killed following a nighttime U.S. Navy Seals raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. It did not begin among the Pashtun mercenaries and Haqqani seminary students — the talibs — that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, armed and mobilized to extend its brutal control of Afghanistan all the way to the frontiers of Iran and Turkmenistan in the 1990s. It did not end when the Northern Alliance drove the Taliban out of Kabul, even before any regular U.S. forces arrived, in 2001. Or when the Taliban was driven back into the ISI’s welcoming arms, or after the cost of thousands of NATO soldiers’ lives, and tens of thousands of Afghan lives. That struggle continues.
It did not begin with Islam, and it does not end with Islam. It is the same thing that possessed the 28-year-old Australian white nationalist and gun enthusiast Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 innocent Muslims at Friday prayers last month in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the lovely Masjid Al Noor on Deans Avenue and the little Linwood Mosque on the other side of town.
It’s what possessed Tarrant’s role model, the Knights Templar fantasist and Norwegian Armed Forces reject Anders Breivik, when he set out on a killing spree in July 2011, in Oslo, leaving 78 corpses in his wake. It’s what preoccupied Robert Gregory Bowers, the 46-year-old truck driver, conspiracy theorist and racist loner facing 63 charges arising from last October’s mass shooting during Shabbat services at the L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 Jews dead. It is what was at work a year ago this week on Yonge Street in Toronto. It’s the thing that killed 10 pedestrians, mostly women, rammed and run over by a man behind the wheel of a van.
Consumed with self-loathing and a hatred of women owing to his “involuntary celibacy,” the accused, Alek Minassian, had found his own hero in the insanely misogynistic mass murderer Elliot Rodger, the “involuntarily celibate” 22-year-old who shot and killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014.
It is not exactly a coincidence that from ISIL to the depraved online “incel community” and from Elliot Rodger to the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, what stands out is that they hate women, they rape women, they enslave women, and they kill women. What leaps off the pages of Brenton Tarrant’s 16,500-word manifesto, and any and all of the various fatwas and declarations of al-Qaida and ISIL, is the same deeply paranoid and apocalyptic hatred of imaginary usurpers, outsiders and invaders.
Looking into the anxieties of certain white conservatives for the “root causes” of Tarrant’s terrorism in Christchurch is about as useful as flipping through the pages of the Qur’an for passages that would explain Easter Sunday’s terrorism in Sri Lanka. Drawing distinctions between a terrorist and a merely insane person is just as useless. Profound sociopathology is the first entry in any mass murderer’s curriculum vitae.
Study their justifications all you like. Read their proclamations, comb through their 4chan pages, weigh and assess their ideologies as much as you want. It’s all the same rationale for the enslavement and murder of Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, or women. All their various manifestos are, at bottom, the same. They do not offer an explanation, or a rationale. All they reveal is that they want us to be mistrustful of one another, to be fearful of one another, to hate one another.
All they reveal is the same eternal excuse, the same ancient pretext, to spill human blood.
nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-its-all-about-hate-and-bloodlust-thats-never-sated
At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters.
There is still much to piece together from what happened on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, about why the authorities did not respond to specific and actionable intelligence about an imminent jihadist attack, how it could be that clear warnings to and from Sri Lanka’s deputy inspector general went unheeded, and what were the names, even, of the terrorists. But this much can be said about them.
The atrocities they committed do not constitute some understandable if misguided act of resistance to Western imperialist hegemony.
This was not an eruption of “blowback” for the trespasses of Zionists or American oil companies, as one routinely hears whenever the blood of innocents is spilled at a bus stop in Jerusalem, or on the streets of London, or at a nightclub in Paris. These were not “chickens coming home to roost,” as it was fashionable to say, over and over again, in the days and months and years following the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
The murderers’ targets were innocent Sinhalese and Tamil Christians, mostly Roman Catholics attending Easter Sunday Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo’s Kochchikade neighbourhood, and at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, just north of Colombo. More were slaughtered at Zion Church, a small Protestant congregation in the city of Batticaloa. Four upscale Colombo hotels were also hit: the Cinnamon Grand, the Shangri-La, the Kingsbury and the Tropical Inn.
The death toll keeps rising, but as I write this it stands at 359 people. Hundreds more were seriously wounded. This makes the Sri Lanka bloodshed one of the worst terrorist outrages since al-Qaida’s 9/11slaughters in the United States. It’s arguably the worst single terrorist attack linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS, also known as Daesh, since the monstrous al-Qaida offshoot emerged in 2014.
A video released by ISIL’s propaganda arm, the Amaq news agency, shows the killers swearing their loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s genocidaire-in-chief. The ritual is overseen by Mohammed Cassim Zaharan, a vile Islamist hate preacher also known as Zaharan Hashmi, who headed up a Sri Lankan Islamist supremacist group known as the National Thowheeth Jama’ath.
While ISIL lost the last enclave of its horrific “caliphate” in the Syrian desert only last month, owing mainly to a bloody struggle waged by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces at a cost of 11,000 SDF fighters’ lives, the bloodlust that animated ISIL’s marauders is not satiated. Their death-cult fervour did not end in the rubble of Baghouz, the town that was ISIL’s last stronghold in the bleak and sprawling Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor, on March 22.
And it did not begin with al-Baghdadi, the shadowy, near-sighted 48-year-old former theology student formerly known as Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri, who arrived on the jihadist scene in August 2011 as the plotter behind the slaughter of 28 Muslims at prayer at Baghdad’s Umm al-Qura mosque. Neither will it end if anyone ever ends up collecting the $25-million bounty the U.S. has put on Baghdadi’s head.
It did not begin with al-Qaida, otherwise known as the World Islamic Front for Combat Against the Jews and Crusaders, and it did not end when the Saudi multimillionaire construction magnate Osama bin Laden was killed following a nighttime U.S. Navy Seals raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. It did not begin among the Pashtun mercenaries and Haqqani seminary students — the talibs — that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, armed and mobilized to extend its brutal control of Afghanistan all the way to the frontiers of Iran and Turkmenistan in the 1990s. It did not end when the Northern Alliance drove the Taliban out of Kabul, even before any regular U.S. forces arrived, in 2001. Or when the Taliban was driven back into the ISI’s welcoming arms, or after the cost of thousands of NATO soldiers’ lives, and tens of thousands of Afghan lives. That struggle continues.
It did not begin with Islam, and it does not end with Islam. It is the same thing that possessed the 28-year-old Australian white nationalist and gun enthusiast Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 innocent Muslims at Friday prayers last month in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the lovely Masjid Al Noor on Deans Avenue and the little Linwood Mosque on the other side of town.
It’s what possessed Tarrant’s role model, the Knights Templar fantasist and Norwegian Armed Forces reject Anders Breivik, when he set out on a killing spree in July 2011, in Oslo, leaving 78 corpses in his wake. It’s what preoccupied Robert Gregory Bowers, the 46-year-old truck driver, conspiracy theorist and racist loner facing 63 charges arising from last October’s mass shooting during Shabbat services at the L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 Jews dead. It is what was at work a year ago this week on Yonge Street in Toronto. It’s the thing that killed 10 pedestrians, mostly women, rammed and run over by a man behind the wheel of a van.
Consumed with self-loathing and a hatred of women owing to his “involuntary celibacy,” the accused, Alek Minassian, had found his own hero in the insanely misogynistic mass murderer Elliot Rodger, the “involuntarily celibate” 22-year-old who shot and killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014.
It is not exactly a coincidence that from ISIL to the depraved online “incel community” and from Elliot Rodger to the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, what stands out is that they hate women, they rape women, they enslave women, and they kill women. What leaps off the pages of Brenton Tarrant’s 16,500-word manifesto, and any and all of the various fatwas and declarations of al-Qaida and ISIL, is the same deeply paranoid and apocalyptic hatred of imaginary usurpers, outsiders and invaders.
Looking into the anxieties of certain white conservatives for the “root causes” of Tarrant’s terrorism in Christchurch is about as useful as flipping through the pages of the Qur’an for passages that would explain Easter Sunday’s terrorism in Sri Lanka. Drawing distinctions between a terrorist and a merely insane person is just as useless. Profound sociopathology is the first entry in any mass murderer’s curriculum vitae.
Study their justifications all you like. Read their proclamations, comb through their 4chan pages, weigh and assess their ideologies as much as you want. It’s all the same rationale for the enslavement and murder of Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, or women. All their various manifestos are, at bottom, the same. They do not offer an explanation, or a rationale. All they reveal is that they want us to be mistrustful of one another, to be fearful of one another, to hate one another.
All they reveal is the same eternal excuse, the same ancient pretext, to spill human blood.
nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-its-all-about-hate-and-bloodlust-thats-never-sated
So far neither JT in Ottawa or Chrystia Freeland in the U.N will openly admit that the terrorists were Islamic douchebags.
However they (correctly) identified the NZ shooter as a white racist immediately.
Oh Canada!
Why would they know more that the people at the site?? Do you not all extremists have the sane leadership that runs the problem/reaction/solution program non-sop and in an almost endless variations of the same scam. Blackbeard would be the CIA trained head of ISIS if today's 'terrorist threat'. Odd the Pirates were able to hole-up in the Caribbean without any of the navies of the EU Royals being able to actually find them.
BRENDAN O'NEILL Sri Lanka attacks — Islamist terror is a new kind of savagery and war on Christianity
It is no longer enough to say 'that’s awful' and move on, we need a serious reckoning, writes Brendan O'Neill
Comment
By Brendan O'Neill, Editor of Spiked Online
26th April 2019
The Sun
HERE’S the most horrific thing from the barbaric assault on Christians and holidaymakers in Sri Lanka.
In the Zion Evangelical Church in the eastern city of Batticaloa, children were gathered for Sunday school.
We need a serious reckoning with the war on Christians after Manchester Arena attack, writes Brendan O'Neill
Moments before the blast, children at a Sri Lankan Sunday school service where 14 youngsters died
Given it was Easter Sunday their teacher asked them, “How many of you are willing to die for Christ?”
According to a teacher who survived what was about to happen, all the children put their hands up. They then spilled out into the church grounds to play. Photos show them looking happy.
Minutes later, an Islamist terrorist, who had failed to get into the church itself, walked among the group of children and blew himself up.
Twelve children were killed. Many of their teachers were killed, too. Their crime was to be Christian.
Details like this demand an urgent and serious assessment of the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism.
Because this terrorism, even by the historical standards of terrorism, is peculiarly hateful, misanthropic and barbaric.
What drives someone to detonate a suicide belt while standing among children?
It brings to mind the Baghdad suicide bomber in July 2005, who drove his car into a group of kids, accepting sweets from a US soldier, and blew himself up.
Twenty-four children were killed.
Or the suicide bomber in Iraq, in September 2006, who blew herself up among families who were queuing for kerosene. Try to imagine what happened next.
And of course it brings to mind the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, which faded strikingly fast from the forefront of the British political consciousness, in which an ISIS-inspired extremist blew himself up among parents and children leaving an Ariana Grande concert.
'IT FEELS APOCALYPTIC'
The youngest victim, Saffie Roussos, was just eight. These are only a handful of the thousands of acts of barbarism carried out by Islamist extremists in recent years.
This terrorism seems to have utterly dispensed with the old rules of engagement. Its battleground is as likely to be a church, school or queue of children as it is land claimed by a military outfit.
It follows no moral code whatsoever. Its defining feature is a glaring and terrifying absence of moral restraint. Anything is acceptable.
Anyone can be killed.
This means the new barbarism is very different to the violent groups that existed in the 1970s and 1980s.
These outfits, like the PLO or the IRA, were usually, though not always, restrained by their own political motives and ambitions.
Their claim to be serious political actors meant they carefully tailored and targeted their militaristic acts.
Their acts of violence were frequently bloody, of course, but they rarely did what Islamist terrorists do today.
For a few years now, some observers — not nearly enough — have tried to get to grips with the new barbarism.
A 2005 New York Times piece titled 'The mystery of the insurgency commented on Iraqi insurgents’ massacre of civilians and how historically unusual it was.
This “surge in the killing of civilians” reflects “how mysterious the long-term strategy remains”, it said. The writer arrived at a horrifying conclusion — that maybe there was no long-term strategy, that maybe killing civilians was the strategy, was the overriding aim.
Death for death’s sake. “Counter-insurgency experts are baffled”, said the NYT piece, because these civilian-targeting groups in Iraq had “developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern”.
Of course this changed later, with ISIS, which did amass territory. But even this contained within it “the mystery of the insurgency”, given that IS territory was defined by its perverse celebration of extreme violence, which it recorded and put out online.
What was really unfolding in Iraq back then was the new barbarism.
The Western leftists who excused the “Iraqi insurgency” were utterly missing the point of what was happening.
It was not anti-imperialist rebellion, but the spread of a new, unhinged breed of violent misanthropy.
This is post-political, post-state, post-morality violence.
It speaks to — and is no doubt inflamed by — the hollowing out of political norms in recent years.
It feels apocalyptic. But there is another factor which is contributing to the intensification of the new barbarism — the striking reluctance of many in the West to condemn it or even to speak openly about its origins or uniqueness.
The aftermath of the attacks in Sri Lanka sums up Western liberal elites’ caginess about confronting the barbarism.
There has been no talk of fascism and hatred and our moral responsibility to stand up to these things, as there was after the mosque massacres in Christchurch in March.
'STRONG MORAL STANCE'
There has been no emergence of a Christian solidarity movement, in contrast with the numerous, and correct, cries of solidarity made to Muslims after Christchurch. Indeed, focus too much on Islamist terrorism these days and you risk being accused of Islamophobia.
“Christians used to do this kind of thing”, they will say, inaccurately, in order to deflect attention from their own unwillingness to take a strong moral stance.
Look at the comments from world leaders following Sri Lanka. There was no mention “Christians” had been attacked by followers of — an albeit hideously warped version of — Islam. The victims were simply “worshippers”.
Some will also point out that America, Britain and other nations are still engaged in violent conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But even they must know that there is an immeasurable difference between US military campaigns in the Middle East (which are wrong) and the wilful slaughter of children queuing for sweets.
The liberal elites’ key aim seems to be to avoid taking a strong position on this new, anti-human violence.
And this cowardice has crossed the line from irritating to dangerous.
It does nothing to challenge, far less try to stop, the rise of the new barbarism. It is no longer enough to say “That’s awful” and move on.
We need a serious reckoning with the war on Christians, the rise of seventh-century barbarism, and the collapse of any semblance of moral restraint among the new terrorists.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/89420...gery-war-christianity-comment-brendan-oneill/
It is no longer enough to say 'that’s awful' and move on, we need a serious reckoning, writes Brendan O'Neill
Comment
By Brendan O'Neill, Editor of Spiked Online
26th April 2019
The Sun
HERE’S the most horrific thing from the barbaric assault on Christians and holidaymakers in Sri Lanka.
In the Zion Evangelical Church in the eastern city of Batticaloa, children were gathered for Sunday school.
We need a serious reckoning with the war on Christians after Manchester Arena attack, writes Brendan O'Neill
Moments before the blast, children at a Sri Lankan Sunday school service where 14 youngsters died
Given it was Easter Sunday their teacher asked them, “How many of you are willing to die for Christ?”
According to a teacher who survived what was about to happen, all the children put their hands up. They then spilled out into the church grounds to play. Photos show them looking happy.
Minutes later, an Islamist terrorist, who had failed to get into the church itself, walked among the group of children and blew himself up.
Twelve children were killed. Many of their teachers were killed, too. Their crime was to be Christian.
Details like this demand an urgent and serious assessment of the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism.
Because this terrorism, even by the historical standards of terrorism, is peculiarly hateful, misanthropic and barbaric.
What drives someone to detonate a suicide belt while standing among children?
It brings to mind the Baghdad suicide bomber in July 2005, who drove his car into a group of kids, accepting sweets from a US soldier, and blew himself up.
Twenty-four children were killed.
Or the suicide bomber in Iraq, in September 2006, who blew herself up among families who were queuing for kerosene. Try to imagine what happened next.
And of course it brings to mind the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, which faded strikingly fast from the forefront of the British political consciousness, in which an ISIS-inspired extremist blew himself up among parents and children leaving an Ariana Grande concert.
'IT FEELS APOCALYPTIC'
The youngest victim, Saffie Roussos, was just eight. These are only a handful of the thousands of acts of barbarism carried out by Islamist extremists in recent years.
This terrorism seems to have utterly dispensed with the old rules of engagement. Its battleground is as likely to be a church, school or queue of children as it is land claimed by a military outfit.
It follows no moral code whatsoever. Its defining feature is a glaring and terrifying absence of moral restraint. Anything is acceptable.
Anyone can be killed.
This means the new barbarism is very different to the violent groups that existed in the 1970s and 1980s.
These outfits, like the PLO or the IRA, were usually, though not always, restrained by their own political motives and ambitions.
Their claim to be serious political actors meant they carefully tailored and targeted their militaristic acts.
Their acts of violence were frequently bloody, of course, but they rarely did what Islamist terrorists do today.
For a few years now, some observers — not nearly enough — have tried to get to grips with the new barbarism.
A 2005 New York Times piece titled 'The mystery of the insurgency commented on Iraqi insurgents’ massacre of civilians and how historically unusual it was.
This “surge in the killing of civilians” reflects “how mysterious the long-term strategy remains”, it said. The writer arrived at a horrifying conclusion — that maybe there was no long-term strategy, that maybe killing civilians was the strategy, was the overriding aim.
Death for death’s sake. “Counter-insurgency experts are baffled”, said the NYT piece, because these civilian-targeting groups in Iraq had “developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern”.
Of course this changed later, with ISIS, which did amass territory. But even this contained within it “the mystery of the insurgency”, given that IS territory was defined by its perverse celebration of extreme violence, which it recorded and put out online.
What was really unfolding in Iraq back then was the new barbarism.
The Western leftists who excused the “Iraqi insurgency” were utterly missing the point of what was happening.
It was not anti-imperialist rebellion, but the spread of a new, unhinged breed of violent misanthropy.
This is post-political, post-state, post-morality violence.
It speaks to — and is no doubt inflamed by — the hollowing out of political norms in recent years.
It feels apocalyptic. But there is another factor which is contributing to the intensification of the new barbarism — the striking reluctance of many in the West to condemn it or even to speak openly about its origins or uniqueness.
The aftermath of the attacks in Sri Lanka sums up Western liberal elites’ caginess about confronting the barbarism.
There has been no talk of fascism and hatred and our moral responsibility to stand up to these things, as there was after the mosque massacres in Christchurch in March.
'STRONG MORAL STANCE'
There has been no emergence of a Christian solidarity movement, in contrast with the numerous, and correct, cries of solidarity made to Muslims after Christchurch. Indeed, focus too much on Islamist terrorism these days and you risk being accused of Islamophobia.
“Christians used to do this kind of thing”, they will say, inaccurately, in order to deflect attention from their own unwillingness to take a strong moral stance.
Look at the comments from world leaders following Sri Lanka. There was no mention “Christians” had been attacked by followers of — an albeit hideously warped version of — Islam. The victims were simply “worshippers”.
Some will also point out that America, Britain and other nations are still engaged in violent conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But even they must know that there is an immeasurable difference between US military campaigns in the Middle East (which are wrong) and the wilful slaughter of children queuing for sweets.
The liberal elites’ key aim seems to be to avoid taking a strong position on this new, anti-human violence.
And this cowardice has crossed the line from irritating to dangerous.
It does nothing to challenge, far less try to stop, the rise of the new barbarism. It is no longer enough to say “That’s awful” and move on.
We need a serious reckoning with the war on Christians, the rise of seventh-century barbarism, and the collapse of any semblance of moral restraint among the new terrorists.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/89420...gery-war-christianity-comment-brendan-oneill/