Western media ignores killing of Christians

The mainstream western media is failing to report the widespread slaughter of Christians overseas, a Conservative councillor says.

Alistair Thompson, writing on the Conservative Home blog, said the poor reporting underlines a “systematic failure to stand up for Christians in the East, who over the last decade have faced ethnic cleansing on unimaginable scale”.

Mr Thompson highlighted figures showing that there is an average of 100,000 Christians who have been murdered every year over the past decade.

Silent

And he commented, despite this “avalanche of attacks against Christians, politicians both here, in the US and EU remain almost completely silent”.

He said: “In Burma, where the native Christians are considered to be opponents of the regime, the military junta have launched helicopter gunship attacks against areas with high Christian populations.”

And he added that in Nigeria, “the terrorist group Boko Haram is believed to have killed more than 3,000 Christians since 2009, many of the victims targeted while attending church or as they left”.

Attack

Mr Thompson said: “According to the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, an average 100,000 Christians have been murdered each year over last decade.

“A million killed for their faith, or 11 murdered every hour of everyday, of every week, but still the West says nothing!”

His article followed an attack at a wedding in a church, and the commentator remarked it was “depressing” that “such attacks occur with such regularity that the mainstream media no longer report them”.

“Even the news-gathering leviathan the BBC reduced this tragedy to online coverage.

Failure

“This weariness with reporting such events – after all, they are no longer seen as news by the liberal establishment – underlines, at best, a nervousness in the West to condemn them in a Muslim country or, as I believe, a systematic failure to stand up for Christians in the East, who over the last decade have faced ethnic cleansing on unimaginable scale.”

He praised Conservative MPs Brian Binley and Sir Edward Leigh who had spoken up about the issue, but said at a “government level it is difficult to find anyone standing up for the world’s 2.3 billion Christians”.