Opinion
As the Albanese government digs in ever deeper on Labor’s latest attempt to impose censorship (never forget that Julia Gillard tried to impose a government censor on the media), it’s worth asking: why? Why is Labor so especially determined to censor footage of a Muslim extremist stabbing a Christian bishop?
Violence? We can watch a US president’s head explode like a watermelon, with no censorship imposed. We can see thousands of people die in an instant as the Twin Towers collapse. We can see people being beaten or stabbed on the news any night of the week.
Clearly, then, a video where no one is even killed is not the reason Anthony Albanese is so desperate to stop Australians from seeing what happened in Sydney.
Australians can be excused for suspecting that the real reason is that Labor is terrified that we might watch the video and draw some uncomfortable conclusions.
What the incident confirms, were further confirmation needed, is the continued vehemence of Islamism’s hostility to Christianity.
Islamist attacks on churches are scarcely isolated incidents. In France alone there were more than 600 attacks on Christian places of worship in 2020, culminating in the murder of three parishioners at Nice’s Basilica of Notre Dame by an Islamist carrying a Koran.
Meanwhile, violence against Christians remains endemic in the Arab Middle East, where the share of Christians in the population has, over the course of the past century, collapsed from around 14 per cent to barely 3 per cent.
Not to mention Jews. Having stolen liberally and without much critical understanding from Jewish and Christian scriptures (unsurprising perhaps for an illiterate, Mediaeval, camel and slave trader), Islam promptly turned on both with vicious zeal.
Seen in the longer term, the eradication of Christianity from its regions of birth appears even more starkly. In AD732, when Islam consolidated its hegemony over what later became the Arab lands, Christians were by far the majority of the population in the Oriental patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as in North Africa.
Now, after centuries of persecution, those ancient churches are becoming an insignificant presence, with their Middle Eastern congregations accounting for less than 1 per cent of Christians worldwide.
Muslim apologists will try to hype such isolated incidents as Najran, or Saint Catherine’s monastery, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. The rule is that, everywhere Islam conquered, Christianity was violently driven out or forced into dhimmitude.
The [Koran’s] so-called “verse of the sword” – which, according to many Islamic scholars, abrogates the Koran’s more tolerant affirmations – enjoins Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them”, sparing them only if they “repent, perform the prayer and pay alms”.
And according to a tradition authoritatively reported by Malik ibn Anas (711-795), the Prophet’s last words were “May God fight the Jews and the Christians! Two religions will not remain in the land of the Arabs.”
For 1600 years, Muslims have repeatedly put these injunctions into brutal practice. The first recognised genocides in modern times were perpetrated against Christian minorities in the collapsing Ottoman empire.
Even after the collapse of the empire, the formation of the Turkish republic and the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923 (which reduced the non-Muslim share of Turkey’s population from 20 per cent to 2.5 per cent), they continued to reverberate in the murderous riots of 1934, the discriminatory Wealth Tax of 1942 (that expropriated the remaining Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities) and the explosion of violence against minorities in 1955.
Those incidents in the Turkish republic echoed throughout the Middle East. Nowhere, however, were the impacts more durable than in Egypt.
Having expropriated and expelled the Jews, who had lived in Egypt for millennia, Gamal Abdel Nasser robbed the Copts of 75 per cent of their assets and shut their schools […]
It was, however, under Anwar Sadat – who made the promotion of Islam central to maintaining his fragile grip on power – that widespread religiously sanctioned violence against Christians started escalating.
After increasing in each decade, that violence reached a peak in the period immediately prior to, during and just after the short-lived rule of the Hamas-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, when at least 150 Copts were murdered, many thousands rendered homeless, and Coptic churches and monasteries stormed – with 64 churches being attacked, and 23 incinerated, in a single day.
The Australian
The modern-day inundation of Europe with millions of Muslims has given rise to a new wave of Islamic violence against Christians and Jews. The War in Gaza is merely the latest excuse for what had been commonplace anyway. The media, though, rarely draw much attention to these attacks, most often attempting to conceal them under euphemisms such as “gangs of youths”, of no particular description.
Police are even worse. When Muslim men organised mass rape attacks on women in Cologne and other European cities, police lied about it for days. When a Muslim mob attacked the Opera House last year, chanting “Gas the Jews!”, not one was arrested, and police tried to convince us that they really said “Where’s the Jews?” — as if that’s in any way reassuring.
Albanese’s attempt to stop Australians from seeing for themselves just what Muslims do to Christians — and before anyone claims this is merely isolated extremism, recall that Christians have long been warned against wearing visible crosses on Sydney public transport — is just the latest in a concatenation of lies and attempted cover-ups.