US Edition "Let my people go." Pope Francis could not have been clearer in his message to Isil: the group’s persecution of Christians in the Middle East has claimed thousands of lives and turned the region into a no-go area for a faith rooted in that soil. Martyrdom has become routine in Christ’s birth place.
In echoing Moses’s plea to the Pharaoh, Francis acknowledged that this kind of dark sectarianism has been part of our history for millennia. Trust an MP to use this tragic history to score a political point. Desmond Swayne, Tory MP for New Forest West and minister for international development, has come out with the crass claim that Isil is acting no worse than Christians have done through the ages.
Swayne’s statement is deeply offensive and morally wrong. Imagine saying about someone who runs a sex slave gang that what they are doing is no worse than what slave traders in Wilberforce’s time did. What kind of moral equivalence is this? Doesn’t history provide a lesson to be learnt?
Yes, men and women have been attacking one another in the name of God forever. But no amount of past evils can erase the wrongs being perpetrated today. I’d advise The Hon Mr Swayne to pick up a copy of “Heirs to the Forgotten Kingdoms”. In it, Gerard Russell describes the painful existence of members of minority religions in the Middle East: from the Yazidis in Iraq through the Zoroastrians in Iran and the Copts in Egypt, these once flourishing faiths face extinction. Their people face flight or death.
Muslim fundamentalists (and not just Isil) have been threatening the Evangelicals in Pakistan and the Catholics in Nigeria over the past few years. Men and women accused of "apostasy" – conversion from Islam – have faced death by stoning or hanging; homes and shops known to be Christian have been burned to the ground or plundered. This is no time to be politically correct or to play professional politics: everyone knows that only bigots blame all Muslims for the actions of other Muslims. Everyone knows – at least, everyone except one Tory MP – that humans twist creed, colour, race into a reason for violence. But to suggest to today’s persecutors that their deeds are no worse than their enemies’ were hundreds of years ago is to display a woeful ignorance of history – secular and religious.