Tea at Trianon: No Room at the Inn for Christians

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 27, 2017

No Room at the Inn for Christians

From Global Christian News:

That today is the experience of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi Christians. They are excluded from the normal refugee camps, either through fear – with a long history of massacres of Christians in the region, or through prejudice. Some time ago the persecuted church agency, Barnabas Fund, asked Christian leaders in the Middle East if they knew of any Christians in refugee camps. One told us “we did once have a couple who tried to live there, we had to get them out in the middle of the night when we heard people were planning to kill them.”

Many Christians fleeing the war in Syria live in half-built buildings or makeshift shelters, not dissimilar from the cold, damp conditions Jesus was born in. Just as Herod’s genocide in Judea targeted a specific group, Jewish boys under two, so the genocide in Syria specifically targets Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim minorities such as Yazidis and Shi’a.

Yet, the extraordinary thing is that the refugee policies of western countries such as the USA and UK admit only a tiny handful of Christians. This number vastly underrepresents the proportion of Christians in Syria’s pre-war population, but is truly shocking when Christians are being specifically targeted by jihadist groups intent on cleansing the area of its entire non-Muslim population. (Read more.)