Daily Archive

The BBC reports:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has accused the UK government of placing Christians in the Middle East at risk through its actions in Iraq.

Dr Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican church, said there had been a growing number of attacks on Christians…

…His comments come after he told the Times newspaper ministers had ignored warnings Christians in the region “would be seen as supporters of the crusading West“…

Most — including many Muslims — actually do share the Archbishop’s concerns about the persecution of Christians in Islamic lands. Yet his willingness to be so morally outspoken on this issue is curious, given that the Archbishop doesn’t seem nearly so willing to show moral leadership . . . where the British government actually governs. Foreign policy is much more interesting, obviously.

And mucking it up is also “interesting”. For rather than squarely blaming the persecution on the persecutors (as he surely would if even a single Muslim were being similarly maltreated in Britain), comments like the above ever so helpfully (meaning stupidly) actually provide a level of legitimacy to the jihadist “argument” on the existence of an early 21st century “crusading West”. After all, if the Archbishop of Canterbury notes it’s there . . . well, it must be there, right?

Yet today’s “crusading West” is hardly expanding Christianity into Muslim lands; as he himself is telling us, Christians are fleeing. Quite a “crusade” that. Indeed, the reverse is actually far more the case, but the Archbishop never seems to have much to say over the constant influx of people* into Britain who, to borrow the Archbishop’s own phraseology, might “be seen as supporters of the jihadist East“.

[NOTE *: That link is one of the most devastating criticisms of the Archbishop's views I think I have ever read . . . and it was in THE TELEGRAPH!]

[UPDATE: That* article was apparently one which several months later got its author into serious hot water. But not over his interpretation of the Archbishop's views, of course.  So much for the freedom vigorously to discuss religion.]

Well, that’s a first-class eye opener if there ever was one; but by that I don’t mean that it is startling Hezbollah has support despite lacking an economic plan. Rather, I mean that’s a truly surprising assertion from Reuters about Hezbollah’s not even having an economic plan. For until that “Alert” hadn’t we heard that a theoretical commitment to regulating the money supply had turned out so well when put into practice?