[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 56 (Monday, May 5, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E831]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS

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                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 1, 1997.

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, the persecution of Christians is one of 
today's overlooked tragedies. On April 29, 1997, columnist A.M. 
Rosenthal of the New York Times addressed the torture of Christians in 
Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I enter Mr. Rosenthal's valuable 
insights into the Congressional Record

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 29, 1997]

                           The Well Poisoners

                          (By A. M. Rosenthal)

       They are outsiders among us. They use their foreign 
     religion to poison our wells, and destroy our belief in 
     ourselves and the God we must follow.
       Throughout the persecution of Jews, that has been the 
     accusation and justification: an evil religion of the evil 
     outsider.
       In their terror and helplessness, sometimes victims pleaded 
     that the charge of foreignness was not true--look at us, we 
     are like you--almost as if being different made their 
     persecution at least explicable to the human mind.
       Now foreignness is the weapon used by persecutors of 
     Christians in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Islamicist 
     inquisitors use the weapon in the name of heavenly 
     righteousness, the Chinese political police in the name of 
     their frightened, last-ditch nationalism.
       Both types of persecutors of Christians benefit from a 
     peculiar protection--the attitude of many Western Christians 
     that Christianity is indeed foreign to Asia and Africa, a 
     valuable export certainly, but not really, well, indigenous, 
     to the soil. So they see faraway Christianity as separate 
     from themselves. This profits persecutors, by preventing the 
     persecuted from getting the succor they need, and due them.
       The aloofness of Christians to their distant persecuted is 
     a denial of the reality that Christianity was not only born 
     in the Mideast but spread wide and deep in Asia and Africa 
     long before Islam or Western Christian missionaries arrived.
       By now, according to David B. Barret's Annual Statistical 
     Table on Global Mission, 1996, there are 300 million church-
     affiliated Christians in Asia, the same number in Africa--and 
     200 million in all of North America.
       Americans are waking up to the persecution of Christians in 
     Communist China. Their own Government, however, gives it zero 
     priority compared with Washington's lust for the bizarre 
     privilege of trade with China granted by Beijing: to buy 
     eight times more from China than China does from America.
       But how many Americans know or care about the increasing 
     persecution of Mideast Christians, like the 10 million Copts 
     of Egypt--the largest Christian community in the region? 
     Copts are vilified as outsiders, though they have lived in 
     Egypt since the seventh century.
       In February and March, 25 Copts were shot to death in 
     Islamicist attacks on a church and a school. The attacks 
     were part of the worst outbreak of Christian-killing in 25 
     years. And Islamic fundamentalists have been allowed to 
     carry out year-round harassment of Copts, including 
     destruction of churches that Copts then are not allowed to 
     rebuild.
       In early April Mustapha Mashour, ``general guide'' of the 
     Muslim Brotherhood movement, a fountain of Mideast terrorism 
     for 50 years, announced a new goal: to bar Copts from the 
     army, police and senior government positions on the grounds 
     that they were a fifth column. He also demanded that a 
     ``protection tax'' be imposed on Christians, as in the time 
     of the Prophet.
       Elsewhere in the Mideast, persecution includes the Sudan's 
     trade in Christian slaves. But the Egyptian Government boasts 
     of fighting extremists and has received praise and billions 
     from America.
       In the U.S., a coalition of 60 human rights and ethnic 
     organizations watches out for persecution of minorities under 
     ``Islamization.'' The coalition's definition is a political 
     and cultural process to establish Islamic law, the Sharia, as 
     the ruling principle of all society, to which all must 
     conform.
       This is what the Very Rev. Keith Roderick, an Episcopal 
     priest, who is secretary general of the coalition, reports 
     about Egypt:
       ``The government has created an atmosphere of bigotry and 
     hatred toward the Coptic minority, allowing the Copts to 
     become human safety valves for Islamic militants. . . .  A 
     significant reduction in [U.S. foreign aid] for Egypt would 
     send a strong signal that the U.S. has adopted a serious 
     priority objective in its foreign policy to eliminate 
     Christian persecution.''
       Ignorance of the history or huge number of Christian 
     worshipers in faraway countries tends to make American 
     Christians, and Jews too, passive about the persecution of 
     Christians. As long as passivity lasts, so long will 
     persecution continue. It has always been so.

     

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