VOICE OF EUROPE | By Emma R. 18 March 2019
Terrorist attacks against Muslims in the Western world, like the one that took place in Christchurch, are extremely rare. Friday’s carnage in two mosques in New Zealand, with the death toll currently at 50, is the first major event of its kind since the Quebec City mosque shooting over two years ago – which killed six persons, conservative writer Srdja Trifkovic states in Chronicles Magazine.
Nonetheless, this terrible incident will dominate the headlines infinitely more than any comparable carnage involving Christians, notably the 2017 Palm Sunday church bombings in Alexandria, which killed 45 people, and was all but ignored by the Western media and politicians.
If we put Friday’s killings in perspective, that perspective should include the fact that some 30 million Muslims reside in the Western world today, which makes the probability of any one of them falling victim to a deplorable attack in any given year roughly one in ten million. 261 persons have been killed and many more injured, in attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims, in less than four years, in only one country, France (pop. 66 million).
With 66 dead a year on average, Frenchmen are exactly ten times more likely to be murdered by a Muslim than a Muslim being killed by a non-Muslim terrorist anywhere in the Western world. The score is incomparably worse if we look at the situation of Christians in the Muslim world.
It is the most egregious example of human right violations in today’s world: according to “Open Doors”, at least 4,305 Christians known by name were murdered by Muslims because of their faith in 2018. Aid to the Church in Need, in its latest “Religious Freedom Report”, warned that 300 million Christians, overwhelmingly in the majority-Muslim countries, were subjected to violence, making it “the most persecuted religion in the world.”
This makes the odds of a Christian in a majority-Muslim country being murdered by a Muslim – simply for being what he is – approximately one in 70,000. Which means that a Christian living in a majority Muslim country is 143 times more likely to be killed by a Muslim for being a Christian than a Muslim is likely to be killed by a non-Muslim in a Western country for being what he is.