The United Nations Refugee Agency appears to be committed to blocking persecuted Christians from receiving any assistance. According to a recent CBN News report:
Christian Syrian refugees ... have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, by Muslim UN officials in Jordan.
One of the refugees, Hasan, a Syrian convert to Christianity, told us in a phone call that Muslim UN camp officials "knew that we were Muslims and became Christians and they dealt with us with persecution and mockery. They didn't let us into the office. They ignored our request."
Hasan and his family are now in hiding, afraid that they will be arrested by Jordanian police, or even killed. Converting to Christianity is a serious crime in Jordan.
According to Timothy, a Jordanian Muslim who converted to Christianity, "All of the United Nations officials [apparently in Jordan], most of them, 99 percent, they are Muslims, and they were treating us as enemies."
Addressing this issue, Paul Diamond, a British human rights lawyer, recently elaborated:
"You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been "genocided," they can't even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you.... Sunni Muslim officials have blocked the way. They've laughed at them, threatened them, said 'You shouldn't have converted. You're an idiot for converting. You get what you get,' words to that effect."
The next obstacle facing those few Christians who make it past UN refugee camps are the immigration centers of Western nations themselves. The discrimination is apparently so obvious in the United Kingdom that Lord George Carey is suing the UK Home Office for allegedly being "institutionally biased" against Christian refugees and therefore complicit in what he calls "the steady crucifixion of Middle East Christians."
He is hardly the only one making such charges. One independent report said that when it comes to offering asylum, the UK "appears to discriminate in favour of Muslims" instead of Christians. Statistics seemed to confirm this allegation: "out of 4,850 Syrian refugees accepted for resettlement by the Home Office in 2017, only eleven were Christian, representing just 0.2% of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK."
He is hardly the only one making such charges. One independent report said that when it comes to offering asylum, the UK "appears to discriminate in favour of Muslims" instead of Christians. Statistics seemed to confirm this allegation: "out of 4,850 Syrian refugees accepted for resettlement by the Home Office in 2017, only eleven were Christian, representing just 0.2% of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK."
Due to such figures, Lord David Alton of Liverpool, a life peer in the House of Lords, wrote to Home Secretary Sajid Javid, who then headed the Home Office:
It is widely accepted that Christians, who constituted around 10 per cent of Syria's pre-war population, were specifically targeted by jihadi rebels and continue to be at risk.... As last year's statistics more than amply demonstrate, this [ratio imbalance between Muslim and Christian refugees taken in] is not a statistical blip. It shows a pattern of discrimination that the Government has a legal duty to take concrete steps to address.
Such imbalances appear even stranger on the realization that the Islamic State, which precipitated the refugee crisis, is itself a Sunni organization that only targets non-Sunnis— primarily Christians, Yazidis, and Shia — all minority groups that the U.S. has acknowledged experienced a "genocide."
No comments:
Post a Comment