Misplaced Outrage

Rupert Shortt, author of Christianophobia , complains that the media misreports incidents of Christian persecution:

“The battle for sexual equality clearly has a long way to run. But this doesn’t mean that any hardship suffered by a woman can be ascribed to misogyny. The logical false move has been especially blatant in media coverage of Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Christian sentenced to death for her faith and forced to give birth in chains.

“Time and again, reporters and presenters have spoken of the scandal as an issue of gender equality, rather than anti-Christian discrimination – as though male converts to Christianity in many Islamic societies are not also at risk of the harshest penalties as well. The explanation for all this is not hard to find. While women’s rights rank high in the liberal hierarchy of victimhood, freedom of worship for Christians ranks low.”

This is not an isolated instance of journalistic blindness, which, Shortt contents, “has helped to obscure some awkward statistics, including that there is barely a country from Morocco to Pakistan in which Christians can worship entirely without harassment, and that ‘freedom of religion’ in many Muslim-majority countries means the freedom to convert to Islam, not away from it.”