Sunday, January 09, 2005

BLACK HOMOPHOBIA IS THE FAULT OF WHITES!

How desperate Leftists are to condemn their own society! Is there anything they won't blame it for? Can't minorities be just a TEENY bit bad?

"But the vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies more than a failure to accept postcolonial politics. It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia, and its legacy is still unmistakable in the precarious, overexaggerated masculinity of many men in Jamaica.

Jamaica was one of the most scandalously misgoverned of Britain's colonies, and since independence we've been helping ourselves to its workforce, while stigmatising it for exporting drugs and yardies. This has left an emasculating sense in many men that the only life that counts is lived abroad. Jamaica today is very poor. The schools are bad, the healthcare atrocious and the police widely mistrusted, and for many the only support comes from churches, many of which dispense a fire-and-brimstone religion that is not merely homophobic, but designed to discourage independent thought. The government doesn't have enough money to make real change, and the reason is simple. This year 69.9% of its budget went on servicing debt. For education, there was less than 10%.

Many Jamaicans are not homophobic, but the prevailing attitude to gays is ignorant and sometimes violent. But the fact remains that of all Jamaica's injustices and deprivations, homophobia cannot be singled out as uniquely intolerable. Although activists are right to campaign about it, it's wrong for public opinion to seize on the issue with no thought for political context.

A better emotion would be culpability. Every ingredient of Jamaica's homophobia implicates Britain, whose role has maintained the conditions conducive to homophobia, from slavery through to the debt that makes education unaffordable. For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful. To do so in the name of liberal values is meaningless.... Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were".

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LEFTISTS ARE FIERCE ENEMIES OF DISCRIMINATION AND PERSECUTION, RIGHT?

Well, here's a cause that they could really get their teeth into. How odd that they don't!

"Let me start by saying that many people find it very surprising, even unbelievable, that in today's world the largest group of people being persecuted for their faith are Christians. This seems all the more unusual because Christianity is the world's largest religion.

I am fully aware that other religions, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or others also suffer in various contexts, and we shall address these situations in subsequent articles. However, for the present we will focus on Christians, due to the urgency of the situation.

Incredibly, more than 200 million people in over 60 nations are being denied their basic human rights for one reason only: they are Christians. The main reason Christians are being persecuted today is the simple fact that Christianity is growing fastest in countries where human rights are being violated or do not exist.

One of my tasks as director of the Religious Liberty Commission is to represent these Christians - both Catholic and Protestant - at the United Nations Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, as well as in other contexts.

I would therefore like to give a brief analysis of the global situation regarding persecution of Christians. This analysis is based on reports from 114 countries and personal visits to many countries where Christian people suffer.

The persecution of Christians goes hand-in-hand with some important trends taking place around the world. I'd like to name five:

* Conflicts tend increasingly to occur within states, rather than between them. In such situations, religious tensions are likely to increase. We are all familiar with the heart-rending struggles in Kosovo, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Chechnya, Northern Ireland and East Timor, to name but a few.

The whole structure of the UN was created after the Second World War, and is designed to solve conflicts between states, not within them. Human rights are increasingly at the core of civil conflict, and added to that is the way countries like China, Russia and Indonesia interpret the whole issue of human rights - in other words, that human rights are each country's own internal affair. This places two fundamental principles on a collision course with one another: the sovereignty of the state, and the universal nature of human rights.

* Many countries with a colonial past are seeking their own identity. Very often, this has strong ties to a religion. We see this clearly, for example, in Asia: Pakistan adheres to Islam, India to Hinduism, Indonesia also to Islam, and Sri Lanka to Buddhism.

It is worth noting that the search for a national identity is strongest in five of the eight countries that together make up more than half of the world population. These are China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. In each of these countries, Christians are finding themselves in increasingly tense situations, because they are painted as bearers of the religion brought by former colonial powers, and thus are considered a threat to national harmony.

* Developments in the Muslim world are likely to have an increasing impact on the lives of Christians within the next decade. The population growth in the Arab world is 4.3 per cent, compared with economic growth of only 0.5 per cent. The population is very young, and this creates the conditions for the growth of radical elements.

* There is a great difference between the West's view of reality and that of the developing countries. The West often interprets global thinking as its own world view written large. But ways of thinking, interpretation and culture differ far more than Westerners think. The West must be ready to listen, and to listen as never before.

* I would like to say something here about the growth of the Christian Church. There is a clear misunderstanding in Europe today that religion is no longer relevant to the modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth. The amazing fact is that of the world's six billion people, only a tiny proportion - 151 million - call themselves atheists. There are two billion Christians, 1.2 billion Muslims, 786 million Hindus and 362 million Buddhists. Religion is, and will continue to be, at the very centre of our world, at the centre of the conflicts within it, and also at the centre of how these conflicts are resolved in the next Millennium.


These five paradigm shifts are the principle reasons Christians are being persecuted today, and most likely why it will continue in the future.

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