Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Welby, Israel and the meaning of persecution

Christians celebrate east in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's old city (Getty)

I arrived in Colombo the morning after the attack and went straight to the morgue to identify some of the 269 victims. The concrete building, with its pretty wooden roof, had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of Christian dead. Several bodies lay on the floor of the entrance, some only partially covered up. One had gone black. It was very hot and humid and the smell lingered in my clothes for weeks. Outside the morgue, a computer had been set up. Distraught relatives were encouraged to view a slideshow of body parts to see if they could recognise a clump of hair, a fragment of ear or a finger still wearing a ring.

This was the 2019 Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka, in which three packed churches and three hotels were targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Forty-five foreign nationals, of whom nine were children, were among the dead. Eight were British, including brother and sister Daniel and Amelie Linsey, aged 19 and 15. Little Zayan Chowdhury, who was blown up while having breakfast with his father, was a relative of Labour MP Tulip Siddiq.

I recall this grim episode mainly for the benefit of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Take heed: this is what the persecution of Christians looks like.

Yesterday, Mr Welby and Hosam Naoum, an Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, jointly penned an article in the Sunday Times entitled: ‘Let us pray for the Christians being driven from the Holy Land’. In it, they drew readers’ attention to the ‘frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups’ in Israel, arguing that this was behind the sharp decline in the Christian population in Jerusalem. Nowhere else in the region. Only the Jewish state.

In countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt, the anti-Christian oppression is carried out by Islamist terrorists

About half way down, the clergymen did briefly say that ‘in Israel, the overall number of Christians has risen’.

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