In a message recorded December 19 at St. James’s Palace, Britain’s Prince Charles admonished his subjects to consider the millions of people around the world suffering from religious persecution. He also said that at a time of year when people normally think of Jesus, they should spend time remembering Muhammad.
The Prince of Wales began his pre-Christmas address by giving voice to the persecution of religious minorities around the world. He said for such people “religious freedom is a stark choice between life and death.”
“The scale of religious persecution around the world is not widely appreciated,” he said.
“Normally at Christmas, we think of the Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ,” said Prince Charles. “I wonder, though, if this year we might remember how the story of the nativity unfolds, with the fleeing of the holy family to escape violent persecution.”
“And we might also remember that when the prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina he was seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship.”
You know, because a month of Ramadan plus all the various other Muslim holidays isn’t enough anymore. We now need to spend one of the most important days on the Christian calendar thinking about the prophet of the most violent religion in the history of mankind.
But Prince Charles wasn’t finished.
“Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same – to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God,” he said.
Tell that to the Syrian Christians who are in exile or the Yazidi Christians who have been massacred or forced into sexual slavery by violent Muslims peacefully responding to the love of God. The religious path and the destination are most certainly NOT the same.
He went on to take what appeared to be a swipe at President-elect Trump and the populism behind his election.
“We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s,” he said.
Those “dark days” led to the rise of Hitler and the religious persecution of the Holocaust, of course.
“I was born in 1948, just after the end of World War Two, in which my parents’ generation had fought and died in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism, and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. That nearly 70 years later we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.”
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