World Council of Churches Stands By As Christians Perish, Churches Wither

THE GATESTONE INSTITUTE

Who needs the WCC any more? Would the world, let alone Middle East Christians, be better off without it?

The World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva claims to represent and serve 345 churches worldwide. What has it done to help the persecuted churches in Iraq, Syria and Egypt? Or the flood of Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon? Answer: it has devoted the whole of 2013 to promoting a World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel (September 22-28). That is, it has poured its Swiss francs into stirring up the one corner of the area that is currently almost calm.

It is not as if it is a secret that Muslim violence in Iraq drove out half the Christian population within a decade. Or that affiliates of Al-Qaeda have emptied whole Syrian villages and towns of their Christian populations. Or that almost a hundred Coptic churches in Egypt were assailed by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood shortly after President Morsi was deposed. And that was merely one chapter in the ongoing martyrdom of the Copts, which has seen 100,000 of them fleeing Egypt since the downfall of President Mubarak.

All such facts are documented on many websites, above all that of Raymond Ibrahim, which also records the endless attacks on Christians in Pakistan and Nigeria, indeed worldwide, by Muslim groups. Since August 2011, the Gatestone Institute has published his monthly roundup of such reports. Look at the website of the WCC, however, and you will hardly notice any awareness of all that. Instead, the WCC's website is loaded with schemes and resources relating to the Palestinians. The "resources" offer compilations of Palestinian propaganda, including calls for the so-called Palestinian "right of return" (that is, the transformation of Israel into an Arab-majority state).
The excuse for this absurd imbalance is that the WCC has maintained for decades, and insists on maintaining against all evidence, that the churches of the Middle East have no other real problem than the Palestinian issue. Earlier this year (May 21-25), the WCC held a conference on "Christian Presence and Witness in the Middle East" near Beirut, Lebanon. Its closing statement proclaimed: "Palestine continues to be the central issue in the region. Resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine in accordance with the UN resolutions and international law, will greatly help resolving the other conflicts in the region

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