Christophobia?
Examine these pictures of the pope protests outside of London's Westminster Cathedral as a result of the current papal row.
Canada Free Press.com described the scene as follows:
Last Sunday, Catholics going to Holy Mass in London's Westminster Cathedral were confronted by Christophobic Muslims, carrying hate posters such as "Pope go to hell," "Benedict watch your back," "May Allah curse the Pope," "Jesus is the slave of Allah, "Islam will conquer Rome," and the like.
Christophobic?
Granted, the column is filled with "I call it like I see it"-defended Islamophobia such as:
Perhaps it can be argued that Islam is in agony, and that this is precisely the reason why Muslims reacted so sensitively to twelve, mostly inoffensive, Danish cartoons earlier this year...It looks as if Muslims cannot cope with an open society and the modern globalized world. Should we interpret their aggression -- the result of their inability to cope with the world -- as a token of strength...?
But Christophobia? I had never heard of such a thing.
The term was actually coined by Catholic scholar George Weigel. Weigel began investigating the phenomenon after being struck by the European Union's fierce resistance to any mention of the continent's Christian origins in the draft versions of the new, and still unratified, European constitution. Originally it was used to describe anti-Christian prejudice among secularists.
New Zealand's Scoop News columnist Jason Miller expresses his fear over the advent of what he terms "Anglo-Christophobia" but puts it in context:
Here are but a few recent examples of the United States’ own flagrant human rights abuses:1. carrying out quite a number of its own executions in a manner recently discovered to inflict a great deal of suffering on the victim
2. routinely torturing and suspending justice for suspected “enemy combatants”
3. funding the Israeli Apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians
4. occupying a nation where it has killed over a million Iraqi civilians since the Gulf War invasion (through brutal economic sanctions and military actions).
5. funding the Israeli devastation of Lebanon
6. supporting numerous ruthless and murderous regimes (as long as they are friendly to US corporations)
7. having cynically embraced Saddam Hussein as an ally (knowing of his crimes against humanity) when it furthered US interests and invading Iraq preemptively to topple him when he ceased to be useful.
8. having kept the House of Saud in power for years despite its harsh practice of Sharia (i.e. thieves’ hands are severed and adulterers are stoned).
9. maintaining the largest prison population in the world through a legal system so unjust that 50% of those incarcerated are Black when Blacks comprise 14% of the general population.
10. engaging in numerous outright massacres of civilians (i.e. Haditha, Fallujah)
In light of the above, how long will it be before a significant portion of the Muslim population falls prey to an extreme prejudice against all Westerners called Anglo-Christophobia? Let’s hope it does not happen any time soon.
Let's hope that we don't see a new blanket form of ethnocentric racism starting. But if we do see it, at least one columnist knows why.
George Weigel listed a number of reasons for the advent of the prejudice he adapted the term for. The Washington Post had one more reason to add, though, for the "Christophobic" sentiment in Europe:
To this I would add one more: Europe's present associations of "religiosity" with "America," and in particular with George W. Bush, who still scores reliably high negatives in opinion polls across the continent.
So W has incensed millions of Muslims and millions of secularists.
What precisely are we doing to improve our image?
