Bullseye Placed on European Christians

Bull's-eye placed on European Christians [Excerpts]

Report counts more attacks than people of any other faith

A new report finds that Christians are the target of religiously motivated physical attacks, intolerance and discrimination more than the people of any other faith in Europe.

“Statistics show the breadth of the problem: 74 percent of U.K. respondents said that there is more negative discrimination against Christians than people of other faiths, said the Report 2011 by an organization called Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe.

The report said 84 percent of “the strongly increasing vandalism in France is directed against Christian places of worship. In Scotland, 95 percent of religiously motivated violence targets Christians.”

“The term ‘intolerance’ refers to the social dimension, the term ‘discrimination’ to the legal. Intolerant and discriminatory behavior results from opposition to individual traits of the Christian faith or moral positions that are intrinsically part of the Christian faith,” the report said. “Intolerant and discriminatory behavior also results from a negative, categorical bias against Christians or Christianity as a whole. This behavior causes various sectors of society to be used as vehicles of intolerance and discrimination against Christians. Such areas of society include the media or arts (through negative stereotyping or profane exhibitions); on the government level (through a discriminatory law or a biased court verdict); on the political level (exclusion from the public sphere, a resolution of a parliament, etc.). Intolerance and discrimination against Christians is also promulgated in the workplace, academia, and in the private and social sphere.

It noted that are no European-wide assessments on attacks on Christians, but several localized surveys support the worry over anti-Christian feeling and action.

In Scotland, for example, of 693 charges aggravated by religious prejudice, 2.3 percent targeted Jews and 2.1 percent related to Islam. The rest targeted Catholics and Protestants.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/bulls-eye-placed-on-european-christians/?cat_orig=world