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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 20, 2009
Unknowable numbers
Winter solstice tomorrow (12:47 p.m. EST). I mention this baldly and up front as a little protest against the contemporary journalistic habit to be generous with interpretation, but stingy with facts. One must often scan through ill-written prose in fruitless search for the fact one is seeking -- the actual seat count from an election; the precise event and location at which some luminary was speaking; the source for some widely cited statistic; or even the actual date and time of an astronomical event.Often all we get is the number killed. But that tends to be an instance from category three, above: a "widely cited statistic." In such a case, I want to know who provided the number. Then I would like to hear other numbers, from other sources -- for in my experience, whether a catastrophe is "natural," or the product of human malice, it must have happened in a specific jurisdiction. And within most of the specific jurisdictions of this world, games are being played with numbers. Let me give an example, purposely chosen from among those that seldom appear in our "heritage media." In a news report this week, in the Jerusalem Post, I read that, "in 2009 more than 165,000 Christians will have been killed because of their faith, most of them in Muslim countries." A Toronto-based human rights organization, One Free World International, was mentioned and implied as the source; but I cannot find it in their website. A Google-search, however, on "165,000 Christians 2009," yielded 62,300 references. None on the first few pages made me any wiser. With the help of my own human memory, I finally traced the number, "165,000," to the annual report of a Vatican charity, Aid to the Church in Need, for the year 2001. It was an estimate of the number of Christians killed in the year 2000, in religious or ethnic clashes, and indeed most of them in Muslim countries (Sudan and Indonesia were atop that list), or Muslim-dominated regions within non-Muslim countries. This number was held to be increasing, year to year, so the inference of "one Christian killed every three minutes" (also widely cited on the Internet) had likely the same origin. That there is some large number, I do not doubt, for I'm on various Christian mission "e-lists," which tell me every day of Christians massacred somewhere in the "Third World." Glancing at my inbox just now: two reports from Egypt, two from Pakistan, and one from Nepal. But as non-Christian media take no interest whatever in these reports (which would anyway be dangerous to confirm) -- and as the reports will be categorically denied by officials in most of the countries in question -- I have generally avoided writing about them. For I have found it is counter-productive to tell people things they do not know already. Christians are, of course, not the only persecuted in this world. In proportion to their numbers, Jews have suffered worse, and depending on the country, other minorities. In Iran, for instance, native Parsees and Bahai have been all but eliminated, along with the Jews and many of the Christians. Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists are mostly gone from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Buddhists are under attack in southern Thailand; Christians in the southern Philippines. Animists, Hindus, Buddhists, and the Chinese generally, have often shared the fate of Christians in the remoter parts of Indonesia. And there is no telling what has happened in innumerable African locations, along a vague line from about Senegal to about Kenya, that corresponds to the Christian-Muslim frontier. Christians have also been under persecution from Hindu nationalists in India, in that case along with Muslims, Buddhists and other minorities. The Sri Lankan conflict has been "ethnically" Hindu-Buddhist. There are tribal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa with religious dimensions we cannot begin to construe. There is intra-Christian factionalism in a few countries (though seldom lethal); but within the Muslim world, again, numerous muffled reports of very lethal factionalism. I see many passing reports of attacks on Shia Muslims in Pakistan, for instance, by Sunnis; and in Iraq, the attacks have gone both ways. This is a whole dimension of life -- indeed, a way of life for hundreds of millions of the world's people, more present to them than hunger or disease -- that is largely invisible to us through western media. An uncheckable number is flashed in the Jerusalem Post, is briefly "linked" all over, and then fades into electronic oblivion. It is a similar case with the big climate scare being promoted this month in Copenhagen -- which does enjoy the attention of the media. In that case, various numbers are routinely cited, about future temperature change and sea levels, which are in their nature unknowable. As one knowing commentator put it, "The world's oceans will rise at least one inch during the coming century, give or take three feet." It is against this background of unknowable numbers, that I recommend we halt this season -- at the still, knowable, solsticial point -- to consider a world in which Christ had not been born. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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