Don’t blame the Church for terrorism
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Below its report criticising the Church of England for naively baptising and confirming an Iraqi asylum seeker who wasn’t what he seemed, yesterday’s Daily Telegraph offered us another headline, suggesting a level of deception infinitely worse than false conversion: “Bomber took cake decorating course”.
How appalling! How dare you pipe out ganache to pretend you are one of us! What will these dastardly immigrants think of next?
I don’t mean to belittle what happened in Liverpool on Sunday. Emad al-Swealmeen, an Iraqi asylum seeker, died when an improvised bomb went off in the back of a taxi. He was allegedly on his way to the Remembrance service at Liverpool’s vast Cathedral, the place where he was prepared for confirmation, photographed smiling beside the Bishop. Had he succeeded in exploding his home-made bomb as worshippers made their way from the remembrance of deaths past, he would have caused carnage. This was wickedness itself.
But the fall-out from this incident has laid the blame at the very church he was seeking to blow up. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is reportedly appalled that the Church of England is naively complicit in ‘gaming’ the immigration system, converting hundreds of asylum seekers as a way of helping them avoid deportation to countries where being a Christian could be a death sentence. But that simply isn’t true.
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