One of my least successful years of journalism was as News Editor on the Sunday Star in Johannesburg.
I wasn’t a very good News Editor, mainly because I hated Jo’burg and would spend hours looking at mine dumps outside our grey offices and dreaming of beaches.
The other reason was that I spent so much time scouting for off-beat human interest stories that I missed some of the real stories in front of me.
Today, in much of the UK media, that is now an art form – trying to find some ‘angle’ rather than reporting what is happening before our eyes.
Instead of being the first draft of history, it’s the first draft of bang-on chattering class opinion.
Indeed, I believe historians will in decades hence agree that the biggest story of the early 21st Century was not Madonna’s recent toy boy romance. In fact, it wasn’t even the crash of the banks or the 9/11 Twin Towers terror attack.
Instead it was the under-reporting of the worldwide murder of Christians on a scale that Roman Emperor Nero could only have dreamt of.
More Christians are murdered for their faith each year than were ever thrown to the lions in the Coliseum. Yet you barely hear a murmur about it.
Okay, many of us saw TV images of the massacre by religious fanatics at a Kenyan shopping centre. Or in Pakistan where 85 Christians were killed when a Peshawar church was bombed.
In fact, Christians are considered the lowliest form of life in Pakistan, routinely abused and only allowed menial jobs.
But although most newspapers reported those incidents, it was not done in any context. The background is far more chilling.
According to the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, an institution not known for hyperbole, about 100 000 Christians have been killed each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians murdered for their faith somewhere in the world every hour of every day of the year.
You may think that’s an exaggeration, but consider some recent events.
At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq boasted a Christian population of 1.5 million. Today there are probably only 150 000 left. Most have gone into exile, but a staggering number have been killed.
In Orissa, India, hundreds of Christians were hacked to death by machete-wielding radicals and at least 50 000 left homeless.
A Catholic nun, Sister Meena Barwa, was raped during the mayhem, then marched naked and beaten by chanting crowds. Police apparently declined to arrest her attackers.
In Nigeria, the militant movement Boko Haram is responsible for the murder of about 3 000 Christians, often targeting them in their churches.
However, despite the keen competition, North Korea is the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, where a quarter of the country’s 400 000 remaining Christians are living in forced labour camps.
About 300 000 Christians have disappeared altogether and are presumed dead.
In effect, an entire new generation of Christian martyrs is emerging on a staggering scale. So why are we allowing this to happen?
It’s simple. The bulk of the globe’s 2.3-billion Christians being persecuted today are impoverished and usually members of ethnic or cultural minorities. They do not have a voice, despite the ironic fact that most of the powerful nations in the world have majority Christian populations.
But that’s the problem, you see.
The West is so scared of being called racist or imperialist that its feeble leaders would rather say nothing. The same goes for the western media. The TV networks are terrified of losing their credentials in the rougher neighbourhoods of the globe, so they turn a blind eye.
However, as an ex-News Editor, I cannot help feeling that the real story is simpler: it’s not cool to be pro-Christian.
There’s no doubt this is going to backfire on us. First World governments claim to be secular, but that’s irrelevant as our history, ethics and ideals are cemented in Christianity, whether we practice it or not.
So just as you don’t have to be black to be outraged by racial injustice, the persecution of Christians affects us all.
Thank Heavens somebody has the insight and guts to publish this. Journalism in general is at crossroads and yours is not mainstay — keep it up.