Belgian
Priest to Stand Trial for Hatred for Citing Fears of Coming Islamic Persecution
LifeSite ^ | March 30, 2006 | John-Henry Westen
BRUSSELS, March 30, 2006
(LifeSiteNews.com) - A Catholic priest in Belgium known popularly as Fr. Père
Samuel is to be brought to trial for hate crimes according to a decision
reached last week by the Belgian judiciary. According to the Brussels
Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com ), the
priest, who fled from Turkey under Islamic persecution, is being prosecuted for
warning against Islamic fundamentalism.
His offending statement:
"Every thoroughly islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time
bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when
they have become a minority."
After hearing of his upcoming
trial the priest, who was suspended by his bishop but nonetheless remains a
popular clergyman, repeated his statement and warns against "the islamic
invasion" of the West.
While that sentiment may seem
bitter to some, it is a sincere conviction for many prelates coming from
Islamic nations.
In a startling statement which
received very little coverage, the Patriarch of the Greek Melkite Catholic
Church, stated in an interview published last October "According to me,
after 11 September, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities
from the Arabic world."
The Patriarch, who oversees some
20,000 Melkite Catholics in Syria, explained in an interview with the Italian
magazine 30 Days, "Islam is our milieu, the context in which we live and
with which we are historically associated. We have lived 1,400 years in the
middle of them. We understand Islam from the inside. When I hear a verse of the
Koran, it's not something foreign to me. It's an expression of the civilization
to which I belong."
Regarding the 'plot' to oust
Christians he stated, "Our simple existence ruins the equations whereby
Arabs can't be other than Moslems, and Christians but be
westerners." If, he said, "the Middle East is cleansed of all
the Arabic Christians, the Moslem Arab world and a so-called Christian Western
world will be left face to face. It will be easier to provoke a clash and
justify it with religion.