by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Anti-Christian vandalism is spiking in Europe, where investigators found a surprising culprit to the rising number of church attacks and desecrations of religious symbols in France and other historic bastions of Christianity.
Richard Bernstein, writing for RealClearInvestigations, headed to France to interview residents about the climate that has led to a quadrupling of anti-Christian incidents between 2008 and 2019, according to the French Ministry of the Interior.
“It’s safe to say that there are many attacks that have nothing to do with extremist groups,” Ellen Fantini, head of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe, told Bernstein, with Bernstein himself uncovering evidence that Muslim immigrants “account for [only] a small fraction of anti-Christian crimes.”
Most of the culprits—60%—were surprisingly native French youth, with the rest either homeless or disgruntled lone actors with a score to settle against the church.
“There is a mood against the church, against faith…there is a discourse against the church [in French culture and media],” Father Joseph Dequick, a priest in Lavour—where two boys were found guilty of a church arson—told Bernstein.
The trend seems to be coupled with a rise in antisemitic violence, with French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner has reported a 74% spike in antisemitic incidents between 2017 and 2018 in February.
Across the English channel, the U.K., which also experienced a slew of church arsons over the past few years, recorded its highest number of antisemitic incidents in 2018, a 16% increase from 2017’s total, “which was itself a record annual total,” according to Community Security Trust.
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