Hungary is making an immediate donation of 30,000 euros to assist survivors and orphans of the Sri Lanka Easter massacre and is discussing an additional larger gift.
“The Hungarian government is offering nine million Hungarian forints in emergency aid to the severely injured survivors and the orphaned children of the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka,” the State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians and the “Hungary Helps” program announced Monday evening.
The secretary, Azbej Tristan, said that Hungary will examine the possibility of further, larger-scale assistance. After the terrorist attacks resulting in over 300 deaths, the first task is to provide victims with compassion, he said.
Mr. Tristan also criticized efforts to silence the reality that “this was an anti-Christian and anti-Western attack.”
In the United States, liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been called out on social media and elsewhere for avoiding the term “Christians” when speaking of the target of the attacks, preferring to refer to them as “Easter worshipers.”
In his statement Monday, Mr. Tristan said that Christianity is currently the most persecuted religion in the world and yet they receive little attention from “major international organizations and Western governments.”
In 2016, Hungary established its Deputy State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians, making it the only nation in the world with a department of this nature. The secretariat has sent aid to rebuild homes, churches, and schools for persecuted Christians in the Middle East, as well as dozens of scholarships to Christian students in Africa and the Middle East who lost everything to militant Islamic terror groups.
Last December, Hungary partnered with the United States in an alliance to help Christians in the Middle East “recover from genocide and persecution by the Islamic State.”
The government of Hungary signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “to increase coordination to help communities in the Middle East recover from genocide and persecution by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).”
The agreement between the two nations follows Hungary’s stated policy of taking assistance “to the troubled spots where it’s needed, instead of bringing the trouble and instability to Europe,” said a statement from the Hungarian government.
Hungary has resisted attempts by the European Union (EU) to impose immigration quotas, saying it prefers to focus its humanitarian assistance in afflicted areas so that people do not feel obliged to emigrate.
Mr. Tristan said Monday that although one cannot speak of Christian persecution in the West, there is an increasingly serious problem with the way that western governments treat Christianity at home.
“In the East churches are bombed and in the West they are locked,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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