A charity has come out against accusations of persecution of Christians in migrant homes saying that religion had nothing to do with any attacks.
The Workers’ Samaritan Federation, a charity which runs a migrant home in Berlin, has come out against a report by the Christian Open Doors foundation.
Open Doors claims that Christians in the Berlin migrant home have been the subjects of violence and threats from their Muslim counterparts, and released a report showing that 204 of the 231 migrants in the home had been attacked or threatened for religious reasons.
The Worker’s Samaritan Federation told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) that the allegations of religious motivation were nonsense, Die Presse reports.
The charity claims that it’s not as cut and dry to find out the motivation of attacks against Christians in the home. The Managing Director of Open Doors, Markus Rode, has countered by accusing churches in Germany of covering up the extent of the violence in the migrant homes they operate.
Mr. Rode’s comments echo the allegations of Christians and Yazidis who claim that translators in migrant homes often lie or outright deny the existence of Muslim on Christian/Yazidi violence.
The Westphalia Provincial church, an evangelical protestant group, has also spoke out against Open Doors and has called the group “untrustworthy.”
The church says that the group is trying to inflame anti-Islamic opinion within the Christian community and that they and their study should be “rejected.” They called the methodology used by Open Doors as “PEGIDA-reasoning,” likening them to the Dresden-based protest group who reject what they see as the Islamification of Europe.
The claims that Christians are not subject to sectarian violence, and especially new converts to Christianity from Islam, flies in the face of evidence and reports that come not only from Germany, but from countries like Austria as well.
A migrant in the Austrian capital of Vienna expressed his concern that he could be the target of Islamic retaliation for his conversion and called his new found faith a potential “death sentence,” saying he feared walking alone in certain Muslim neighbourhoods because of the risk to his safety.
The FAS and the charity do not deny that violent acts and threats are being carried out against Christians but rather question the motivation behind them.
Paul Kurt of the Central Council of Eastern Christians in Germany (ZOCD) endorsed the findings of Open Doors saying: “These are not isolated cases, I do not know any accommodations from Germisch to Hamburg where we did not come across such cases,” adding: “I’ve seen families who have returned voluntarily” to their home countries “because of threats.”
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