On May 18, 2022, the
European Parliament, one of the European Union’s legislative bodies,
rejected a proposal to discuss the elephant in the room: the rampant
persecution of Christians around the world.
The proposal came in response to the May 12 stoning and burning to
death of Deborah Samuel Jacob (Yakuba), a Christian student in Nigeria murdered by Muslims
for thanking Jesus on her performance in a test, and, therefore,
precipitating an allegation that she had somehow “blasphemed” against
Muhammad. Her murderers also made a video laughing at and mocking her
burning corpse. Using that tragic incident as a catalyst, Jean-Paul
Garraud, a French Member of the European Parliament (MEP), proposed a
debate on the persecution of Christians and Christianophobia.
With a vote of 244 against, 231 in favor, and 19 abstentions, the
proposal was rejected. As the European Union claims to champion human
rights and religious freedom, several of those MEPs who voted for the
proposal could be heard booing and shouting “shame on you!” across the
plenary floor (video here).
Those MEP groups that voted against the proposal included the vast
majority of the European United Left, the Greens, the Social Democrats,
and the Renew Europe group—in a word, and to use American parlance, the
“Left.”
Responding to their hypocrisy and double standards, Jean-Paul Garraud, the MEP who submitted the proposal, lamented
that the European Commission “does not want to designate a coordinator
for the fight against Christianophobia, when a coordinator of this type
was created for anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
Other MEPs were outraged at what they described as “shameful” and
“disgraceful” behavior from the Left. Margarita de la Pisa Carrión, of
the Spanish political party Vox, and an MEP since 2019, tweeted:
“What a shame! The European Parliament does not want to take a stand on
the murder of the young Nigerian for being a Christian. They do not
want to condemn the persecution that Christians are suffering. This is
inexcusable! [Spanish original].”
Similarly, Peter van Dalen, a Dutch MEP, tweeted,
“It is an extremely deep disgrace that a majority of the European
Parliament refused to debate the murder, by stoning, of the Nigerian
Christian student Yakubu, who was falsely accused of blasphemy.”
“Europe should know Deborah Samuel Yakubu’s name,” observed
Jean-Paul Van De Walle, of ADF International (Alliance Defending
Freedom), in Brussels. “This opportunity to speak out against a brutal
and unjust murder of an innocent teenage girl—based on a false
accusation of ‘blasphemy,’ no less—has been unforgivably lost. Nobody
should be persecuted because of their faith, but it seems that EU has
turned a blind eye.”
