Imagine that Hamas had won on Oct 7 and the victims were Christians. That’s what happened in Algeria. Islamist and Marxist terrorists during the Algerian War waged a ruthless campaign against the non-Muslim population. Including Jews.
The atrocities by Muslim terrorists included the slitting of women’s throats and babies being murdered by having their heads smashed against walls. The massacres climaxed in the Oran Massacre in which De Gaulle’s corrupt regime refused to protect Christians and Jews from the Muslim mob.
The Catholic Church virtually disappeared in Algeria after the Islamic takeover. The dead included martyred members of the church.
The memory of violence during Algeria’s civil conflict in the 1990s is central to the identity of the Catholic Church in the country. During that period, several clergy and women and men religious were killed, including monks murdered during the Tibhirine abbey massacre in 1996 and Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran. Catholic monk Jean-Pierre Schumacher was left to tell of the ill-famed 1996 massacre at the Algerian monastery of Tibhirine in which seven of his confreres were brutally killed.
The Church’s position on these massacres has been surreal, at once honoring the dead and their killers.
Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria by Islamists between 1994 and 1996, were beatified Saturday during a Mass in Oran.
Archbishop Paul Desfarges of Algiers noted the “thousands of victims of the Algerian civil war,” calling them anonymous heroes.
“We did not want a beatification between Christians, because these brothers and sisters died among tens and tens of thousands of Algerian” Muslims, he stated.
Algeriaʼs population is almost entirely Muslim.
… because the Christians were killed or driven out.
Relatives of those beatified were received by Muslim dignitaries at the Ibn Badis Grand Mosque, where Mostapha Jaber, an imam, said, “We Muslims associate this event with much joy.”
Pope Leo, in between berating President Trump for standing up to Islamic Terror, paid tribute to the killers.
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