Category: Europe
Violent attacks against Christians spike in Europe; France leading the way with anti-Christian hate crimes: Report
Christians are brutally persecuted the world over. According to the watchdog group Open Doors, over 380 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith, and over 4,476 were killed for their faith in 2024 alone.
While the top 10 worst countries for Christians are all in Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent — Nigeria, for instance, saw over 300 Christian schoolchildren abducted during a raid by bandits on Friday — Christians are also subjected to violent attacks, discrimination, and state suppression in supposedly civilized Western nations.
’15 incidents featured satanic symbols or references.’
The U.S. and Canada have together, for instance, seen thousands of acts of hostility against churches in recent years.
Across the Atlantic, a British court handed a grieving father a criminal sentence last year for praying silently near the abortion clinic that killed his unborn son. In France, Christians were reportedly arrested at gunpoint for peacefully protesting the mockery of their faith during the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. In Spain, a maniac broke into a monastery in November 2024, savagely attacking several people and fatally bludgeoning a Franciscan monk. Farther afield, an Islamic terrorist stabbed an Assyrian bishop on April 15, 2024, in an Australian church.
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, a Vienna-based watchdog group, recently revealed that violent attacks on Christians spiked in Europe and the U.K. last year.
The watchdog noted in its annual report that a total of 2,211 anti-Christian hate crimes were documented by European governments and civil society organizations in 2024.
OIDAC hinted that the actual number of hate crimes may be much higher, as surveys indicate they are grossly underreported. In Poland, for example, nearly 50% of Catholic priests surveyed indicated that they were met with aggression sometime in the past year, yet over 80% failed to report such incidents.
RELATED: ‘Mass slaughter’: Trump moves to help Nigerian Christians under attack
Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images.
Nevertheless, OIDAC indicated that this reflects a general decrease over 2023 — a year when there were 2,444 reported hate crimes. The decrease is partly the result of a dip in recorded incidents in France but largely the result of “lower figures reported by U.K. police, which noted a change in methodology in its official report,” the report reads.
Of the 516 anti-Christian hate crimes independently recorded by OIDAC last year, the most frequent form of violence was vandalism, at 50% of reported incidents, followed by arson attacks, 15%; desecration, 13%; physical assaults, 7.5%; theft of religious objects, 5.5%; and threats, accounting for 4% of incidents. These figures do not account for burglaries at religious sites, of which there were nearly 900 additional recorded cases.
While reported anti-Christian hate crimes have generally decreased, the number of personal attacks — including assault, harassment, and threats — “rose from 232 in 2023 to 274 in 2024.”
The watchdog indicated on the basis of police and civil society data that the top five European nations most affected by anti-Christian hate crimes last year were, in descending order, France, Britain, Germany, Austria, and Spain.
Among the incidents highlighted in the worst-rated country, France, were the destruction of historic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer by an arsonist on Sept. 2, 2024, and the March 11, 2024, vandalism of a church and desecration of the cemetery in the village Clermont-d’Excideuil, where “Isa will break the cross” and “Submit to Islam” were spray-painted on graves, the war memorial, and the church door.
Since many of the offenders have not been apprehended, the watchdog group could not say definitively what is driving this trend. However, among the 93 cases OIDAC documented wherein the perpetrators’ motives or affiliations could be established, “the most common were linked to radical Islamist ideology (35), radical left-wing ideology (19), radical right-wing ideology (7), and other political motives (11). Additionally, 15 incidents featured satanic symbols or references.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
How Sweden’s Demographic Winter Turned It Into Europe’s Rape Capital
Sweden has spent the past month debating a court ruling that has unsettled even a nation accustomed to difficult conversations…
Mark Levin reveals the leader he says could save Britain
Leftist policies have gutted Europe, with the U.K. and France serving as prime examples — once proud bastions of Western civilization, now barely recognizable as native cultures are systematically eroded under the guise of unchecked mass migration. Free speech is a relic of the past, crushed by tyrannical censors. Sky-high taxes strangle the working man, and suffocating bureaucratic overreach is the hallmark of these failing socialist regimes.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer sits at the helm of Britain’s descent into its dystopian nightmare.
“This is the guy that allowed these gang rapes by Pakistani immigrants of English girls that went on for years,” Mark Levin says, adding that under Starmer, “Crime is through the roof and mostly committed by recent immigrants” who are valued above natives.
England is a picture of what the United States was hurtling toward under Democratic rule. If Donald Trump hadn’t pulled our nation back from the cliff, Levin predicts we would’ve seen “the end” of America.
England needs its own Donald Trump now — a party that can effectively fight tyranny. Levin believes the Tories — the Conservative and Unionist Party — are the answer to Britain’s woes.
The party’s leader, Kemi Badenoch, is a woman Levin deeply respects and admires — a “superstar,” he calls her.
“She is brilliant. She is courageous. She is trying to defend Western culture and principles in Britain — the home of Western culture and principles,” he says.
He then plays a clip from Badenoch’s fiery parliamentary takedown of Keir Starmer’s weak-kneed Israel policy during a Middle East debate on October 14, during which she lambasted Labour’s appeasement of Hamas and vowed unyielding Tory solidarity with Israel’s fight against Islamist terror.
“The response from some in the West — the equivocation, the indulgence in whataboutery, and the drawing of false equivalence — shows how far moral clarity has eroded. And we have got a job to do here at home, Mr. Speaker, to fix this,” she fired.
She went on to praise President Trump for masterminding the Gaza ceasefire and condemned Starmer and his spineless Labour cronies for “rewarding terrorism” by recognizing Palestine sans hostage releases, for making “the wrong decisions time and again” that gutted Britain’s Middle East clout, and for their mealy-mouthed weakness that only emboldens Hamas butchers.
“She is fantastic,” Levin says.
“I hope she becomes prime minister,” he adds.
To hear more of his analysis, watch the clip above.
Want more from Mark Levin?
To enjoy more of “the Great One” — Mark Levin as you’ve never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
NATO Member’s Top Court Considers Whether Saying Men And Women Are Different Is A War Crime
Finland’s Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday about whether quoting the Bible is illegal ‘hate speech’ under its war crimes laws.
