Prince Charles Blames Social Media for Stoking Fear, Conflict Between Christians, Muslims and Jews
Prince Charles, the U.K.'s Prince of Wales, has claimed that "no one culture" holds the "complete truth," and encouraged Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others to focus on unity instead of division and divisiveness.
"There has perhaps never been a greater need for cultural connectivity," Charles said during his visit to the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, Premier Christian reported on Wednesday.
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"In the world in which we now live, with fears about 'the other' — whether that be Sunni, Shia, Jew, Christian, Yazidi, Hindu or Buddhist — stoked and spread through social media, and amplified by those who would seek to suppress understanding, rather than promote it, there is an urgent need for calm reflection and a genuinely sustained, empathetic and open dialogue across boundaries of faith, ethnicity and culture," he added at the center, aimed at fostering dialog between the West and the Islamic worlds.
Charles urged believers of different religions to "rediscover and explore what unites rather than what divides us."
When calling on people to learn from one another, he argued that "no one culture contains the complete truth."
In previous speeches on religion, Charles has focused deeply on the suffering and elimination of Christians across the Middle East.
When honoring the consecration of a Syriac Orthodox Church in London in November 2016, he said:
"It is surely deeply encouraging, at a time when the members of the Syriac Orthodox Church in their homelands of Syria and Iraq are undergoing such desperate trials and such appalling suffering, that in Britain the Syriac Church is able to expand and gain in strength,"
He added: "May the congregation of this cathedral, and all the members of the Syriac Orthodox Church, wherever they may be, be blessed with the kind of courage and faith that can ultimately transcend the unbearable misery and anguish that have been so cruelly inflicted upon you, your loved ones and your brethren.
Christians in Syria and Iraq have been driven out of their homelands along with millions of other citizens due to civil war and persecution at the hands of the Islamic State terror group, which has vowed on numerous occasions to kill out all followers of Christ.
Charles himself warned in December 2015 that unless things change, Christianity may be driven out entirely from the region.
"Their suffering is symptomatic of a very real crisis which threatens the very existence of Christianity in the land of its birth," he said at the time, reflecting on projections from Aid to the Church in Need that the faith could be eradicated from Iraq within five years.
And in his Christmas message at the end of last year, he called it "beyond all belief" that the massacre of Christians and other religious minorities continues even decades after the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed.
"I was born in 1948, just after the end of World War II in which my parents' generation had fought, and died, in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe," the Prince of Wales said back then.
"That, nearly 70 years later, we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past," he added.
