Christian refugee children living in the German city of Leipzig are being mercilessly bullied by their Muslim counterparts, a local priest has revealed.
Andreas Knapp is a 58-year-old Catholic priest who works with migrant youths, many of whom fled the Middle East along with their families amid fighting between the Islamic State group and Kurdish militants.
He shared with German radio broadcaster Deutschlandradio Kultur how many of the Christian refugee children he encounters are relentlessly persecuted by Muslim children. In fact, the priest revealed that Muslim children were "disrespectful" of Christians and that they even "hated" Christians who had come from the Middle East.
In one case, a Christian boy was bullied by Muslim classmates at a school for integration that he had to change schools, according to Breitbart, and in another case, a 13-year-old boy was regularly threatened by Muslim children because of his faith.
"There were a lot of children who were all Muslims, and I was the only Christian," Father Knapp recalled the teen telling him. "When I would go to them and say, 'Let's play football', they said, 'No, you're a Christian!' Then they insulted me because I eat pork."
Knapp explained that many of Muslims hate Christians because they see them as collaborators with Western governments because they share the same religion.
As earlier reported, persecution watchdog Open Doors, together with Action on Behalf of Persecuted Christians (AVC), Central Council of Oriental Christians in Germany (ZOCD) and European Mission Society (EMC) found that hundreds of Christians and other religious minority groups in German migrant shelters have suffered attacks from both Muslim refugees and Muslim staff of the migrant shelters.
The nonprofit organization conducted a survey from February 15 to September 30, 2016 investigating instances of persecution among Christians in German refugee camps scattered across different states.
The survey results showed that at least 743 Christian refugees have suffered from religiously motivated attacks from both Muslim refugees and Muslim refugee camp staff. The attacks reportedly happened "several times" for most of the victims (83 percent); only 8 percent said they were attacked just once.
More than half (56 percent) of the 743 Christian refugees were beaten and violently assaulted, while 42 percent reported they or their family members were issued death threats by Muslim refugees and Muslim camp staff and volunteers.
The survey results also showed that sexual attacks happened to 44 of the Christian refugees affected by persecution.
While these numbers seem a lot, these are "most likely ... the tip of the iceberg in regard to the number of religiously motivated attacks on Christian refugees and other religious minorities," the report said, adding that more cases could have been documented if there were more staff to collect data. "It must be assumed that there is a high number of unreported cases."
