Many admit that Asia's honeymoon with the West has come to an end as Asian nations are predicted to recover faster than elsewhere in the post-coronavirus world.

The worst-hit countries in Europe, such as the UK, Italy France and Spain, along with the US, have failed their people as death tolls from the coronavirus have surged to tens of thousands.

Their superior healthcare systems and social welfare built on high-tech technology have suffered an irreparable beating while humble Asia has withstood the crisis with its head held high.

Asian students who used to flock to temples of knowledge in the West have started to believe that Asia has arrived after it weathered the storm better than the wealthy West.

Look at the US, where the blame game is still on, while the UK could not even save its prime minister from falling victim to the pandemic.

Financial consultancy firms have already pressed the panic button on Western countries.

"It does make sense to tilt your portfolio towards China or towards Asia generally because the virus is moving from that region ... to the West, where it is unfortunately not yet contained," said Andrew Harmstone, a senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley, recently.

While central banks in the US and Europe are running out of tools to contain the economic fallout from the disease, many Asian economies learned a hard lesson from previous crises and successfully built strong sovereign balance sheets.

The Asian central banks have more room to use monetary policy to kickstart their economies.

Advantage Asia

Severe contagious outbreaks are not new to Asia. The new coronavirus has often been likened to the SARS epidemic in 2003, which greatly affected China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore and other Asian countries. They deployed all their energies to cushion their people and societies.

Governments in the region copied China's response to the outbreak in Wuhan, where the virus was arrested after emerging there late last year.

Meanwhile, in the West, anger and despair have spilt over to the streets over governments' failure to respond strongly when the situation was clear and called for a clear-cut medical and social strategy.

When the New Year started on a sad note, parts of East Asia were a scary place to be. The coronavirus was rapidly spreading across mainland China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan and beyond. Many foreign nationals began to flee the region.

Now that the table is turned on the West, Asia has emerged as one of the safest places in the world.

With the notable exception of Japan and Singapore, Asian governments have reported a steady decline in new cases and have eased lockdown measures. However, the situation in the West remains dire.

Too slow to act

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted that steps to implement life-saving social distancing measures faced "a lot of pushback" in the early stages of the outbreak in the US.

The European Union's chief scientist resigned over the slow implementation of preventive measures.

By February, many things about the new virus were widely known — its severity and ability to spread quickly and lethally - and yet countries in the West failed or refused, to act and a general sense of complacency prevailed.

In the US, a nationwide social distancing norm was implemented on March 16 even though the country's first case was reported much earlier.

The UK too dragged its feet and lockdown and stay-at-home orders were put in place in late March, a gap of two months after the first case was reported.

Asian countries, however, acted swiftly. Despite not being a member of the World Health Organization, Taiwan nevertheless put in place a world-class response. Singapore also earned kudos for its response.

Superior healthcare

Most European countries have health systems that are better funded than their Asian counterparts. The US is the pioneer of modern medicine. The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is considered the best in the world.

Citizens in these countries have access to better healthcare and enjoy a high standard of living and purchasing power due to increased government and private investments. Besides, government initiatives promote medical insurance.

Special incentives from government agencies in the form of grants and research and development funding encourage people to hit the path of innovation to make public health more efficient.

Emerging tech trends like 3-D printing, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology were first to hit the road in these countries. They added more sheen to well-established healthcare systems.

Fitness-savvy millennials and their health-conscious parents became the driving force to make healthcare systems in the West superior.

Before the coronavirus wreaked havoc, Asians were looking at the West with wonder. However, having managed to keep the coronavirus at bay, the trend has reversed in Asia's favour.

Academic excellence

According to reports, the top study destinations for Asian students were the US, UK, Germany and Australia.

With over 370,000 students in the 2018-19 academic year, China sent the largest number of students to the US for 10 years in a row. Over the past decade, the number of Chinese students enrolled in American colleges has more than trebled.

India, second after China, has 250,000 students in the US. It is reported that there are 1.1 million foreign students in the country.

The COVID-19 outbreak will cause a huge shift in student intake.

In March, several US universities moved classes online and asked students to vacate campus housing. Classes over video conferencing apps such as Zoom have become the new normal.

In Australia, where the fall semester starts in late February or early March, more than 107,000 Chinese students — 56 per cent of the total Chinese student population — are still outside Australia and unable to return to resume classes.

"This is the worst possible time for Australian education providers because it comes at the very start of our academic year," said Phil Honeywood, chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia.

A new report predicts that more Asian students are likely to pursue higher education in Asian universities in the coming years.

Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and China will occupy the places once held high by the US, UK, Germany and Australia.

European social model

Poor Asians often admired the tight social welfare net in force in almost all Western nations. The catchphrase "European social model" promoted social justice and social cohesion.

The welfare state in Europe has resulted in thriving economies, livable and trustful societies and efficient polities that have grown in strength to face all sorts of demographic, economic, financial and political challenges.

Regardless of their differences, the social welfare models in all these Western countries were designed to protect people against the risks associated with unemployment, parental responsibilities, healthcare, old age, housing and social exclusion.

Now the greatest health crisis in a century has shifted the focus of the world from the West to the East.

• Richard Fang First published in La-Croix. Republished with permission.

In perhaps the only sign of action from the West to the increased intensity of Christian persecution, France has opened itself up to refugees from Iraq, who are being driven out under pain of death by ISIS.

This is a welcome reversion to form for France, which ever since the Middle Ages has periodically found ways to protect Christian minorities abroad.

This is a great beginning — but it is such a small response to the magnitude of Christian persecution, happening not just in Iraq and Syria, but in Nigeria and Egypt as well.

Why hasn't there been a greater response from the once-Christian West to the plight of Christians?

It's not for lack of outrageous events.

The International Society for Human Rights estimates that 80 percent of acts of religious discrimination in the world have Christians as their victims.

And these are starting to poke through the headlines.

The purge in Mosul attracted some attention, the kidnapping and threatened murder of mostly Christian girls by Boko Haram even more.

But much less is said about the fate of Syrian Christians or Copts.

Still less is said about even more obscure religious minorities like Yazidi and Druze who face discrimination from ISIS.

One reason for our silence, suggested by John Allen Jr. in his book The Global War on Christians, is that the modern humanitarian West has difficulty seeing Christians as "native" to third-world nations.

Their imagination of "global" Christianity is one of a religion implanted by Europeans and Americans through a violent, racist, and discredited colonialism.

Of course this isn't true in these cases, as there were Christians in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt long before there were any in Britannia or Biloxi.

Allen also cited French philosopher Regis Debray's view that in Christian persecution the victims are "'too Christian' to excite the Left, and 'too foreign' to excite the Right." Continue reading

Source

• Michael Brendan Dougherty in The Week

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com.

The forces fighting Israel are essentially the same as those trying to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and those seeking to take over Afghanistan on the borders with Russia - radical Sunni jihadists, most notably the group ISIS who look back to the tradition of the conquering caliphate.

Their sworn enemy is not primarily the liberal West or the imperial United States, but instead Catholic and Orthodox Christendom.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State stretching from Iraq to Syria, has called on Muslims to rally behind his pan-Islamic project:

"Rush O Muslims to your state. It is your state.

"Syria is not for Syrians and Iraq is not for Iraqis. The land is for the Muslims, all Muslims.

"This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills."

This should come as no surprise to anyone.

For decades Sunni jihadists have waged war on Christian oriental communities across the Middle East and North Africa, while other Islamic extremists are fighting Russian Orthodoxy in the Caucasus and throughout Central Asia.

In novel and frightening ways, this pits the militant strands of Sunni Islam not only against the more traditional forms of Sufism, including the Alawites in Syria, but also the remnants of Christendom.

I shall return to the importance of Christendom in due course. But first, a number of points need to be made about the contemporary global geopolitical situation.

The end of Westphalia and the rise of "neo-medievalism"

To begin with, we are witnessing the death throes of the Westphalian system that was dominated by national states and transnational markets, in which great powers could simply buy off small countries and rule by proxy. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion and Ethics
• Image: The Telegraph
• See also: Christendom at War, in Catholic Vote and Persecution of Christians by ISIS contradicts idea of a Caliphate in The Conversation.

Their action was reported by the Russian news agency Interfax, which also carried a Russian Orthodox statement that it "vividly indicates Russia's high authority in the Middle East, especially among the Christian minorities living there".

"It is for the first time since the Nativity of Christ that we Christians of Qalamoun living in the villages of Saidnaya, Maara Saidnaya, Maaloula and Maaroun are under threat of banishment from our land," said a letter from the residents to the Russian leadership and the Russian Orthodox Church.

"We prefer death to exile and life in refugee camps, and so we will defend our land, honour and faith, and will not leave the land on which Christ walked.

"The Christians of Qalamoun believe that the purpose of the Western-backed terrorists is to eliminate our presence in what is our native land, and with some of the most revolting methods as well, including savage murders of ordinary people," they added.

"We see the Russian Federation as a powerful factor of global peace and stability. Russia pursues a firm line in the defense of Syria, its people and its territorial integrity."

The letter adds: "None of the about 50,000 people — physicians, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs — who are willing to sign this application want to leave their homes. We possess all that we need, we are not asking for money."

Archpriest Nikolay Balashov, an official of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, said the granting of citizenship was "hardly possible from a judicial standpoint".

He said he believed the residents' action was guided by the intention to stress that "the Christians of the East have known for centuries that no other country would take care of their interests better than Russia".

Meanwhile, the leader of the Melkite Catholic Church, Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, has said more than 450,000 Christians have fled during Syria's civil war, out of a total Christian population of about 1.75 million.

Sources:

Interfax

Interfax

BBC

Image: Beliefnet

"This powerful energy today strives to finally break with Christianity, which controlled its totalitarian impulses during 17 centuries," said Metropolitan Hilarion in an article quoted by a Russian news agency.

"Eventually, it unconsciously strives to set up an absolute dictatorship that demands total control over each member of society."

Continue reading