Ideologically Inconvenient Genocide
Does genocide exist if the religion of its victims doesn’t align itself with the agenda of the Left?
According to Open Doors USA, an organization that describes itself as “a community of Christians who come together to support persecuted believers in more than 60 countries,” an average of 345 Christians are killed, 105 churches and other Christian buildings are burned or attacked, and 219 Christians are detained without trial, arrested, sentenced, and imprisoned — every month.
Sadly those totals will only get bigger because violence against Christians is on the rise worldwide. Last Sunday, six people, including a pastor, were murdered in an attack on a Christian church in the African nation of Burkina Faso. The story barely made a ripple in the mainstream media.
A week earlier no one could ignore the coordinated atrocity that took place in Sri Lanka. A series of bombings at three churches, four hotels, and a housing project were all aimed at the country’s Christian population. Those attacks killed more than 250 and wounded more than 500 on Easter Sunday, one of Christianity’s most important holy days.
Yet what the media couldn’t ignore, they shamefully attempted to realign with the progressive agenda. “Christianity under attack? Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West,” stated the headline of a piece by The Washington Post, which further noted, “The attacks, which targeted a religious minority in a predominantly Buddhist country, also resonated abroad — especially in Europe. To some, it was further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack.”
Christian are under attack. Nonetheless, the WaPo article asserts otherwise, adding, “The theme of Christianity under attack has been a recurring one for many activists in the United States and Europe.”
The propagandist game being played here? The Post doesn’t like the fact that these so-called “activists” held Muslims accountable, and also criticized those that didn’t, especially those who embrace an odious double standard of quickly standing with “Muslim” victims while failing to identify Christian victims as Christian. People like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who instead referred to the Sri Lankan slaughter victims as “Easter worshippers.”
Pure coincidence? As columnist Dennis Prager doesn’t think so. “As they both spelled ‘worshipers’ the same idiosyncratic way and used the term ‘Easter worshippers,’ it is likely that either they had the same writers or Clinton copied Obama,” he writes. Prager further notes that when Muslims were victims of the New Zealand attack, both Obama and Clinton made it clear they were grieving with the “the Muslim community” and “the global Muslim community,” respectively.
In another effort to bolster the progressive narrative, the Post asserted that while Christian minorities “are targeted around the world, analysts say that the vast majority of terrorism victims globally are Muslims.”
What the Post didn’t say? The vast majority of those victims are killed by their fellow Muslims. Moreover as Open Doors reveals, Islamic oppression also fuels Christian persecution in eight of the top 10 most oppressed countries on their Worldwide Watch List.
Christians themselves are quite familiar with that loathsome reality. They have been fleeing their long-established Middle East homelands in droves. In Iraq, their numbers have decreased from 1.6 million to less than 100,000, and in Syria, from 360,000 to about 25,000. “I think we have no more hope,” declared Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, ecumenical director for the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church of America. “Middle East Christians have no nation that protects them openly.”
What about Europe? While France mourned the intensely covered burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral, the mainstream American media ignored the reality that 875 French churches were vandalized in 2018, with some being burned and others being smeared with feces.
The Washington Post’s take? The paper asserted “the vast majority of acts were minor.”
The Washington Post is hardly alone in the effort to downplay inconvenient facts. On Monday, a report released by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance recommended that the British media be barred from identifying the Muslim background of terrorists in its reporting. “ECRI considers that, in light of the fact that Muslims are increasingly under the spotlight as a result of recent ISIS-related terrorist acts around the world, fuelling prejudice against Muslims shows a reckless disregard, not only for the dignity of the great majority of Muslims in the United Kingdom, but also for their safety,” it states.
In other words, one is either silent or “Islamophobic.” Even more arrogantly, the report cited the Brexit movement as a contributing factor that “seems to have led to a further rise in ‘anti-foreigner’ sentiment, making it even more important that the British authorities take the steps outlined in our report as a matter of priority.”
Making the suppression of the truth a priority — more familiarly known as “banning hate speech” — is the real message being sent here.
What about America? “In the last 60 years, the anti-religious, anti-American left has conducted a relentless assault on believers and their beliefs, suppressing religious liberty, stripping the public square of religious expression and memory, and, in the process, removing the underpinnings of our democratic order,” stated author David Horowitz, whose new book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, spells out that agenda in no uncertain terms. “What inspired me to write this book was the realization that the left’s hatred for Christianity is also its hatred for America itself.”
That hatred is driven by the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our nation the American Left sees as the chief impediment to the “fundamental transformation” they so fervently desire. And perhaps nothing demonstrates that hatred better than their ongoing efforts to remove or destroy historical artifacts that “offend” them — even as they seemingly remain stunningly oblivious to the searing irony that their penchant for doing so makes them exactly like ISIS.
Realistically, the Supreme Court is the only institution standing in the Left’s way, with two rulings for the Little Sisters of the Poor and Colorado baker Jack Phillips overturning lower courts more than willing to elevate leftist dogma above First Amendment protections.
Nonetheless, the assault continues: California is proposing a bill that would force priests to divulge what they hear during confession, or face possible imprisonment.
As for the Left’s obsession with Islamophobia — even as “moderate” Muslims in Saudi Arabia are on an execution spree in a nation where homosexuality is a capital offense and women remain second-class citizens in adherence with Sharia Law — it is easily explained by an ancient proverb: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
And with friends like that, one can’t expect the American Left to acknowledge the reality of Christian genocide.