Hat tip Investigative Project on Terrorism and Philly.com
Steve Emerson's Investigative project on Terrorism has cross-posted an article by Stu Bykofsky, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, which I think is important enough to also cross-post here. It concerns the world's inaction to the on-going persecution of Christians in Muslim lands.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20130927_Turn_the_other_cheek_.html#8g4cFetkPbLq17uI.99
And why the Christians? Well, the Jews were basically driven out of Muslim countries in the late 1940s when Israel was created. To kill the Jews, they will have to conquer Israel. The Christian minority, however, is there for the killing.
Is it not time for Christians and Jews to stand together? And don't forget the Buddhists, Baha'i and Hindus. It is disgraceful that the world community, as represented by the UN and major powers like the US, will not raise their voices against what is happening to Christians in Muslim lands. We are so concerned with giving refuge to Islamic refugees (real and imagined-like the Brothers Tsarnaev) that we forget about who the real refugees are these days.
I am not calling for the US to send in the Marines. What I do expect, however, is that President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and our UN ambassador Samantha Power raise their voices publicly. This they have not done. I expect the US to make it clear to the countries involved that continued aid will depend on how they treat their religious minorities. I would also expect the US (and other Western countries) to open its arms to Christian and other religious minority refugees. We could also restrict immigration from Islamic countries until this persecution ( not to mention terrorism) stops. (Save your cards and letters. This is not the first time I have said this.)
Instead, we get silence from our leaders all over the West. Will we stand by and allow another Holocaust to occur at the hands of a latter-day Nazi force? I say again; save your cards and letters. What is being done across the Islamic world to its religious minorities is pure Nazism.
Here is another op ed that agrees with you:
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324463604579040654002211502.html
The authors (very left of center) point out at the outset"
"When President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly this week, the speech ran to more than 5,000 words, most of them focused on turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the president never mentioned the continuing genocide conducted in several parts of Sudan by President Omar al-Bashir.
There was a time when Mr. Obama expressed outrage over the mass murder and aerial bombardment of civilians in the Darfur region of western Sudan. In 2007, the then-presidential hopeful said the Western world's silence regarding the slaughter in Sudan would leave "a stain on our souls."
Now President Obama has joined that silence..."
He certainly did not mention the persecution of Christians and carefully avoids any mention at all of "Islamic Terrorism" even though it is a common occurrence someplace in the world and sometimes in the U.S. every day of the year.
This is the "Leader of the Free World" who is afraid to even utter the name of the enemy? In fact he directs that it be scrubbed from US documents and historical records.
You would think that someone who got much of his theological views from the renown Rev. Jeremiah Wright would have imposed some Christian principles in him besides Black Liberation theology.
(Incidentally, Rev. Wrights' daughter was indicted by a federal grand jury several months ago in a 1.25 million dollar laundering scheme. "The Evanses have been charged with more than 10 fraud-related counts. In addition to the alleged money laundering, Wright stands accused of making false statements to federal law enforcement officers and lying to a grand jury. If convicted, Wright could face potentially decades in prison."
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/rev-jeremiah-wright-daughter-indicted-alleged-money-laundering/story?id=18932843
Christians and Jews standing together against Muslims would, in the long view of history, be awfully ironic.
ReplyDeleteJews collaborated with the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, and were admitted to Jerusalem for the first time in centuries. Also, every fragment of the Roman-destroyed Temple that could be found was reverently gathered and incorporated into the first mosque built on the Temple Mount.
Visigothic Catholic kings in Iberia persecuted Jews anyway, but hearing they had collaborated with the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, redoubled their fury. True, a Jewish kahina led twenty years of resistance, in alliance with the not-yet-converted Berbers, in North Africa, but the Umayyad caliphate in Spain was a wonderful time for Jews.
The First Crusade began by killing Jews in Europe before moving on to Palestine, where they killed Jews, local Christians, and Muslims without discrimination.
So now there are Muslims killing Christians and that makes them friends of the Jews now that Jews, thanks to a real estate dispute, are enemies of the Muslims? This too shall pass.
I am not calling for the US to send in the Marines. What I do expect, however, is that President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and our UN ambassador Samantha Power raise their voices publicly.
ReplyDeleteUnless one is prepared to send the marines, or to take other concrete steps that inflict real pain on the perpetrators, raising your voice is called powerless posturing. I would think conservatives would understand that.
Or there's that old communist favorite terminology, "paper tiger." Is that what you want America to be viewed as?
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteSo what should we do, remain silent? Do nothing to assist these people (short of sending in the Marines)?
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteWe're not talking about the long view of history. We are talking about here and now. That's all that counts.
I have a friend who was some kind of adviser on building projects in Bangladesh or someplace around there some years ago. He said they used to come to him with a problem and he would say, "Do X." Some months later they came back to him with another (worse) problem and they would admit that they didn't do "X" but decided to do some other alternative that he knew would surface. Then he would say, in effect, now "Do Y." The same thing would happen months later as the problems grew even worse because they didn't do Y either.
ReplyDeleteFinally, he gave up the job and came back home.
The point of the story is that the situation with the killings of Christians and other atrocities keep getting worse, the alternatives keep getting more difficult, because we don't have good intelligence or use good judgement as to the basic nature of the problem and deal with it at the time.
So when the President watches events go by as a bystander then things deteriorate and we are faced with worse and worse alternatives.
As far as I know, he has yet to publicly condemn these religious killings or even name the perpetrators.
There was a time when tyrants used to carefully consider what America's likely response would be and that would color their decisions. No more.
We are stuck with it for at least another 3 and a half years.
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Gary, I'm still waiting for someone to suggest something we could and should DO about the situation. I would not recommend sending a force in to "save the Christians" while leaving the majority of Muslims to the tender mercies of ISIS, which will kill most of them as some kind of apostate or other.
ReplyDeleteIn line with Miggie's analogy, the time to act would have been when the Syrian uprising was just turning into armed resistance, under the impetus of finding that Assad's troops were ready and willing to shoot down large numbers of civilians -- before the foreign jihadis had flooded in and showed off their guns and battlefield experience. Like Miggie says, the opportunity for that seems to have passed.