Echoes

Over the past 60 years, Islamic countries throughout the Arab crescent have practice judenrein—the calculated persecution and ultimate ethic cleansing of the vast majority of Jews within their population. The left-leaning media throughout the world remained silent, or worse, decided that the real villain was Israel, because it “oppressed” the Palestinians and therefore drove these events.

There’s an old saying that Jews are “the canary in the coal mine.” When an evil ideology works to exterminate them, it’s a harbinger of future attempts to exterminate others.

Over the Christmas weekend, bomb blasts in Nigerian Churches killed dozens of Christians who were attending Christmas eve and Christmas day masses. The bombings, perpetrated by an Islamist group called Boko Haram. Although these atrocities have gotten some coverage in the MSM, the stories are fleeting and under-reported. The administration and state department responses have been muted at best, and even the Vatican has remained largely silent on the events.

It’s reasonable to invert the situation and ask what the coverage would be like if a Christian majority has bombed a mosque on the first day of Ramadan? The MSM would be outraged, expressing horror at the viciousness of the attacks. Stories asking whether it might happen here would be rampant along with handwringing about “Islamophobia.” Christian leaders would immediately condemn the violence (as they should) and reach out to the Muslim community.

But in this instance the dominant sound is crickets chirping. Mark Steyn comments:

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King, [Jr.]. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Richard Fernandez notes one country that has not been silent:

Will there be “Western” governments which will match Israel’s dispatch of medical teams to Nigeria? Or would there be more which would denounce the act as inflammatory, divisive and a slander on a great creed of peace?

There are likely to be those who will argue that Israel is sending relief for their own political ends. Doubtless it is, but it is because they perceive it as being in their own interest to help the Nigerian Christians, something which many Western politicans cannot say about themselves.

And that is a shame. For there are many nonviolent and peaceful ways in which the evil which killed people across Nigeria on Christmas Day may be fought. One of them is using words to name it. The other is sending material relief to its victims. Still another is to open the doors to those it persecutes. None of these partake of war. None of these harm a hair on the head of al-Qaeda or Boko Haram.

And the evil that invaded the Nigerian churches on Christmas eve? Our leadership in the United States, along with most leaders in the West refuse to use “words to name it.” It’s not appeasement—oh no. It’s multiculturalism run amuck, it’s fear of Islamic outrage, it’s … echos of 1938. A different time, a different place, and a different ideology, but no less—echoes.