We should consider it a preview of coming horrors.
In Libya, terrorists affiliated with the Islamic State shot and beheaded groups of Ethiopian Christians, echoing a similar atrocity earlier this year committed against Egyptian Christians in Libya.
In African schools, Boko Haram murderers question students about their religion. If they reply “Christian,” or prove unable to answer questions about the Koran, they are murdered in cold blood.
Syrian Christians have met the same fate, as have coreligionists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, including Gaza under the Islamist fist wielded by Hamas.
The Islamist crusade — the word is used advisedly — against Christianity has grown so bloody that even the Vatican, long accustomed to remaining silent in hopes of not inflaming the madness even further, has finally spoken out.
“The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard,” Pope Francis said in February, after the murder of Egyptian Copts in Libya. “It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants.”
Under different circumstances, the pontiff might have added that it also makes no difference whether the victims are Jewish, Kurdish, Hindu, Buddhist or the wrong variety of Muslim.
All have been victims of the Islamist reflex for murder. All can testify to the bloodlust and fanaticism that drive ISIS, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, the Taliban, et. al.
If such groups prevail — even within a limited geographical context — make no mistake. Mass murder will grow into genocide. It might be argued that in Iraq or Syria it already approaches that level.
In essence, Islamism is nihilistic, aspiring only to destruction and death, first of its perceived enemies and competitors, ultimately ending in its own self-destruction. In that sense, as well as in its deeply racist nature and hatred of freedom and democracy, Islamism resembles Nazism. The need to destroy it — to remove it from the face of the earth — is no less dire.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
