The following editorial about the mass slaughter and displacement of Christians was originally publish in an Austrian daily paper. Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who recommended it for translation, sends this brief introductory note:
This is an opinion piece by a former US ambassador to Austria. Given his rocky relationship with Austria at the time of his tenure in Vienna, these words are especially significant. One wishes for the same clarity in the utterances of Austrian politicians. They are elusive…
The editorial from Die Presse, as translated by JLH:
Christians in the Slaughterhouse — The World Is Silent
US air attacks will not be enough to stop the wave of terror in Iraq
by Ronald S. Lauder
The Near East and parts of Central Africa are in the process of losing entire Christian communities that have lived there in peace for centuries. In the north of Nigeria alone, the terrorist group Boko Haram has kidnapped and killed hundreds of Christians. During the Syrian civil war, which has lasted over three years, half a million Christian Arabs were driven out. And Christians have been hounded and killed from Lebanon to Sudan.
Historians may look back on this era and wonder whether humanity has lost its way. Only a few journalists have gone to Iraq to witness the raging of a Nazi-like wave of terror that is sweeping across that land. For the most part, the UN is silent.
The rulers of the world seem to be occupied with other things in the summer of 2014. There are no flotillas embarking for Syria or Iraq. And all those beautiful people and aging rock stars — why are their social antennae not quivering from the slaughter of Christians?
President Barack Obama is to be applauded for ordering air attacks to save tens of thousands of Yazidis from Sunni fanatics. Unfortunately, air attacks alone are not enough to stop the wave of terror.
A Well-Oiled Murder Machine
The Islamic State is not a loose confederation of jihadist groups. It is a military force which has conquered parts of Syria and Iraq. This terror organization is using money from banks and gold from companies in cities it has conquered. On top of that, they have oil resources and ransom money to finance their murder machine. It has become the wealthiest terrorist group in the world. Where it really excels is in the carnage of its medieval orgies of slaughter, ruthlessly directed against Shi’ites, Kurds and Christians.
Shameless Indifference
“They actually beheaded children and put their heads on sticks,” reports a Chaldean-American businessman named Mark Arabo to CNN. He was describing a scene in a park in Mosul.
Finally, 200,000 Aramaeans fled their ancestral home in Nineveh after already having fled from Mosul. The widespread indifference to IS, with its mass executions of Christians and its deadly confrontations with Israel, is not just wrong, but also shameful.
Israel was among the first countries to come to the aid of the Christians in southern Sudan. In contrast to many places in the Near East, Christians can openly practice their religion in Israel. This bond between Jews and Christians makes sense. We share much more than most religions. We read the same Bible and share moral and ethical values.
Unfortunately, we now share a type of anguish: Christians must die for their faith because they are defenseless and because the world looks on indifferently, Good people must come together and put an end to this gruesome wave of terror. We are not powerless. Jewish people understand only too well what can happen if the world is silent. This campaign of murder must be stopped.
Ronald S. Lauder was US ambassador to Austria in 1986-87. He is currently president of the Jewish World Congress.
What is happening to Christians in the lands controlled by Islamic extremists is very similar to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, the outside world preferred to look the other way until Hitler unleashed World War II and lots of non-Jewish Europeans were slaughtered as well.
Now, the world, including the US, EU and their allies is trying hard to ignore this horrible genocide of Christians. The ruling élites of the West hate Christianity so much that they are glad to let Muslim fanatics go on with this carnage. But they should know that their turn can come soon. Muslim fanatics will slaughter atheists and agnostics with the same enthusiasm when they have a chance to do so.
The reason the toothless United Nations Organisation has looked the other way on the slaughter of Christians is that the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation makes up over a third of UN membership. It has also bought up or intimidated a sufficient number of smaller nations to ensure that it has a permanent majority in the UN to ensure that it permanently dominates this body.
Dont expect any help for Christians from the UN.
For me, the biggest red flag was how long the world waited to hear *any* voices from the UN or the MSM to correctly condemn what is occurring in Iraq as crimes against humanity/ethnic cleansing/genocide.
Even now those voices are few and far between, and some of them are trying to use the crimes of ISIS to push their true, far less important, agenda of Syrian regime change.
Maybe Diana West’s been reading your mail? This is from her Town Hall column but it arrived sans URL. I’ll look it up later…
September 9, 2014
Countering “Extremism” Will Never Defeat Jihad
9/4/2014 9:39:00 PM – Diana West
It’s just seven minutes of airtime out of millions since 9/11, but a recent segment of “The Kelly File” on Fox News bears notice. It’s as good an example as any of the state of paralysis that still afflicts the public square since jihad struck Manhattan and Washington, D.C., 13 years ago. We have mourned our dead, fought wars, rebuilt cities, but something still is missing. That something is informed talk about Islam. Frank discussion of the Koran and Muhammad. Without it, there is no stopping the jihad that is shutting down Western civilization.
Host Megyn Kelly interviewed Maajid Nawaz about the Islamic State (ISIL), the latest Muslim horde on a jihad to establish a “caliphate” (pan-Islamic regime) based in sharia (Islamic law). Nawaz could be considered a defector from Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the revolutionary Islamic groups, some violent, some removed from violence, dedicated to the establishment of a caliphate based in Islamic law, from al-Qaida to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Nawaz said goodbye to all that in 2007, he says. In 2008, he and fellow defector Ed Husain founded Quilliam, a British “counter-extremism” foundation named for William Quilliam, a 19th-century British convert to Islam. Abdullah Quilliam, as he became known, opened the first British mosque on Christmas Day, 1889. “Co-exist,” right? It’s no stretch, however, to imagine Sheikh Quilliam at home in Hizb ut-Tahrir as a fatwa-issuing advocate of the caliphate and sharia both. He also issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from fighting for or assisting Britain (“contrary to the sharia”), then fighting Muslim tribes in the Sudan.
Scholar of Islam Andrew Bostom first brought these fatwas to my attention, but they are now accessible on Abdullah Quilliam’s Wikipedia page. Should we take a “counter-extremism” think tank in Quilliam’s name seriously? Could the name have been a mistake? Or is it a joke on gullible infidels? A wink to stealth jihadists?
This piqued my interest in Kelly’s Nawaz interview. Zeroing in on the ISIL beheading of Steven Satloff, she asked: “Where does their thinking come from? … The first reaction many here in the United States and around the world had was these people who are doing this are psychopaths.”
Really? Such mystification wasn’t my first reaction. I know where their thinking comes from. It comes from Islam. Who doesn’t know that but the highly educated and politically empowered? Not for nothing does the immutable Koran say (Surah 47, Verse 4): “Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers, smite them at their necks,” among other directives of open-ended jihad. Then again, take the life of Muhammad, Islam’s “perfect man.” He followed his jihad campaign against the Qurayzah, a vanquished Jewish tribe, by beheading all of the 600 to 900 men in the tribe, setting the example for Muslims through the ages. Mohammed also condemned the tribe’s women and children to slavery, keeping some women for himself and his companions, which, bonus, set an example of jihad sex slavery.
Surely this suggests it’s the extremism of Islam that requires “countering.”…
[…]
I wonder if “state of paralysis is a corollary of Stuck on Stupid…
And yet were forced to buy OPEC’s Blood oil so the damn Polarbears wont be harmed and to appease the granola muncher’s/tree huggers [redacted to “consummate sexual congress with] THE GREENS
The mainline churches in the U.S., and the U.S. govt. look the other way. Not a peep from my pastor about the Christian genocide, although he’ll discuss it privately.
We always have to hear the real truth from non-taqqiyya Muslims like Anjem Choudary, Omar Bakri or this man, for instance. Or IS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabab, and the likes.
And still our politicians will peddle the same denialist drivel over and over again, simply because they can’t bear the thought of it being actually true and they can’t genuinely consider the consequences this is inevitably going to have !
For too long, ever since the Second World War came to a close, the West has been trying to build an internationalist set of standards with regards to human rights, predicated on the illusory notion that sooner or later, the whole world would be eagerly emulating this ideal. We have been made to believe this for decades. A pseudo-intellectual idiot like Francis Fukuyama for instance was the main subscriber to such a view, not all that long ago.
And yet, in 2014, this illusion is crumbling to bits as we speak ! We have been proven wrong, plain and simple !
Makes me think of Bruce S. Thornton’s piece in FrontpageMag: Western Arrogance and Decline
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/western-arrogance-and-decline/
“Yet we Westerners have a vice peculiar to ourselves–thinking the rest of the world is just like us and wants what we want because we are the destination towards which historical progress is inexorably moving. Because the rest of the world does imitate us in certain respects, desires our technologies, even enjoys our popular culture, we think that they have the same attitudes we have toward religion, or social relations, or violence, or the supremacy of ideals like peace, tolerance, cooperation, openness, equality and the like. This arrogant assumption lies behind the whole edifice of international law, and the diplomatic processes and institutions that administer it, that we think can provide global order, peace, and prosperity.”
“Blinded by our arrogant assumption that we are the vanguard of the future, we ignore those values and beliefs that contradict our own, or patronizingly explain them away as the consequence of ignorance, superstition, poverty, or the machinations of malignant elites and psychopathic dictators.”
“The whole “war on terror” has, under both parties, been compromised by the failure to understand historical Islam in its own terms, particularly its doctrine of violent jihad against the infidel.”
“Assured of our superior knowledge and morality, we presume to explain to millions of Muslims that they don’t understand their own religion.”
“Having reduced our faith to a life-style choice and comforting holiday traditions, we Westerners cannot imagine a religion whose believers take its commands seriously, and see the world as the arena of a long spiritual struggle they are destined to win.”
“Hence we are vulnerable to the ruthless and the fanatic, since in every conflict we prefer to bring a diplomat to a gunfight.
“So here we are, still living off that enormous capital amassed by our ancestors, and doing nothing to restore it. But those cultural and moral resources are dwindling by the day, and outside the West brutal rivals are watching and waiting, exploiting our arrogant delusions and manipulating our bankrupt ideals like “diplomatic engagement” in order to achieve their aims.”
Complacency is what makes Westerners totally oblivious to the reality that people will act according to the collective doctrine they adhere to. We simply won’t admit what’s going on beneath our noses ! And let’s face it: Islam is a militant totalitarian doctrine with adherents ready to fight everywhere and at any time. And all the while, we have lost the will to safeguard our achievements by force and this will turn out to be necessary at some stage ! And rather sooner than later !
How many diplomats will we be sending to a gunfight before our attitude will start changing and reality starts kicking in ?
The whole denial mechanism today is simply related to our fear of things not having panned out like we had imagined decades ago: the world is de facto NOT developing like we had envisioned back then, and the consequences have to be denied for the sake of soothing everyone’s mind. That’s why our leaders and the MSM are trying their hardest to skew reality: “IS has nothing to do with Islam”, “There is such a thing as moderate Islam”, “Most muslims in the West are ‘moderates'”, “Terrorist groups don’t understand true Islam, they misunderstand it.”, “What IS is doing doesn’t resemble a coherent doctrine in any way.”, and the like.
Taking things a bit further, the scope of denial has widened to negating the damning consequences of muslim immigration in Western societies: Sharia courts in the West, muslim pedophile rape gangs, Mutawwin enforcers patrolling the streets of London to “command what’s right and forbid what’s wrong”,…etc. All of this evidence pointing to Islam being incompatible with the way we live has to be denied, parallel to the rejection of what’s happening abroad. (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria,…etc.)
In our minds the realization that the world has not changed according to our plans makes it equally horrendous to contemplate what the future will hold for the West, because we can simultaneously expect that neither muslims in our midst have changed.
The minorities of Iraq and Syria (or elsewhere in muslim-dominated countries) are simply not allowed to loom large in our minds, because we have been told time and time again, that muslims are victims of socio-economic deprivation, racism or oppression. Which has been the largest part of the politically correct eulogizing of muslim ‘virtue’. What’s happening over there (and in the rest of the world) clearly demonstrates that muslims are, first and foremost, the worst of PERPETRATORS, rather than victims. Again, a notion too horrendous to contemplate, so it has to be denied, because the truth is too inconvenient with regards to the damning consequences on our own turf in the West !
And that’s why Nigerian, Egyptian, Syrian or Iraqi Christians (or other non-muslim minorities) don’t seem to exist in the mainstream media today. Keep them well out of sight, or the PC myths will start falling apart at the seams. The mass media’s credibility is at stake ! Our leaders have egg on their faces, and they know it !
Anurshivan, I hope you and other readers will excuse my repeating an observation I quoted here recently, made by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin decades ago, that the Victorians would have been astonished that people would still be fighting over religion in the C20th -and this is now the 21st).
Quite correct. In the past it seemed the most natural thing in the West to be wary of Communism, for instance. The Cold War taught us that, and we were collectively very receptive to the message: this doctrine purveys global domination. We knew where the enemy was.
But ever since Communism collapsed, we seem to have turned less receptive to the idea that universalist totalitarian doctrine (like Islam) can constitute a threat to us. After all, any one of us is expected to show the utmost respect for a grievance mongering “religion” !
Bravo! Reality must be faced HOWEVER UNPLEASANT!! Thanks to Gates of Vienna for making this available.