All Religions are Created Equal — But Some are More Equal Than Others.
From the website of the US Coptic Association
With attention focused on the flagrant security breaches around Flight 253 on Christmas Day, too little has been made of the timing of the attack. Most readers will be surprised to learn that this was not the only Christmas attack on Christians. Here is a list of other holiday attacks which I found without extensive research:
1. On December 23, a bomb was detonated near the Syrian Orthodox church of St. Thomas in Mosul, Iraq.
2. On the same day, a bomb exploded in the same city outside the Chaldean church of St. George, killing three people.
3. Fifty Muslims barred the doors of the Tafat Church in northern Algeria to stop a Christmas service. According to the Algerian newspaper El Watan, the Muslims threatened to kill the pastor.
4. On Christmas Eve, armed Muslims attacked worshipers at a church in Kalar Kahar, Pakistan, injuring 65 Christian women and children. Local police were called but refused to help.
5. On December 17, about a thousand Muslims attacked the nearly-completed church of St. Albert, which was being readied for Christmas Mass, in Bekasi Regency, near Jakarta, Indonesia. The Muslims carried tanks of kerosene with which they set the church afire.
6. In Nag Hamadi, Egypt, near Luxor, gunfire from a speeding car directed at worshipers leaving midnight mass on Coptic Christian Christmas (January 7) killed seven. The assailants escaped; Copts claimed that police sided with the Muslims who attacked them.
I have not searched for additional instances. Isn’t it noteworthy that you did not hear about any of this from the general media? Reporting such attacks might compel the media to consider tenets of Islam which appear to mandate desecration of Christian holy days. Understanding that the analysis ventured below will subject me to accusations of bigotry and Islamophobia, let me hasten to explain: I have spent more than a half-century as a lawyer and writer defending human rights, including a long stint as counsel for the ACLU (an agency with which I am now in considerable disagreement) at the outset of my career. I do not seek to defame hundreds of millions of Muslims who live in peace alongside Christians. But neither can it be contended that Christmas violence is an aberration confined to the distant fringes of Islam.
My comment: In his book WE ARE DOOMED, John Derbyshire, a conservative columnist I have found increasingly harder to appreciate (ever since he lost his religion and now wanders into the weird lands of convincing people that we are automatons whose self awareness is an illusion) voiced the conclusion that the onslaught of modern "Fundamentalist" Atheism (his word for it, not mine) such as Dawkins and Hitchens and other loudmouthed ignoramuses was triggered by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. People who had been Christian merely out of habit or inattention suddenly woke up and realized that religion — all religions, but especially Christianity — make people do Bad Things for No Good Reason. Derbyshire is in this camp, even if he is unwilling to say so directly.
The other reaction mentioned by Derbyshire was that some people suddenly woke up and realized that one particular religion — the Religion of Peace — was a threat.
For myself, it seems to me that one particular religion has been at war with Christendom and Jewry since roughly 700 A.D., and ceased to be a major threat to our existence only after the Battle of Lepanto, and ceased to be a minor threat only after World War One, with the shrinking of the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the period during which the West was not menaced by the Religion of Submission was when the West was convulsed with the internal threat of Socialism (National Socialism in the case of Germany, in the years leading up to the fall of Berlin, and International Socialism in the case of Russia and China and their satellites, in the years of the Cold War.) That reaction he terms "Islamophobia."
(These days, with the same polite reflex that provides you must say Gesundheit when someone sneezes, whenever one condemns the Jihad, one must hasten to add "But not all Islamics are Jihadists! The Jihadists are merely the Moral Majority of Islam, their 700 Club!" I decline to indulge in this courtesy, for the same reason that, when speaking of the Second World War, I do not after each sentence pause to remind people that there were moderate and reasonable Germans who were not Nazis, moderate Italians in Fascist Italy, and moderate Japanese who were under-enthusiastic in their support for Tojo. These moderates did nothing to hasten the end of the war. They had no affect, none at all, on the outcome of events. We still bombed the cities where they lived. )
The third reaction mentioned by Derbyshire were the cheers from the Chinese and the dancing in the streets of the Palestinians, who seemed to agree that American Had It Coming. (I know some Libertarians who agree with them, which is one reason I no longer count myself among their number, fine fellows as they may be on certain other issues.)
My question to my fellow human beings is whether the Copts had it coming? Are the Coptic Christians to be counted among those Religious Nuts who Do Bad Things for No Good Reason? Or are the Copts, like all other Christians, under assault by the Jihadists because that is what Jihadists do, and what their religion, in its historically understood mainstream interpretation, preaches and has always preached?
Those of you whose reflex when hearing the word "Christian" is to think "Torquemada! Children’s Crusade! Sack of Constantinople! Trial of Galileo! Borgia Popes!" — but no. I am giving you too much credit. You don’t know those names, do you? No matter. As far as I know the Coptic Christians are guilty of exactly none of these historical crimes or wars, did not participate in the Crusades, maintained no Inquisition, and never criticized Galileo.
My question to my fellow Christians is what is the Church to do to protect and avenge our brethren? Copts are Christians. Why do we hear nothing of the Christian minorities being oppressed and slaughters in Africa, the Near East, and the Far East? The Serbs are Christians, and being driven from the homes by the Muslims. The Nestorians and the Syrians are Christians.
Is our shared religion now a days no longer a decent or respectable reason to promote political action?
Is the persecution of Christians world-wide now a topic newspaper may not discuss and polite society will not?
Santiago! St. James Matamoros, slayer of the Moor, pray for us, we the weak who will never again draw the sword to shield our mother, the Church, or save our brothers in Christ.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
