Ironic

Submitted by Mark Kaye (United States), Oct 17, 2006 at 14:19

This article's appearence today is ironic in that I sent my first letter to the editor of the NYTimes today, as follows:

Today's front-page, above-the-fold, New York Times article illuminating Christian minority communities in Iraq being brutalized and ultimately chased from their homes should serve as a warning of things to come. Let there be no misunderstanding that Christianity is under assault within the Islamic world.

It has happened before. Proof is found in the systematic eradication of Jewish communities in the Muslim world during the past half-century. Christianity stood by and did nothing while entire Jewish societies, many of which predate Christianity, let alone Islam, were hounded from their ancestral homes. But why did Christianity turn such a blind eye toward this phenomenon?

Perhaps the thought was that it was "just the Jews," who had, after all, been chased from their homes since antiquity. Perhaps it was an acknowledgment that the since the Jews now had Israel, they had a place to go and the means to take care of their own. Perhaps it was thought that the Muslims had a "right" to persecute their Jewish minorities, as some sort of imprecise response to the Palestinian circumstance. Or perhaps it was reflexive Holocaust exhaustion, wherein Christians simply tired of accepting blame for sole complicity in attempting to eradicate Jewry.

So the question becomes: "what does the future hold for Christian/Muslim relations?" A telling predictor is to keep an eye on how Muslims currently deal with Judaism, the smaller and weaker sister religion. Jews are today vilified, dehumanized and viewed as suitable for eradication across the Muslim world. Don't be surprised if, in these times of combined pathological desire to extinguish those unlike themselves together with the means to do so, the unthinkable happens and an unsuspecting and undefendable Israel is the target of some future nuclear "device." Christianity, watch out, for if you don't come to the aid of your neighbors, there may be no one left in your time of need.

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