Endangered Species

"There are parts of the world today where to be a Christian is to put your life in danger. From continent to continent, Christians are facing discrimination, ostracism, torture, even murder, simply for the faith they follow. Christian populations are plummeting and the religion is being driven out of some of its historic heartlands. In Iraq, the Christian community has fallen from 1.2 million in 1990 to 200,000 today. In Syria, the horrific bloodshed has masked the haemorrhaging of its Christian population."
"A bomb going off in a Pakistani church shouldn't just reverberate through Christian communities; it should stir the world."
Sayeeda Warsi, minister for faith, British Government -- The Daily Telegraph

What an unspeakable turn of events. In the very places where Christianity was born, and where for centuries within the Middle East, Christians lived in peace and relative harmony with the Muslims who outnumbered them, but whose existence in that same geography was introduced well over a half-millennium later than Christianity, fundamentalist extremism has virulently turned Islam against Christianity.

Perhaps, after all, they should have seen it on the horizon. Pastor Martin Neumoller, after all, during the era of the World War II Nazi Germany Final Solution to exterminate Europe's Jews leading to the Holocaust said it well, when he declared that if he did nothing to protest the dread systemic annihilation by the Nazis against Europe's Jews there would come a time when the death-delivers would knock on his door as well.

And when the Jews, whose heritage existence in the Middle East where Judaism pre-existed both Christianity and Islam by thousands of years were hounded, pogroms mounted, their possessions taken and they exiled or face death, it signalled a progressive turn toward vicious Islamist intolerance. Jews found haven in the State of Israel, created for that very purpose; its very existence opposed then as it is now.

And then, unsurprisingly, it was the turn of the Christian population, that most ancient of Christian communities, to have their places of worship condemned as polluting the sacred ground of the Middle East that Islam had consecrated to itself. And the presence of Arabs who eschewed Islam for their own inherited religion of Christianity, passed down through the millennia as a sacred trust, constituted an assault against Islam.

Islam, the tertiary religion as it were, the last of the so-called Abrahamic monotheistic religions, which considers itself though last, the triumphant final version that God entrusted humankind with in its worship of the Omniscient Spirit equalled perfection. The final version was the finished one, the completed and final one, to which its predecessors were meant to submit and integrate themselves seamlessly into the embrace of Islam.

Having not done so, having refused the initial kindly invitations to surrender their incomplete, unfinished version of the world's only and one true religion to take instead to their hearts and souls God's chosen version, Jews, then Christians condemned themselves to life ever-lasting outside the embrace of the God of Islam. Which Islamists have interpreted as Allah's intention to destroy the incomplete drafts and those who continue to cling to them.

This is the jihad which focuses the mind of the jihadist. Their sublime duty to Islam and to Allah, in memory of the Prophet Mohammed whose wars of religious conquest they emulate. This is the Final Solution of Islamism. Which has been turned in a neat and tidy manner upon the pretenders within Islam as well, those who have chosen to take up their interpretation of a kinder, gentler God exhorting peace and equality, brotherhood and tolerance.

This is the religion that turns not only against other religions in the defiance of hatred and violence geared to destruction, but the version that placates the psychopaths among the dedicated faithful who turn their splenetic horror upon one another, leaving the region a battlefield of bloody massacres.