From The Caliphate To The Cross

"The Assyrian people are not merely Christians, but indigenous inhabitants of the Middle East."
"After the Iraq war of 2003, and since the Syrian crisis began, the persecution unleashed on them – including extortion, kidnappings, murder, the ethnic cleansing of entire swaths of Baghdad, the Nineveh plains, and now much of north-east Syria, has been so vast that their very existence in their ancestral homelands is in grave peril."
"We are watching a living history and all that comprises [it] disappear".
Mardean Isaac, Assyrian writer, U.K.

"A message signed with blood to the Nation of the Cross."
"Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of as-Sham and Dabiq's plain, chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross for a long time."
"Today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message."
"The sea you've hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden's body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood."
Video executioner, Islamic State, Libya

Egyptians call for more action earlier this month over the kidnapping of Coptic Christians in Libya. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El GhanyANY/Reuters

"It is one thing to fly the ISIS flag because a lot of guys are doing it. It is another thing to capture a bunch of Egyptian Copts and kill them and see it as some part of a grand, final-days battle."
William McCants, researcher, Brookings Institution

Under the banner of the Tripolitania Province of the Islamic State, terrorist jihadis announced they were holding 21 Egyptian Christian Copts last month. A like number of workers had disappeared from the coastal city of Surt; and it was they who were seen being beheaded by masked fighters in black carrying machetes parading along a rocky beach. And it was that atrocious event that brought Egypt's warplanes on bombing missions over Libya.

This time around Islamic State jihadis retreating from their defeat by the Kurdish defenders of Kobane, kidnapped 90 Christians in the north-east of Syria. "This is another episode in the targeting to the Christians of the east. We are witnessing the end of the Christian presence in the east", said Habib Afram, president of the Syriac League in Lebanon, representing the Assyrian minority.
Four Christians were killed in their attempts to defend the village of Tal Tamr.
 

The terrorists were overheard referring to the Christians as "crusaders". An anomaly of historical reckoning when the Christian presence much predated Islam in the east, and the crusades where European Christians responded in fury to the Islamic slaughter of Christians in Jerusalem were Christianity's answer to Islamic bloodlust. Reports of the destruction of Christian churches augmented the pain of the kidnappings.

The kidnappings were recognized as related to attacks targeting Christian communities regionally, inclusive of attacks in Baghdad and Mosul, the beheading of the Egyptian Copts, and Jabhat al-Nusra's occupation of the ancient Christian town of Maaloula. Mr. Afram spoke of Christian refugees taking refuge in a humanitarian crisis and shock at the attack. "They are not part of the struggle", he explained, the Christians having desisted from taking sides in the sectarian war in Syria. "We do not understand this targeting of Christians."

A statement that is difficult to credit for a spokesman of the Assyrian Christians who surely should have a better handle on the vicious antipathy of Islamist jihadis toward Christians in particular and minority ethnic and religious groups in general. Making of their antipathy a special emphasis on tormenting and violating their human rights, when they're not busy killing them. When Mr. Afram condemned the "frightening and shocking Arab silence" over the attacks against regional Christians he is perhaps on more solid footing.

"Coexistence needs two sides", he complained. The deafening silence is the response to that statement.