WarSclerotic

They cut off the 12-year-old boy’s fingertips, but still he refused to convert to Islam. They then “severely beat him,” reports the group Christian Aid Mission, “telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam. When the [father] refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and … two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion.”

Perpetrated by Islamic State (IS) jihadists, the above crime occurred near Aleppo, Syria, just last month. But it’s a scene that has been replayed over and over in the Middle East for years now, a result, say critics, of Obama administration policy that has destabilized the region and empowered the most brutal of Islamists.

This contention is made and the Christian persecution recounted — in horrific detail — in a recent Gatestone Institute piece by Raymond Ibrahim entitled, “How Obama Ushered in the New Age of Christian Martyrdom.” And the martyrs, sadly, are many. Just consider this 2014 testimonial from Andrew White, an Anglican priest known as the “Vicar of Baghdad”:

ISIS turned up and they said to the [Christian] children, “You say the words [shehada, convert to Islam], that you will follow Muhammad.” And the children, all under 15, four of them, they said, “No, we love Jesus. We have always loved Jesus. We have always followed Jesus. Jesus has always been with us.” They [IS] said, “Say the words!” They [the children] said, “No, we can’t” [White begins weeping]. They chopped all their heads off. How do you respond to that? You just cry. They are my children. That is what we have been going through. That is what we are going through.

These are not events you read about in the establishment media, and Obama doesn’t talk about them. Both he and the media certainly find time, though, to take up the cudgels for criminals such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Obama and his media minions also don’t explain the urgency of granting these Christians safe haven, although they devote much effort to advocating for the Muslim migrants currently pouring into Western nations. Damnable? Yes. Especially since Obama’s policies — largely rubber-stamped by the media — make him and the media culpable in the Christians’ deaths.

Obama’s support for the misnamed “Arab Spring” movement and the consequent ouster of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and the targeting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was justified on the basis that we were backing “moderate” Arab rebels. But did the administration really believe this? Consider that Vice President Joe Biden himself admitted in a Harvard University speech last year that in Syria there is “no ‘moderate middle.’” He went on to say that our allies “were so determined to take down Assad and have a proxy Sunni-Shia war” that “they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands, of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight,” thus supplying and empowering “al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

This was also admitted by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey in a 2014 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee meeting. When asked by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) if he knew of any major Arab allies who embrace IS, Dempsey replied, “I know major Arab allies who fund them.”

But could this all just be “some new revelation that took the White House by surprise?” asked The New American’s Alex Newman in August. Answering “Not even close,” Newman then reported:

Judicial Watch recently obtained an explosive 2012 document from the Defense Intelligence Agency exposing the fact that the West, along with Arab and Muslim regimes in Obama’s anti-ISIS coalition, knew that al-Qaeda and other terror groups were leading the rebellion against Assad from the start. The report says, “The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

… “The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the Syrian opposition.” The document goes on: “There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

And, of course, the same dynamic applied in Libya and Egypt.

It speaks volumes — but isn’t surprising to those not blinded by political correctness — that our Muslim “allies” might favor a radical-jihadist state over more secular leaders such as Assad. But why did Obama proceed with his reckless policies knowing such an outcome was possible? I suggested here that he could be motivated by hatred for all things Western (and the modern Middle East is a Western construct). Whatever the case, the results are clear: Muslim migrants flooding into the West, IS rampaging through the Mideast as it forges a modern caliphate — and the new age of Christian martyrdom.

But while this may be a new age, Muslim persecution of Christians is nothing new. Orthodox Christian researcher and author Ralph Sidway recounts the beheading of 100,000 Georgians in 1226 A.D., and Ibrahim writes of the murder of a “great procession” of Coptic Christians in Egypt in 1389. Of course, that the latter would occur in the belly of Dar al-Islam may come as no surprise; note, however, that persecution of Christians was not always a given in the Mideast and North Africa. For Christianity was once the regions’ dominant faith.

In fact, in the 400s A.D. there were more Christians in North Africa than in Europe. But this would change. Shortly after Islam’s birth in 622, its hordes would set out to conquer the old Christian lands, and by 709, North Africa was in their grasp. They would also invade Europe two years later, eventually getting within 125 miles of Paris before Charles Martel (the “Hammer”) stopped them at the Battle of Tours in 732. Muslims’ later conquests in Byzantine Empire (the remnant of the Roman Empire) territory would, in 1095, spark the great but misunderstood defense of Christendom known as the Crusades. And Islam’s warriors would twice reach the gates of Vienna, in 1529 and 1683.

Today, Islamic State and other Muslim jihadists are finishing the job of conversion by the sword their co-religionist forebears began, and there are no modern Crusaders riding to the rescue. For Obama’s part, he appears blithely unaware of (or indifferent to) the bloody history and — whether through malice or criminal neglect — bent on writing more of it.