No worst friend

Richard Fernandez:

The day before a number of bombs were detonated in Nigerian churches on Christmas day, Mark Steyn wrote that the West seemed studiously oblivious to one of the great ethnic cleansings of the instant: the destruction of Christians across the world by Islamists.

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Lord Sacks is mostly right. But it is the “friend” part he has gotten wrong. It is not Christianity’s “friends” who are silent because they are not friends. The Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda are, whatever their faults, entirely candid about what they are. It is the “caring West” that is treacherous. Save for the convenience of being able to misrepresent itself as “Christian” and thereby apologize on behalf of the victims to the perpetrators, the cultural leadership of the West has long stopped being anything but the Marxists to which they converted decades ago.

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There is a silence about the religious bigots if Islam in hopes of not offending the more "moderate" Muslims.  But their sensitivity is such that any criticism of the bigots is seen as a reflection on them.  If they were really moderate they would be the first to condemn the attempted genocide by the bigots.

The Islamic religious bigots do not just attack Christians, but they also attack Muslims who do not accept their weird beliefs.  They must fear bringing attention to themselves and suffering the fate of the Christians.