The following excerpt from the Islamic State captures well the perverse logic that its many members and even more sympathizers operate on. It recently appeared in an Islamic State report explaining why the jihadis already did — or soon will — execute 21 Coptic Christian workers abducted in (post-"Arab Spring") Libya. The justification begins by positioning the 2010 Islamic raid on the Our Lady of Salvation Church in Iraq — where nearly 60 Christian worshippers were slaughtered (graphic pictures here) — as a response to the absurd allegations (based on Muslim projection) that the Coptic Church of Egypt was forcing — and killing — Muslim women to convert to Christianity. In short, the Islamic State justifies the killing, not only of Coptic Christians, but all Christians anywhere, in the context of, yet again, "collective punishment." The excerpt follows, interspersed with my observations (emphases mine):

[T]he Islamic State leadership decided to target the Catholic Christians of Baghdad so as to teach the taghut [tyrant] of the Copts — [late Pope] Shenouda — that the price of Muslim blood is costly, and so accordingly, if his church persecuted any Muslimah [female Muslim] in Egypt, he would directly be responsible for every single Christian killed anywhere in the world when the Islamic State sought its just revenge... And the deaths did not begin until after the crusaders had expressed their arrogance and refusal to execute the righteous demands of the mujahidin [jihadis]. So more than 100 crusaders were killed and injured by just five brave istishhadiyyin ["martyrs"] from the Islamic State.

Click here for the graphic aftermath of this "brave" venture.

And the different Christian churches had no one to truly blame but Shenouda for the deaths of their brethren on kufr [disbelief]. [...] And so, five years after the blessed operation in Iraq, Allah granted the Islamic State expansion to Libya, Sinai, and elsewhere, allowing it easily to capture the Coptic crusaders — the followers of the dead Shenouda and the supporters of the taghut Sisi — as the Salaf [early pious Muslims] said, "The reward for a good deed is another good deed."

In other words, due to the 2010 "good deed" of killing nearly 60 Christians during church service in Iraq, Allah has allowed the Islamic State to grow and kill more Christians in Libya and elsewhere.

And thus, the Islamic State strikes terror directly in the hearts of the Copts after striking terror in the hearts of their Catholic allies before... Finally, it is important for Muslims everywhere to know that there is no doubt in the great reward to be found on Judgment Day for those who spill the blood of these Coptic crusaders wherever they may be found...

This final bit is reminiscent of what the Islamic State/Al-Qaeda said back in 2010 after the Iraq church attack:

All Christian centres, organisations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the mujahedeen (holy warriors) wherever they can reach them… Let these idolaters [Christians of the world], and at their forefront, the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican [Pope Benedict], know that the killing sword will not be lifted from the necks of their followers until they declare their innocence from what the dog of the Egyptian Church [Pope Shenouda] is doing.

And yet, back in the real world, the well documented reality in Egypt is that Coptic Christian women are regularly abducted and forced to convert to Islam. Thus the Islamists project their own vile practices onto Coptic Christians in order to justify killing Coptic Christians.

Note: An important press release from Coptic Solidarity follows:

Coptic Solidarity Demands Urgent Actions to Save Kidnapped Copts in Libya

Contact: Lindsay Vessey,
Coptic Solidarity,
801-512-1713,
[email protected]

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ — A new report by the Islamic State has just been published with photos alluding to the possible execution of the 21 Coptic Christian construction workers kidnapped from their place of employment in Sirte Libya. Coptic Solidarity condemns this heinous kidnapping and urges the Egyptian government to do everything possible to save the Coptic hostages.

Websites related to the Islamic State published pictures of the abducted Coptic workers, wearing orange execution dresses, their hands tightened with ropes, and being led by masked men on a sea shore. They are shown in another picture with knives put over their throats in a slaughter position. While showing the Coptic abductees in death dress, there was no explicit mention of whether they have already been executed.

The abductees are construction workers who belong to the Samalot and Matai districts, in the Minya governorate, in Upper Egypt. Families of the abductees appealed yet again to President Sisi to intervene to save their loved ones, or at least meet them in order to be to briefed on the details of the abduction which occurred over 40 days ago.

The Islamic State's magazine Dabiq included an article in its latest issue #7 attacking "the Coptic Crusaders." Thursday's publication says that the abducted workers have been "captured by members of the organization in retaliation of what the West inflicts upon Muslims." Accusing the Copts of being the followers of the late (Pope) Shenouda and the supporters of the taghut (tyrant) Sisi, the article boasted that the Islamic State "strikes terror in the hearts of the Copts." This presumably refers to the capture of 21 Coptic workers in Libya almost six weeks ago and prior attacks on churches in Egypt.

The article concluded with a call to kill Copts anywhere: "Finally, it is important for Muslims everywhere to know that there is no doubt in the great reward to be found on Judgment Day for those who spill the blood of these Coptic crusaders wherever they may be found..."

Coptic Solidarity holds the Egyptian government responsible to protect its own citizens in Libya, including evacuating them from areas of danger. The Egyptian government to date has been lax and done very little regarding the despicable deaths and kidnapping of Copts in Libya.

Coptic Solidarity urges President al-Sissi to immediately take the lead to save the innocent workers, abducted for their faith and possibly to revenge Mr. Sissi's war on Islamist fighters. Confronting the Islamist State terrorists in Egypt's western flank is no less important than combating them in Sinai.

Coptic Solidarity is non-profit organization dedicated to leading efforts to achieve equal citizenship for the Copts in Egypt and minorities in Middle East. For more information, contact Lindsay Vessey at 801-512-1713 or [email protected]

U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama’s recent condemnation of medieval Christian history to exonerate modern Islam is a reminder of how woefully ignorant (or intentionally deceptive) a good many people in the West are concerning the true history of Christian Europe and Islam.

The problem is that those who condemn things like the Crusades—including “mainstream” academics, journalists, movie-makers, and politicians—do so without mention of historical context. Worse, they imply “we” already know the context: evil popes and greedy knights exploiting Christianity to seize Muslim lands and wealth. Or as Karen Armstrong put it, “the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.”

The true story of Christendom and Islam is the antithesis of such claims. Consider some facts for a moment:

A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered—including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.

Among other nations and territories that were attacked and/or came under Muslim domination are (to give them their modern names in no particular order): Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Albania, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Belarus, Malta, Sardinia, Moldova, Slovakia, and Montenegro.

In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 600 years later, in 1453, Christendom’s other great basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently. (Till this day, Turkish Muslims celebrate the sack of Constantinople, which saw much rapine and slaughter.)

The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that they were not attacked by Islam. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the “terror of the Turk.” This was not mere paranoia; as late as 1627, Muslim corsairs raided the northern Christian island seizing four hundred captives and selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.

Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

In short, for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.

And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians. (Watch my response to a Fox News host wondering why Christians have always persecuted Muslims.)

So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected (twice) a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president; a man who condemns the Crusades while openly empowering the same Islamic ideology that Christian warriors fought for centuries.

Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in their graves.

But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?

This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.

Yet this may not even be necessary. Thanks to the West’s ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of “immigration,” refusing to assimilate, and forming enclaves which in modern parlance are called “ghettoes” but in Islamic terminology are the ribat—frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.

All this leads to another, perhaps even more important point: If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?

Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages—which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe—a product of another suffocating “religion”? Was the Spanish Inquisition—also condemned by Obama—a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it at least partially a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the many Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam? (Jews often received the same treatment and worse primarily for being associated with Islam and Muslims.)

Don’t expect to get true answers to these and other questions from the makers, guardians, and disseminators of the West’s fabricated epistemology.

In the future (whatever one there may be) the histories written about our times will likely stress how our era, ironically called the “information age,” was not an age when people were so well informed, but rather an age when disinformation was so widespread and unquestioned that generations of people lived in bubbles of alternate realities—till they were finally popped.