New American, by Selwyn Duke

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 aHarvard 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.

Christian Examiner, by Gregory Tomlin

WASHINGTON (Christian Examiner) – The Gatestone Institute, a conservative, non-profit foreign policy think tank chaired by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, is claiming that while the Islamic State is carrying out its ruthless persecution of Christians, they aren't entirely at fault.

Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians, writes in a piece on the institute's website, "Everywhere that U.S. leadership helped Islamic jihadis topple secular autocrats in the name of 'democracy and freedom,' indigenous Christian minorities are forced either to convert to Islam or die."

"Many are accepting of death," Ibrahim wrote.

Ibrahim chronicles some of the persecution taking place in the region, such as the recent torture, crucifixion and beheading of Christians near Aleppo.

"The same is happening in the two other Arab nations where the U.S., under the pretext of 'freedom and democracy,' overthrew the secular dictators who had long kept a lid on the jihadis: Libya and Iraq," Ibrahim wrote.

In other words, American presidents may not like the Arab strong man, but he is all that stands between the Christian minority and those who want to kill them.

Ibrahim then described the situation in Iraq, where he said the Anglican priest, Andrew White – known as the "vicar of Baghdad" – has seen the results of persecution firsthand. In one account, White wrote:

"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 [Yesua]. We have always loved Jesus. We have always followed Jesus. Jesus has always been with us." They [ISIS] said, 'Say the words!' They [children] said, 'No, we can't.' [White starts sobbing] 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."

White, Ibrahim wrote, regularly circulates pictures of Christians persecuted since Saddam Hussein was removed from power.

Ibrahim's voice joins a small chorus of voices that claim the U.S. policy of supporting the "Arab Spring" hasn't led to a flowering of democracy, but to a new type of Dark Age for the Middle East where the power vacuums created by the toppling (or near toppling in the case of Syria's Bashaar al-Assad) have left an opening for an Islamic purification of the countries.

The leader of the Syriac Catholic Church is one such voice. Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Yonan said in a recent interview that the U.S. was "wrong in its approach to that situation in Syria ... since the beginning."

"They wanted to just change the government because they were telling people, the media, that this guy, Bashar al-Assad was a dictator, so he has to go to liberate the people of the country and to bring democracy," Yonan said.

"The Syrian patriarch has condemned this ideologically inspired foreign policy. Setting aside whatever value it may have in some nations, he doesn't see it working in places like Syria.

"You can't export Western democracy into countries where you don't have separation of church and state, where you have what we call the hegemony of religion," Yonan said. "Whatever you do, you'll be unable to implement this kind of democracy they were praising, whatsoever."

Others are using the idea that the push for western-style democracy in the Middle East has resulted in violence for global political advantage.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the United Nations that the Arab Spring was the reason for the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

"Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster — and nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life. I cannot help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have done?" Putin said at the U.N.

"It is now obvious that the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa through the emergence of anarchy areas, which immediately started to be filled with extremists and terrorists."

In at least one place, the power vacuum caused by the Arab Spring was filled quickly. After a series of riots against the Egyptian government and the failure of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which was supported by the U.S., the Egyptian military took control of the country and reinstituted the secular Arab "strong man."

Now, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi – a former military officer and secretary of defense who ousted Muhammad Morsi – has called for a "religious revolution" to combat ISIS, which has conducted attacks in the Sinai Peninsula. That does not mean that persecution in the country has ceased, but it is not happening on the scale perpetrated by ISIS.

Last week, al-Sisi granted permission for the Coptic Christian Church to begin construction of a $1.3 million church honoring the 21 Coptics beheaded on a Libyan beach by ISIS in February 2014. Christian observers in Egypt note that, though some persecution still takes place, Egypt is climbing out of its brief sojourn into the extremism of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Friar Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Egyptian Catholic Church, told Asia News the president was instituting reforms so the presence of Islamic extremism in society "has been progressively waning. Add to that the fight against fundamentalism, sectarianism and extremism in mosques" and there is "more secularism without the rejection of religion."

Egypt, Greiche said, "is trying to build a society that cares about religion, but one not based on differences between Christians and Muslims."

Coptic Solidarity

Ibrahim Eissa, an Egyptian television personality, recently made some remarks that were as objective as they were startling to many in Egypt.

After pointing out that it is good to teach Coptic Christians the Koran in public schools, simply because knowledge of the Koran goes a long way in improving knowledge of the Arabic language—which both Copts and Muslims should aspire to—Eissa said:

But here we come to the real question: Why isn’t Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel—which is one of the greatest and brightest of statements, full of wisdom and justice—also being taught?

He then stressed that, if Copts should be taught the Koran, so should Muslims learn from the New Testament: “And if you disagree, then you are unjust, unfair, and unpatriotic.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, many of Egypt’s pious dismiss or condemn Eissa as an apostate for making this and other "outrageous" claims.