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Yesterday, on Aug. 6, the Christians of Iraq commemorated the tenth anniversary of “The Black Day” — when the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded northern Iraq, where most of that nation’s Christian minorities live(d), beginning on Aug. 6, 2014.

The atrocities then committed — and which were correctly labeled genocide by the international community — were unimaginable: I personally remember going through and still have access to numerous reports, many in non-English languages, on how ISIS butchered, crucified, enslaved, raped, bought, and sold Christians as if they were chattel — not to mention the bombing or burning of countless, often ancient heritage-site churches and monasteries.

Incidentally, and striking closer to home, it should be remembered that one of the main reasons that an otherwise small band of terrorists was able to conquer the large Christian populations of Northern Iraq is because the latter were disarmed by their government and thus unable to fight back. As John Zmirak of The Stream wrote,

[Iraq’s Christians were] kept disarmed, politically powerless, but physically safe by a regime that valued its credentials as religiously tolerant. The U.S. invasion in 2003 destroyed the regime of Saddam Hussein, dissolved the Baathist party, and unleashed the long-simmering forces of inter-religious hatred… The one group which all the others saw no reason to protect, and which many scapegoated for the invasion by U.S. “crusaders,” were the helpless local Christians.

Be that as it may, and as fitting as it is to remember the “Black Day” that unleashed ISIS on the Christians of Northern Iraq, it is equally important to remember that the plight of Iraq’s Christians — one of the oldest Christian communities in the world — began well before the advent of ISIS and continues to the present moment. In other words, ISIS was always only the icing on the jihadist cake, one which continues to be dished out to Christians, even if in smaller slices.

Everything went downhill for Iraq’s Christians following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein. Whatever his faults, Saddam was a secularist — meaning that his internal enemies were the same enemies of Christians: observant (“radical”) Muslims who, just as they disliked Christian “infidels,” also disliked and sought to overthrow Saddam for not being a “true” Muslim — for being an apostate as they had long characterized him. As such, he kept them suppressed, which indirectly benefited Christians.

As one leading Vatican official once put it, Christians, “paradoxically, were more protected under the dictatorship [of Saddam Hussein].”

Once he was toppled, the genie — or jihadi — bottle was uncorked: “militant” Muslims everywhere — many of them presented by the mainstream media as U.S. allies and “freedom fighters” — began to exercise sharia (as they later did in Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Syria under the Obama-sponsored guise of an “Arab Spring”).

Here, for example, is a telling excerpt from an article I wrote in April 2011 — three years before ISIS even existed and had not yet caused the “Black Day”:

Last week an Iraqi Muslim scholar issued a fatwa that, among other barbarities, asserts that “it is permissible to spill the blood of Iraqi Christians.” Inciting as the fatwa is, it is also redundant. While last October’s Baghdad church attack which killed some sixty Christians is widely known … the fact is, Christian life in Iraq has been a living hell ever since U.S. forces ousted the late Saddam Hussein in 2003…. Among other atrocities, beheading and crucifying Christians are not irregular occurrences; messages saying “you Christian dogs, leave or die,” are typical. Islamists see the church as an “obscene nest of pagans” and threaten to “exterminate Iraqi Christians.”

Again, keep in mind that the Muslims doing this were not yet ISIS, as ISIS would not even become an entity till 2013. They were just “militant” Muslims who hated Christians for the same reason their ancestors hated and ruthlessly subjugated Christians: Islam, which exploits innate tribalism, makes a detested enemy of the “other” — in this case, the non-Muslim, the infidel, who is to be abused, plundered, and slaughtered at will.

That the real issue was an uncorked Islam, as opposed to an organization called ISIS, is further apparent in the fact that, long after ISIS has been gone, Christians continue to suffer persecution and discrimination — at the hands of regular Iraqi citizens and even the U.S.-installed government no less.

Since late 2017, when ISIS was officially defeated in Iraq, Christians have continued to be physically attacked, including with knives; Christian shops have been firebombed; Christian churches invaded; Christian lands burned, and Christian homes illegally seized — always with the Iraqi government looking the other way.

None of this should be surprising: mainstream Iraqi clerics — Sunnis and Shias, neither “radicals” — continue to spew hate for infidels from their minbars. One Muslim leader on the government’s pay described Christians as “infidels and polytheists,” stressing the need for “jihad” against them.

Discussing Islam’s correct approach to non-Muslims, the Grand Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, Iraq’s top cleric, even went so far as to say on live television:

If they are people of the book [Jews and Christians] we demand of them the jizya—and if they refuse, then we fight them. That is if he is Christian. He has three choices: either convert to Islam, or, if he refuses and wishes to remain Christian, then pay the jizya [and live according to dhimmi rules]. But if they still refuse—then we fight them, and we abduct their women, and destroy their churches—this is Islam!

In a Dec. 30, 2022, interview, Louis Raphaël I Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon, discussed the continuing plight of Christians in post-ISIS Iraq. After saying that Christian minors continue to be pressured to convert to Islam and that sharia is being imposed on Christians, he added:

The [Iraqi] constitution talks about freedom of conscience, but it is just on paper. This mentality and these practices—all this inherited tradition—must end. The world has become a global village. Just look at the Muslims abroad. When I visit abroad and meet with heads of state, I see that the Muslims there have the same rights as the Christians and atheists. Here, however, I am treated as a second-class citizen.

Almost as if to prove him right, the most recent form of Iraqi persecution comes directly from Abdul Latif Rashid, the president of Iraq, and is directed against the Chaldean Patriarch himself. According to a 2023 report, “Under mounting pressure from a pro-Iran militia group, the Iraqi president earlier this month revoked a decade-old decree that formally recognized Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako and granted him powers over Christian endowment affairs.”

Christians are convinced that this move was meant to facilitate the further confiscation of their property, which began under ISIS. In the words of Diya Butrus Slewa, a human rights activist from Ainkawa, “This is a political maneuver to seize the remainder of what Christians have left in Iraq and Baghdad and to expel them. Unfortunately, this is a blatant targeting of the Christians and a threat to their rights.”

Other Christians gathered in peaceful protests, holding up “placards telling the Iraqi government that they had committed ‘enough injustice’ against the long-suffering Christian community.” Another sign read:

Mr. President, the protector of the constitution should not violate the constitution. The Iraqi president orders the displacement of Christians, and opens the way for violating the property of the Chaldean Church which represents nearly 80 percent of Christians in Iraq and Kurdistan.

In short, Iraq’s Christians have gone from having ISIS, a terrorist organization, persecute them, to the U.S.-sponsored president of Iraq persecuting them, if in an admittedly less sensationalist form (hence why zero coverage from the “mainstream media”).

This should make clear that ISIS was never the cause, but rather an overt symptom of the persecution of Christians in Iraq and the broader Middle East. The true cause — Islamic hostility and contempt for “infidels” — remains alive and well, not least because it must never be named or acknowledged.

And so, although it began ten years ago yesterday, Iraq’s Christians continue to live under a “Black Day” — one that has not seen a sunrise for a decade.

The Stream

On July 29, the son of African migrants went on a stabbing spree targeting small children in Southport, England. He murdered three little girls (aged six, seven, and nine, pictured above) and seriously injured two adults and eight other children; five were left in critical condition.

The really big news, however, is that several Brits concluded that the stabber was a Muslim, then rose up in protest and attacked a mosque. This prompted Prime Minister Kier Starmer to vow to do everything in his power to protect not native British children, but Muslims.

In a press conference, Starmer denounced those protesting the murder of three children as “far-right” “thugs,” adding, “Let me be very clear. I will take every step that is necessary to keep you [Muslims] safe…. The far-right is showing who they are. We have to show who we are in response to that.”

But why did so many Brits assume that the murderer, whose name has been given as Muganwa Rudakubana, born to Rwandan migrants, was Muslim in the first place?

First, as it happens, many Muslims have launched similar attacks, randomly stabbing native Europeans. While there are countless examples from Western nations — including a public beheading in London, also at the hands of African migrants — one need not leave the British Isles to find a nearly identical attack.

On Nov. 23, 2023, a Muslim man of Algerian origin, with a known criminal record, also knifed a group of preschool children attending Saint Mary’s, a Catholic school in Dublin. Three children — two girls and a boy, all five or six years old — and a care assistant who tried to defend them were stabbed in the assault. Knifed near the heart, another five-year-old girl was hospitalized in critical condition.

Incidentally, Ireland’s then-prime minister, Leo Varadkar (a half-Indian homosexual), responded just as his British counterpart did a few days ago. He accused those protesting the stabbing of Catholic schoolchildren of being racists “filled with hate,” and vowed to use the “full resources of the law” to punish the protesters and tighten legislation concerning “hate speech” and “incitement.

Second, Rudakubana could be a convert to Islam.

There have been many examples of non-Muslims, including of European origins, who convert to Islam, only to engage in terrorism. For obvious reasons, they seldom formally change their legal, non-Muslim names. Rwanda, moreover, though historically Christian majority, has seen a sharp rise in conversions to Islam. Finally, as a young black migrant in the UK, where cultural and ethnic polarization has become pronounced, Rudakubana would most likely have gravitated to and adopted the ways and worldview of other black and brown migrants; and a great many of these are Muslim in the UK.

Third, when it comes to the names of sub-Saharan African Muslims, these are often indigenous and not what you might expect them to be — Muhammad, Ahmed, and the like.

Consider the African nation of Uganda, which shares a border with Rwanda and is similarly Christian-majority (with a small, though restless, Muslim minority). Many if not most of the Muslims in Uganda — even the murderous, violent ones — have indigenous names with no association to Islam.

Thus, the name of a teenage Muslim girl whose father “burned” her a few days ago for converting to Christianity is Naasike Maliyat. A few weeks before that, a Muslim man poisoned and killed his mother for embracing Christ. His name is Arajabu Mukiibi. In February, a Muslim couple who converted to Christianity was also murdered. Their names were Twaha Namwoyo and Nadiimu Katooko.

Indeed, the two African men who slaughtered and used a cleaver to behead Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in the streets of London in 2013 were named Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. Both were converts to Islam.

Clearly, the Shakespearan dictum, “What’s in a name?” holds much weight here. A person’s name, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, need not be, and often isn’t, recognizably Muslim, even though that person is.

But perhaps the greatest indicator that Muganwa Rudakubana may have been a Muslim is that the British authorities who are saying he is not Muslim have lost all credibility. Their word is absolutely worthless. At this stage in the game, who would be surprised to learn that, as part of their “Muslim damage control,” the authorities are creating fake names, identities, and backgrounds for Muslim criminals, lest people keep connecting the dots and rising up against their agenda?

For example, on the day after Rudakubana’s murderous stabbing spree, another man was arrested for preparing to launch another knife attack on a vigil for his victims. Although the man definitely appears to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent, authorities quickly gave his name as “Jordan Davies.” (Even if that is his real name, perhaps his father is British, but his mother is of Muslim origin — and only recently he decided to get in touch with his “roots”?)

It cannot be stressed enough: The UK’s leaders, as is the case with all of the West’s leaders, are avowed Leftists, which, among other things, means that, for them, the ends always justify the means. Whether their professed end is to maintain peace and order in the UK, or whether, and more likely, it is to overcome any hurdle in the way of their mass migration agenda, using any means necessary — including out-and-out lies and fabrications — is, obviously, part of their modus operandi. To think otherwise is to be a fool.

In the end, of course, it does not matter if Rudakubana is Muslim or not. The same argument sticks. Europe was founded on Christian values. Those who come to Europe and do not assimilate, whether they are Muslim or just “third worlders” — increasingly an academic distinction — bring with them unacceptable “behaviors,” chiefly tribalism that manifests as hate for and attacks on “the other.”

To be sure, in Europe those acting on such tribal impulses are almost always Muslim. Islam essentially deifies tribalism— the notion that the world consists of “us” vs. “them” — but, on occasion, it could simply be generic tribalism. Islam in Europe is merely a concentrated and microsmic reflection of this truth, though it applies to all who do not share in the West’s worldview, which is still rooted in Christian values — and which the Left hates and is doing everything possible to undermine.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.