Grimly, History Repeats Itself

“WHO WILL BE THERE TO SAVE US?”

by Paul R. Hollrah, ©2015, blogging at Order of the Ephors   

(Jul. 20, 2015) — In a recent story by BBC reporter Jane Corbin, she describes the plight of Christians living in Muslim nations of the Middle East.  After a visit to an ancient monastery in Iraq, she writes, “As I climbed the steep mountain path above the plain of Nineveh, Iraq, the sound of monks chanting and the smell of incense drifted out of the 4th Century monastery of St. Matthew.  Once, 7,000 monks worshipped here when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Almost the whole population was Christian then.  Their numbers have dwindled and now there are only six monks – and no pilgrims dare to visit.”

Describing the rise of ISIS, she writes, “They swept across the plain of Nineveh last year, forcing tens of thousands of Christians to flee from Mosul, Iraq’s second city…  A million people, two-thirds of Iraq’s Christians, fled in the decade following the fall of Saddam.  The same story is being repeated in country after country across the Middle East where the Arab Spring unleashed forces that turned against Christians and the authoritarian leaders who once protected them.”

In a radio interview on April 12, 2015, Samy Gemayel, a Phalangist Party member of the Lebanese Parliament, predicted that, “If the U.S. and international community do not intervene, Christians may be driven out of the Middle Eastern Arab countries within two years.”  Other experts predict that, in the absence of western intervention, Christian churches will be razed to the ground and the faithful either killed by radical Islamists or driven from their homes.

After centuries of brutal conquest, the Ottoman Turk empire extended across Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.  Their most significant minority, the Armenian Christians, were treated like second class citizens, denied such basic protections as property rights and personal security.  As non-Muslims, they were forced to pay discriminatory taxes and denied participation in the affairs of government.

However, by 1914, having lost virtually all of their territories in Europe and Africa, the Ottoman Turks experienced enormous internal pressures, both political and economic.  And when the Armenian minority pressed demands for representation and participation in government, ethnic tensions were intensified.  Demands by Armenian political leaders for administrative reforms, especially in provinces where Armenians represented a clear majority, invited further repression.

The Armenians were not unaware of the dangers represented by challenging the authority of their Muslim rulers.  For example, a series of massacres carried out during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II between the years 1894-96 were still fresh in their minds.  Those massacres cost the lives of as many as three hundred thousand Armenians.

Just over 100 years ago the Armenian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire numbered some two million people.  However, beginning on April 15, 1915, the Turks accelerated their campaign to cleanse their country of their Armenian minority, ordering the entire Armenian population deported.  Tens of thousands… men, women, and children… were forced to walk hundreds of miles toward the Syrian frontier.

The Turks made no arrangements for food and water, and while a great many of all ages died of starvation or dehydration, or from attacks by criminal Muslim bands, physical exhaustion took the lives of many of the elderly and the infirm.  Straggling south under the scorching desert sun, the denial of food and water was intended only to hasten the death of the Armenians.  By 1918, some one million Armenians had been systematically murdered, and by 1923 virtually the entire Armenian Christian population had disappeared from Turkey.

It is estimated that, in the eight year period between 1915 and 1923, as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.  Those Armenians who survived the genocide owed their lives to the humanitarian efforts of the United States.  Under a plan devised by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople, the U.S. Congress established a relief program called “Near East Relief,” and tens of thousands of Armenian lives were saved.

But now, exactly a century later, we find that history is repeating itself, but on a much broader and more brutal scale.  What happened to the Armenian Christians in the early 20^th century is now happening to Christians all across Africa and the Middle East in the early 21^st century.  And while western political leaders, most notably Barack Obama, the reluctant “leader” of the free world, stand transfixed in fear, not knowing what to do or how to respond, American and European Christians are attacked and murdered in the streets of their own cities.

The March 24, 2015 edition of Globe Newswire asks, “Who is courageous enough to brave the possibility of being beheaded, burned alive, or crucified to bring the world the voices of those Christians whom Muslim extremists have been hunting off the face of the Earth?”  We are, after all, at war with a worldwide religious sect that thinks nothing of kidnapping hundreds of young girls at a time and selling them into slavery, of raping and crucifying children, of beheading their captives in order to strike terror into the hearts of non-Muslims, of setting caged captives on fire in a public square, of drowning captives by placing them in a cage and submerging them in tanks of water, or of gathering up all the Christians from among hundreds of refugees and throwing them overboard in mid-ocean as they attempt to escape the poverty and the Muslim-inspired brutality of their homelands.   

So who is to stand up to such barbarism… whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or here at home?  What do you do when all those guys dressed in black, wielding machetes and flying a black flag, come after you with guns blazing, offering to slice off your head at the shoulders and to rape your wife and your children?

Some of the 450 new troops that Obama is sending to Iraq to face 30,000 or 40,000 ISIS butchers will be embedded with forward units of the Iraqi military as advisors and air controllers.  If those U.S. troops begin to take casualties, especially fatalities, how will Obama explain that?  But worse, if radical Islamists step up their attacks on our own soil, how will Obama react to that?

On February 26, 1993, radical Islamists detonated a truck packed with explosives under the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, killing six and injuring 1,042 others.  Seven Islamic terrorists, under the leadership of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), were tracked down, captured, and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.  KSM now resides in a cell at Guantanamo Bay while Barack Obama searches for a politically expedient way to free him.

Under “enhanced” interrogation, KSM admitted to masterminding both attacks on the New York World Trade Center, as well as the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  In that attack, carried out by nineteen radical Islamists, nearly 3,000 people were murdered.

Since the second World Trade Center attack, radical Islamists have staged some 73 separate attacks on U.S. soil in which 93 people have been killed and 333 seriously wounded.  The last such attack occurred on July 16, 2015, when 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, born in Kuwait, opened fire on an armed forces recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before driving seven miles to a naval reserve center where he was shot to death by police.  Five unarmed American servicemen, four Marines and a Sailor, were killed in the surprise attack.

In a July 17 article in FrontPageMag, titled “Terror Immigration to America Must Stop,” writer Daniel Greenfield writes that, “As the government began filling it with immigrants from terror zones, Tennessee, the Volunteer State, fought back because it hadn’t volunteered for this.  In 2008, it pulled out of the Federal refugee resettlement program, but the resettlement continued.”  Clearly, when Democrats are determined to swell the ranks of reliable Democratic voters, they are not easily dissuaded.

Greenfield tells us that three days before the Chattanooga terror attack, Muslims in Chattanooga protested in support of Islamberg, an exclusively Muslim New York community established by Mubarak Ali Gilani, who has said, ‘We are fighting to destroy the enemy.  We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.’  These are the people that Barack Obama is importing to live next door to you and me.

Greenfield explains that, “Every time the citizens of Tennessee attempted to stand up to terror immigration and the Murfreesboro Mega-Mosque, they were shouted down, smeared and lied about by the media.  A day from now, the media will have shifted the focus of the story from the murdered Marines to local Muslims whining about the backlash…”

Greenfield warns that it is not just the people who send checks to terrorist groups who deserve to be called terrorist supporters.  Those who support the importation of terrorists into this country, including Barack Obama and others in his administration, are the biggest terrorist supporters because without them most of the attacks we have suffered would not have been possible.

One wonders what would happen if fundamentalist Christians began attacking and killing Muslims in the same numbers and with the same frequency as Muslim fundamentalists attack and kill Christians, at home and abroad.  Would liberals, Democrats, and the mainstream media insist that we import more radicalized Christians?  Probably not.  As Greenfield says, “The war keeps coming home because we have filled our home with the enemy.  It’s time we clean house.”  But, short of draconian “house-cleaning” measures, we must ask ourselves this question: if there is no Morgenthau plan when the world’s non-Muslim population faces almost certain extinction, who will be there to save us?  Who will we look to?

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Paul R. Hollrah is a retired government relations executive and a two-time member of the U.S. Electoral College.  He currently lives and writes among the hills and lakes of northeast Oklahoma’s Green Country.