"Christian Holocaust" in the Middle East

I wouldn’t use the term “Holocaust” for what is really a regional ethnic cleansing, but the fate of Middle East Christians has been sealed:

In a region where Christians predate Muslims by centuries, over one million Christians have been killed or have had to flee because of jihadi persecution, while America is basically standing by and watching. This is the sad news that Breitbart’s National Security Editor and one of the world’s leading experts on asymmetric warfare, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, brought to Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Editor in Chief Alex Marlow on Sirius XM Patriot Radio.
Dr. Gorka explained that “in the last 48 hours, ISIS, which is now called the Islamic State in Mosul, has painted the letter “N” for Nazarene on the houses of all the surviving Christians in the city. ISIS has basically given an ultimatum to all the Christians left: You can either flee or convert to Islam, or we will kill you.”

Gorka points out that, over the last 20 years, America has stood up around the world to save Muslims. “Whether it was to save the Muslims in Bosnia or the Albanians, Kosovars, and Muslims in Serbia, it is now time for a humanitarian operation to save the remaining Christians in Iraq,” he said. “It is time for the American people and our representatives to do something for our co-religionists remaining in the Middle East.”

Marlow observed that the blatant religious cleansing is horrifying and asked Gorka: “Why is it that the mainstream press is not interested in the story?”

Now that part I can answer.

If there’s one thing our Mainstream Media suffers from even more than simple bias, it’s white guilt. For just one recent example, here’s the NYT’s Carl Zimmer yesterday on Twitter.

Funny how the people yelling about disease-carrying immigrants never mention the Europeans who brought epidemics to the New World…

— carlzimmer (@carlzimmer) July 20, 2014

Four hours later he walked back that tweet with a column-length “Twit Longer” post, with the excuse that “Twitter is an ambiguous medium.” But what I saw was an unambiguous insult on Twitter, followed by 600 words or so of self-evident pablum meant to explain away the insult. I could be wrong, of course, but it isn’t like we don’t see those kinds of mean-spirited bromides, these thinly-veiled accusations of racism from the Left all the damn time.

I swear sometimes the modern American Left is made up of almost nothing but bromide savants.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) July 20, 2014

So how does this relate to the underreported religious cleansing of Christians from the Middle East?

Nearly a thousand years ago, some cruel-hearted white European Christians decided to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims who had previously conquered it from Christian Byzantium. Despite their cruelties, the Europeans ultimately failed, and were forced back out of the Middle East by equally-cruel Muslims. That the Holy Land had previously been Jewish or Christian, that the bloody cruelties extended to both sides, and that the Muslims eventually triumphed, have never kept Muslims from decrying the Crusades as the worst injustice in history, and claiming themselves as the sole victims. And that’s pretty much how it’s taught in our universities and high school, too.

Now, nearly a thousand years later, the remaining Christians are being forced to flee, or convert, or die. This isn’t news because it is justice — legitimate payback for the Crusades. Just like, I suppose, illegal immigrants carrying infectious diseases is payback for racist Southern teabaggers whose forefathers brought smallpox to North America. The sins of the white racist fathers are the sins of the white racist sons — which is newsworthy, unlike the religious cleansing of “virtual whites” from Iraq.

The Muslim or the illegal can almost never be the victim, and the Christian (or Israeli Jew) or the American is almost always the devil. That’s the narrative, and the facts on the ground may be altered or ignored to fit it.