‘Nothing to See Here’ -- The Establishment Whitewashes Jihadist Murder

Published originally under the title "'Get Off Your High Horse': Christians Must Not Complain When Muslims Butcher Them."

Winfield Myers

A Muslim man butchered a Christian man in Spain and, true to form, the establishment is responding by telling Christians not to “get on their high horse” — sound familiar? — but rather to do a little “introspecting” concerning the past and present crimes of Christians.

‘That’s What Muslims Do’

On Jan. 25, a machete-waving Muslim migrant screaming Islam’s ancient war cry, “Allahu akbar,” barged into two churches. In one he hacked at the 74-year-old priest, who was just then celebrating morning mass; the elderly clergyman survived, though only after immediate medical treatment and surgery. The jihadist, a 32-year-old illegal Moroccan migrant, then moved onto another church where he slaughtered a sacristan. Three other Christians were seriously injured in the rampage.

One Spanish commentator highlighted the travesty of this act by resorting to analogy:

Imagine a Spaniard entering a mosque in Morocco, shouting ‘Long live Christ the King’ and killing the imam. Well, that’s what Muslims do day in and day out here in our Christian Europe — and nobody says a thing.

Don’t Overreact

Worse, as far as several media outlets and politicians in socialist Spain are concerned, the real news here — as discussed by journalist Milenko Bernadic — is that Christians have had their fair share of violence, so there is no need to overreact to this most recent slaughter at the hands of a Muslim.

Thus, immediately after that jihadist attack, the television news network La Sexta (the Sixth) devoted an entire report on “Christian terrorism,” which it advertised in a tweet saying, “Christians have also killed in the name of religion.” After stating that “We will not talk here about those thousands of people killed during the crusades” — we will not talk, that is, but we will sure remind you — the report goes on to mention the usual suspects, terrorists whose connection to Christianity is tenuous at best, including Anders Breivik — a non-Christian who was actually motivated by Islamic modes of terrorism.

Muslims killing Christians, followed by the establishment admonishing Christians to do some “self-reflection,” is, of course, a well-established pattern.

Don’t Get on Your High Horse

Back in 2015, when the Islamic State’s genocidal atrocities against Christians and other non-Muslims in Iraq and Syria were raging, then president Barack Obama sought to shame American Christians from being too critical during the National Prayer Breakfast. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this [Islamic beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting and burying humans alive] is unique to some other place,” the American president admonished, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

Back in the real world, both the Crusades and the Inquisition were responses to Islamic aggression: the former were about liberating conquered Christian lands from Islamic tyranny; the latter were about exposing clandestine Muslims pretending to be Christian and trying to subvert Spain back to Islam. (For more documentation, see here and here.)

Two months later, during the Easter Prayer Breakfast of 2015 — which took place three days after yet another Islamic terror attack targeting Christians resulted in the massacre of 147 people in Kenya, prompting a few American Christian groups to express anger — Obama said:

On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians [i.e., criticism of Islam], I get concerned.

What the Mainstream Media Has to Say

Turning the table on Christian victims of Muslim aggression is especially evident in the so-called “mainstream media.” A 2012 BBC report on a church attack in Nigeria that left three Christians, including an infant, dead, objectively states the bare bone facts in its opening sentence. Then it jumps to apparently the really big news: that “the bombing sparked a riot by Christian youths, with reports that at least two Muslims were killed in the violence. The two men were dragged off their bikes after being stopped at a roadblock set up by the rioters, police said. A row of Muslim-owned shops was also burned...”

The report goes on and on, with an entire section about “very angry” Christians till one confuses victims with persecutors, forgetting what the Christians are “very angry” about in the first place: nonstop terror attacks on their churches and the slaughter or enslavement of their women and children.

Christian Genocide

Incidentally, since that 2012 church attack, literally thousands of more churches have been attacked, torched, or bombed by “Allahu akbar” screaming Muslims in Nigeria, to say nothing of the ongoing Christian genocide. But the media continue to point to anything and everything for a pretext — including climate change — so long as Islam is exonerated.

Even concerning the most recent atrocity in Spain, the popular journalist Susanna Griso took the priest of the church where the sacristan was murdered to task by suggesting that “perhaps part of the reason for the anger was because he had asked for food from the church and it had not been given to him” — to which the priest said they had never even seen the murderer, much less denied him food. Before concluding, she bizarrely suggested that he, the priest of the murdered sacristan, take advantage of his appearance on her show “to ask his faithful [Christians] not to kill, or not to respond by killing.”

What the Pope Said

A final, and especially apropos, example comes from Spain’s neighbor, France. In 2016, another group of “Allahu Akbar” shouting Muslims stormed another church during morning mass. They forced 85-year-old Fr. Jacques Hamel to his knees, slit his throat, and critically injured a nun.

Two months later, a journalist asked Pope Francis if Fr. Jacques was “killed in the name of Islam.” Francis adamantly disagreed, arguing that he hears of Catholics committing violence every day in Italy:

[T]his one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law ... and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.

Apparently, for this pope, violence done in accordance with Allah’s commandments — hate for and jihad against non-Muslims is obligatory — is no more troubling than violence done in contradiction of the Christian God’s commandments.

Violent Christians are ‘Beyond Rare’

The establishment’s formula is clear: When “Christians” do violence against Muslims — which is beyond rare — the United Nations stand up in condemnation; when Muslims butcher Christians — a daily occurrence — Christians are told to shut up and do penance for their (imagined) misdeeds.

Raymond Ibrahim is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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