How much do you care about your fellow Christians who are being persecuted?

No, really. 

Be honest with yourself, if with nobody else. None of us can fool God, nor outwit the enemy via our own puny powers. Pose yourself the following probing questions, if only to better assess your own strengths and weaknesses. Don’t do what I did when once I gained a lot of weight — take down the mirrors so I wouldn’t have to see it.

How willing are you to make some sacrifice to help persecuted Christians?

Will that extend to taking the risk that you might join them?

To put this another way: Is your faith something you’re willing to pick a fight over, even a fight that you might lose? Or is it a lifestyle accessory, a track of mood music you play in the background that helps you get through the day?

Before you settle on an answer to that, reflect on what happened Monday to a Christian leader of a persecuted community.

Knife Spontaneously Attacks Christian Bishop; Its Motive May Never Be Known

 According to Human Events:

Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed repeatedly while leading Mass at Wakely’s Christ The Good Shepherd Church, which was being live streamed. The Bishop is the leader of the Assyrian Orthodox church in Sydney, Australia. The stabbing suspect reportedly yelled, “Allahu Akbar” during the attack.

Here’s the attack on video:

A stabbing attack happened during a live stream of an Australian church service.

pic.twitter.com/apYZfN7kCO

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 15, 2024

The bishop survived the attack, having apparently used his cross to fend off the jihadi’s knife. (How’s that for symbolism?)

The Blaze offers more details which have emerged:

Australian officials have determined that the savage stabbing that left Assyrian Orthodox Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, a priest, and at least two others wounded during church services in Sydney Monday was an act of terrorism.

While authorities have indicated there is a religious motive for the attack and indicated the attacker was speaking Arabic at the time, they appear unwilling to name the 16-year-old bearded attacker’s obvious religious affiliation.

Extra to remaining mum about critical details pertaining to the terrorist attack, New South Wales officials are apparently considering tightening knife laws as if that might amount to a deterrent for future attacks.

At least Australian officials have a grip on the nub of the problem: Too many pointy objects are available to the public (which was stripped of guns in a post-massacre panic in 1996). 

Here’s a snippet of how the New York Times covered this hate crime against Christian refugees in a Christian-founded country by a Muslim terrorist:

Shame on you @nytimes pic.twitter.com/OUSnvMltgH

— s (@DoomguyN7) April 15, 2024

Ah, the Times subscriber says, as he sips his cup of kombucha, “an ‘ultra-conservative’ anti-vaxxer Christian.” Then he shrugs, relieved that the victim wasn’t part of any minority group that matters. Had a white Christian (God forbid) attacked someone at a transgender event or a mosque, the whole nation would have been convulsed with massive protests and calls for crackdowns on “Christian nationalists.” 

Killing for the Religion of Peace

But Australian media won’t even report on the ethnicity or religious affiliations of the jihadi who tried to kill a bishop. In case you don’t know the jargon, a “jihadi” is someone who kills unbelievers on behalf of the “Religion of Peace,” which is the phrase Public Christian™ George W. Bush used to describe Islam right after the 9/11 attacks.

George W. Bush is relevant to this story because his decisions led to the massive persecution of the ancient Christian communities in Iraq after 2003. He is literally the reason why Iraqi Christians like Bishop Emmanuel are exiled in Australia. 

On shaky evidence of so-called “WMDs” and false evidence that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, Bush launched a massive invasion of Iraq — heedless of local Christians who warned they would be incredibly vulnerable in the wake of such a war. When our troops controlled the country, our administrators imposed gun control laws, which the Christians duly obeyed.

You know who didn’t obey them? The local jihadis. Scapegoating these harmless Christians for the actions of “crusader” America, they began hunting, killing, and ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of believers, and our troops stood by and did virtually nothing — first on Bush’s orders, then on Obama’s. Three-fourths of the ancient Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities were either killed or displaced over the course of 20 years. I had friends whose family members were huddling in shipping containers because the Muslims even controlled the refugee camps and wouldn’t let Christians in.

That genocide of Christians, made possible by a president most American Christians had supported, is the reason why Assyrian Christians had to flee to places like Australia. But they’re not safe even there.

Is This Any Skin Off Your Nose?

Now let’s ask ourselves, how much do we care about the fates of obscure, dark-skinned, foreign Christians who worship differently than we do? For that matter:

• How much do you know about the massive ethnic cleansing of ancient Christian communities in the Artsakh region, which local Christians call a “second Armenian genocide”? Do you follow events like this one, on which The Stream dutifully reports?
• Do you keep up on the persecution of Christians in places like China and Nigeria? Do you at least remember to pray for those fellow believers?
• Closer to home, are you following the trial of Christian pro-lifers in Washington, D.C., who face decades-long prison sentences for peacefully protesting in a facility that brazenly performs illegal late-term abortions?
• Are you aware that our own FBI is infiltrating churches it dubs “extremist” for their conservative theological stances? Did you let Public Christian™ House Speaker Mike Johnson know that it’s wrong for him to fund an unreformed FBI which keeps doing those things?
• Are you speaking up about Christians losing custody of their kids at the behest of transgender-grooming school psychologists? That’s happening in Indiana, thanks to a law pushed by Public Christian™ Mike Pence in 2015, obeying the orders of the local Chamber of Commerce and the NCAA.
• Have you spoken up for the hundreds of Christians now in prison for peaceful protesting on January 6 the massive 2020 election fraud who are being punished with long sentences via obscure, misapplied laws thanks to politicized judges and biased juries?

Why Are There Muslims in Australia, Europe, and America?

Now let me pose another, more pointed question: Why are there Muslims in Australia? More than 800,000 of them, in fact, and millions in countries like France and Britain and Germany, where they block streets with public prayers or pro-Hamas demonstrations. Such protests in recent days alone have blocked:

• Chicago’s O’Hare Airport
• the Golden Gate Bridge and
• the Brooklyn Bridge

These people belong to a religion committed to global domination, which encourages violence against unbelievers and especially critics of Islam — such as the brave Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.

So why did we let them in? Do we really want to live alongside people we hope don’t really believe in or practice their religion — since if they did, they’d become really dangerous? That’s right, from the point of view of any “unbeliever,” the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. If you don’t realize that, you ought to watch this powerful debate I organized and moderated a decade ago, between Islam critic Robert Spencer and well-meaning but politically naïve Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft.

Again, why did we let millions of potential enemies with a high birth rate and a hostile religion into our countries? Was there some terrible shortage of falafel chefs and kebab merchants that desperately required a mass influx of potential jihadi attackers?

Or is it something else? Do the same people who regard serious, biblical Christians as vectors of “hate” who need to be infiltrated and watched by the FBI intentionally promote policies that import millions of immigrants who are religiously committed to wiping out Christianity? Is that why the feds paid Catholic Charities to fly thousands of Somali “refugees” over a dozen safe Muslim countries in order to settle them in Minnesota so they could form a congressional district for Rep. Ilhan Omar?

Be careful about the conclusions you draw from such thoughts as these. They might well land you in the cross-hairs of our persecutors right here at home. Maybe it’s safer to stick with being a Public Christian™ instead of a serious one.

Let’s end on a positive note, with one of the powerful messages of Christian hope and love that Bishop Emmanuel has been offering online, which attracted persecution:

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.