ishtartv.com-
washingtontimes.com
By
Dana Rohrabacher - - Monday, February 8, 2016
It’s
now a couple of weeks of news cycles since we learned from satellite imagery
that the Islamic State had destroyed the monastery of St. Elijah, which for
more than 11 centuries served as a spiritual oasis for the promulgation of
Christianity in the Middle East.
Because
of our own century’s dizzying acceleration of history, I’m afraid, the
unfathomable destruction of this priceless site already may be receding from
our minds.
The
razing of Dair Mar Elia, the monastery’s local name in Iraq, requires that we
give it more reflection — like the reflection of Edmund Burke when he beheld
the bloody upheaval of the French Revolution and contemplated its meaning for
Western Civilization.
The
Sunni terrorists, as we know, have declared war on modernity, on human
progress, on civilization itself. They signal this apocalyptic intention by
targeting any physical antiquity that stands in their way — prior to St.
Elijah, they blew up Roman ruins at Palmyra in Syria.
What
we sometimes call Christendom stands idly by, with the exceptional evidence of
limited U.S. airstrikes and more aggressive raids by the Russians. This
colossal indifference cannot be explained away. By itself it is horrifying.
So
what will happen to those individual Christians standing in the way of a
murderous caliphate in the making?
any
have been forced into coffins or made to stand in cages, doused with flammable
fluid, and set ablaze. Many, as we’ve seen time after time, have been forced to
their knees, their heads to be sawed off. Or they have been — to give it a
measure of symbolic cruelty — crucified. Christian women, Yazidi women, women
of other religious minorities — and the children of all — have been similarly
mistreated, tortured or forced into sexual slavery.
The
world has watched these monstrous proceedings for more than a year. And whereas
many Christian organizations have gone into embattled Mesopotamia to rescue
their brothers and sisters, official U.S. policy remains mired in deep denial
or at the least an intentional inability to see what is clearly a historic
catastrophe.
Consider
the astonishing answer Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for our military operations
in the region, gave to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who brought to his attention the
slaughter of thousands of Christians and the forced flight of hundreds of
thousands more: “Wolf, [the Islamic State] doesn’t care if you’re a Christian .
We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”
You
could almost hear journalist Raymond Ibrahim of the Gatestone Institute
clearing his throat when he responded in his blog: “Except that roughly
two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christian citizens have been killed or forced
to flee the country by ISIS and its jihadi predecessors over the past decade.
This has nothing to do with their religious identity?”
In
fact, what is happening is genocide carried out before our eyes, and its
ultimate target is us. Forgive the graphic image, but each day we do not act a
jihadi blade is likelier to slice into a Christian neck. Each moment we try to
avert our attention Christian flesh is about to be incinerated. When our
policymakers adjust their morning showers from scalding to soothing, perhaps
they should pause for a moment to contemplate the extreme fiery pain so many
victims of ISIS are made to feel in those last moments of life.
Late
last year I was among a handful of lawmakers who introduced urgent bills to
respond as we are morally called to do, indeed, to preserve our very meaning as
a people in the 21st century. Mine, H.R. 4017, is the only one actually to
invoke the law so that persecuted Christians and Yazidis would be given
emergency status.
In
short, my bill says, whether refugee or immigrant, a person targeted for
genocide is granted priority status, and it declares Christians and Yazidis to
be targets of genocide.
Existing
immigration law allows us to do just that. And yet the Obama administration, in
all its Orwellian political piety, reacted as if we were engaging in religious
discrimination by moving to save victims specifically targeted because they are
Christians or Yazidis.
This,
Obama officialdom complained, placed Christians ahead of all others; such
prioritization, they insisted, was “not who we are” — and other such
Beelzebubian blather.
