Why the West is blind and indifferent to the persecuted Christians in the Islamic lands

In a brief, powerful Christmas Eve essay at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer shows how all traditional Christian art violates Islam and would be destroyed under Islam rule. Then he speaks of the continuing persecution suffered by Christians in the Muslim world:

In those countries, Christians today are being kidnapped, imprisoned, wrongly arrested, beaten, and murdered — not because of anything they have done, but because they have dared to believe some of the things I have adumbrated above, beliefs that are considered blasphemous in authoritative Islam. And it is hardly better elsewhere in the Islamic world: nowhere in majority-Muslim countries today do people who believe these things enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims.

We see this at Jihad Watch every day. We see jihadists attacking Christians with increasing fury. We also see the world largely yawning and indifferent as all this goes on. Christianity is a large and multifaceted thing, with so many different and various manifestations, but in the mind of the opinion makers of the West it is Western, white, suburban, wealthy, comfortable, oppressive, and oppressing. Christians are, in the little dramas that play out in mainstream media stories every day, a bit cracked, a bit sinister, a bit dangerous, a bit grasping, and sometimes fanatically jingoistic and xenophobic. They are never victims. Muslims, by contrast, are in the daily mainstream media playlets always cast as non-Western, nonwhite, poor, wise, serene, and oppressed.

And so when it comes to the specter of non-Western, nonwhite Christians being persecuted by Muslims, the mainstream media’s circuitry explodes. They can’t handle it. They have no paradigm for doing so. It violates every rule in their playbook. So they either ignore it or mask the identity and/or motives of the perpetrators, and try to cast the focus elsewhere.

Spencer is speaking of the “script” that constitutes modern liberalism, a script with three characters: the virtuous liberal, the bigoted white, and the nonwhite/Third-World victim, who is oppressed by the bigoted white. Since liberals automatically cast Christians—even Third-World Christians—as bigoted whites, they cannot conceive of them as victims of Third-World oppressors, namely Muslims.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 26, 2011 09:40 AM | Send