by Raymond Ibrahim
While Obama sides with Christian-murdering “freedom fighters.”
The Orthodox Christian Church, which holds an important place in an insurgent Russia, has described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi opposition groups in Syria as a “holy war.”
According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department,
The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is
perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian
Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to
defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness
of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the region with the
kidnapping of clerics and the destruction of churches. Muslims are
suffering no less.
The head of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said
that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in
some part of the world, specifying that he was talking about such
countries as Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India. The cleric asked Putin to
make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions
in future.
“This is how it will be, have no doubt,” Putin answered.
The Russian Patriarch Kirill even once wrote an impassioned letter to Obama, imploring the American president to stop empowering Christian persecuting jihadis. That the patriarch said “I am deeply convinced that the countries which belong to the Christian civilization bear a special responsibility for the fate of Christians in the Middle East” must have only ensured that the letter ended in the trash bin of the White House.
Of course, Russian’s concern for Christian minorities will be cynically dismissed in America by the major talking heads on both sides. While such dismissals once resonated with Americans, they are becoming less and less persuasive to those paying attention, as explained in “Putin’s Crusade—Is Russia the Last Defender of the Christian Faith?”
For those of us who grew up in America being told that the godless
communist atheists in Russia were our enemies, the idea that America
might give up on God and Christianity while Russia embraces religion
might once have been difficult to accept. But by 2015, the everyday
signs in America show a growing contempt for Christianity, under the
first president whose very claims of being a Christian are
questionable. The exact opposite trend is happening for Russia and its
leaders—a return to Christian roots.
How can they not? After one of his speeches praising the West’s Christian heritage—a thing few American politicians dare do—Putin concluded with something which must surely resonate with millions of traditional Americans: “We must protect Russia from that which has destroyed American society”—a reference to the anti-Christian liberalism and licentiousness that has run amok in the West.
Should U.S supported jihadis (“rebels”) succeed in toppling the government of Syria, Graham correctly predicts that there will be “a bloodbath of Christians”:
There would be tens of thousands of Christians murdered and
slaughtered and on top of that, you would have hundreds of thousands of
more refugees pouring into Europe. So Russia right now, I see their
presence as helping to save the lives of Christians.
When asked why the Obama administration is ignoring the persecution of Christians, Graham, echoing Putin, said Obama was more invested in promoting the homosexual agenda than he is in protecting Christian minorities:
I’m not here to bash the
gays and lesbians and they certainly have rights and I understand all
of that, but this administration has been more focused on that agenda
than anything else. As a result, the Middle East is burning and you have
more refugees moving today since World War II. It could have been
prevented.
Indeed, at day’s end, it is not Russian claims of waging a holy war to save Christians from the sword of jihad that deserves to be cynically dismissed, but rather every claim the Obama administration makes to justify its support for the opposition in Syria (most of which is not even Syrian).
There are no “moderate rebels,” only committed jihadis eager to install Islamic law, which is the antithesis of everything the West used to hold precious. If the “evil dictator” Assad kills people in the context of war, the “rebels” torture, maim, enslave, rape, behead, and crucify people solely because they are Christian.
How does that make them preferable to Assad?
And, based on established precedent—look to Iraq and Libya, the other countries U.S. leadership helped “liberate”—the outcome of ousting the secular strongman of Syria will be more atrocities, more Christian persecution, more bombed churches and destroyed antiquities, and more terrorism, including in the West, despite John Kerry’s absurd assurances of a “pluralistic” Syria once Assad is gone.
Thus, and once again, the U.S. finds itself on the side of Islamic terrorists, who always reserve their best for America. The Saudis—the head of the Jihadi Snake which U.S. presidents are wont to kiss and bow to—are already screaming bloody murder and calling for an increased jihad in Syria in response to Russia’s audacious call to holy war.
Will Obama and the MSM comply, including through an increased propaganda campaign? Top Islamic clerics like Yusuf Qaradawi—who once slipped on live television by calling on America to wage “jihad for Allah” against Assad—seem to think so. Already the U.S. “welcomes” the new cruel joke that Saudi Arabia—one of the absolute worst human rights violators—will head a U.N. human rights panel.
At day’s end and all Realpolitik aside, there is no denying reality: what the United States and its Western allies have wrought in the Middle East—culminating with the rise of a bloodthirsty caliphate and the worst atrocities of the 21st century—is as unholy as Russia’s resolve to fight it is holy.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260372/russia-declares-holy-war-islamic-state-raymond-ibrahim
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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