By Raymond Ibrahim
For years now, a number of mostly Eastern European nations have been arguing that, if they are going to accept any refugees from the Muslim world, they prefer Christians. Hungary, for example, has apparently been doing just that.
To this, the official western response has been to cry “racism!” Barack Obama, for instance, once called such a suggestion “shameful,” loftily adding: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” It was later revealed that his administration was doing precisely that — but in reverse: discriminating against persecuted Christian asylum seekers, while favoring Muslims.
All emotionalism and name-calling aside — that is, the stuff of American politics — there are, in fact, several objective reasons why the West should give priority, if not exclusivity, to Christian refugees from the Muslim world — and some of these are actually to the benefit of western nations. Consider:
Christians are real victims of persecution. From a humanitarian point of view — and humanitarianism is the chief reason cited in accepting refugees — Christians should receive top priority simply because they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East. As former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop once put it, “I think that Christian minorities are being persecuted in Syria and even if the conflict were over they would still be persecuted.”
Indeed. While they are especially targeted by the Islamic State and other professional jihadists, before ISIS, Christians were and continue to be targeted by Muslims — Muslim mobs, Muslim individuals, Muslim regimes, and Muslim terrorists, from Muslim countries of all races (Arab, African, Asian, etc.) — and for the same reason: Christians are infidel number one. (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for hundreds of anecdotes before the rise of ISIS as well as the Muslim doctrines that create such hate and contempt for Christians.)
Conversely, Muslim refugees are not fleeing direct persecution, but chaos created by the violent and intolerant teachings of their own religion, Islam — hence why violence and intolerance follows Muslims into Europe.
Muslim persecution of Christians has been further enabled by western policies. Western nations should accept Christian refugees on the basis that western actions in the Middle East are directly responsible for exacerbating the plight of Christian minorities. Christians were not terrorized in Bashar Assad’s Syria, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muamar Gaddafi’s Libya. Their persecution grew exponentially only after the U.S. and other western states interfered in those nations in the name of “democracy.” All they did is unleash the jihadist forces that the dictators had long kept suppressed.
Unlike Muslims, Christians are easily assimilated in western countries, due to a shared Christian heritage. As a Slovakian official once explained, Muslims would not fit in, including because there are no mosques in the Slavic nation. Conversely, “Slovakia as a Christian country can really help Christians from Syria to find a new home in Slovakia.”
This too is common sense. The same Christian teachings that molded Europe over the centuries are the same ones that mold Middle Eastern Christians — whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. As San Diego’s Father Noel once said, Mideast Christians “who come here [America] ‘want to be good citizens’ and many who came here a decade ago are now lawyers, teachers, or other productive members of society.”
Meanwhile, Muslims follow a completely different blueprint, the Koran — which condemns Christians by name, calls for constant war (jihad) against all non-Muslims, and advocates any number of distinctly anti-Western practices. Hence it is no surprise that many Muslim migrants are anti-western at heart.
Mideast Christians bring trustworthy language and cultural skills that are beneficial to the West. They understand the Middle Eastern — including Islamic — mindset and can help the West understand it. Moreover, unlike Muslims, Christians have no “conflicting loyalty” issues: Islamic law forbids Muslims from aiding “infidels” against fellow Muslims (click here to see some of the treachery this leads to in the U.S. and see the treachery Christians have suffered from their longtime Muslim neighbors and “friends”). Subversive Muslims are working to infiltrate every corner of the U.S. government. No such threat exists among Mideast Christians. They too render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Finally, it goes without saying that Mideast Christians have no sympathy for the ideology that made their lives a living hell — the ideology that is also hostile to everything in the West. Thus a win-win: the West and Mideast Christians complement each other, if only in that they share the same threat.
All the above reasons — from those that offer humanitarian relief to the true victims of persecution, to those that offer benefits to the West — are unassailable in their logic and wisdom. Yet, because western progressives prioritize politically correct ideals and fantasies over stark reality, there is little chance that they will be considered.
Quite the reverse: all throughout the West, masses of Muslims have been and continue to be granted easy asylum, while the few Christian applicants are scrutinized and often rejected.
The reason for this is simple: for the progressive (now “woke”) mindset — which dominates western governments, media, and academia — taking in refugees has little to do with altruism and everything to do egoism: It matters little who is really being persecuted — as seen, the West is directly responsible for greatly exacerbating the sufferings of Christians around the world.
No, what’s important is that the progressives “feel good” about themselves. By taking in “foreign” Muslims, as opposed to “siding” with same-old, same-old Christians, they get to feel “enlightened,” “open-minded,” “tolerant,” and “multicultural” — and that’s all that matters here.
Meanwhile, reality marches on: The same Islamic mentality that persecutes and slaughters “infidel” Christians in the Middle East continues to grow at an alarming rate in the West.