Killing Christians

Peggy Noonan has an article today in the WSJ that focuses on the ongoing effort to eradicate Christians in the Middle East. The WSJ hides a lot of stuff behind paywalls, but for now the whole article is here.

I'm glad to see someone talking about it. It has been going on a long time, for decades really, but it seems to be accelerating and seems to have finally come to public attention here.

"In roughly the past 18 months, all this has broken through in Christian communities, largely by way of Christian media, including Catholic news services and the Baptist press. The story has been all over social media. Pope Francis has denounced what is happening; the Vatican is talking about just-war theory."

The story has not really been covered by the establishment media. The genocide has not really been exposed by the foreign policy wonks or the U.N.

I originally grasped the scope of what was happening from reading a 1999 book by William Dalrymple: From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East. He visits monastery after monastery, and over and over the Christian population around the monasteries has dwindled significantly. Kirkus Reviews describes the book as "an evensong for a dying civilization". And why is that civilization dying? Dalrymple says it's due to resurgent Islamic fundamentalism.

I don't know that we can solve this problem. But we should at least begin by admitting that this is a great evil happening now.

Noonan is pretty good at reading the mood of the American people. I think she's correct that there's no current appetite for nation-building. But I think she's also correct that there's plenty of appetite for killing off a lot of these murderous Islamic State thugs, who are riding around in the open and waving flags and killing American journalists, and, generally, just begging to be killed.

Send in the drones.
Blast their bones.