The fate of the murdered Christian migrants is the image of our future, unless we form a human chain to resist our attackers.
By Ralph H. Sidway
The shared experience.
How people, often from very different backgrounds, countries, nationalities and races, and even religions, can bond in simple human camaraderie, especially when going through difficult challenges and trials together, helping one another, looking out for each other, protecting not just one’s own family but those of one’s fellow travelers, one’s fellow strugglers.
The shared experience.
Yet in the Associated Press report of the horrific crime against migrant Christians — fellow migrants seeking a better life — we see into the Muslim heart of darkness:
ROME (AP) — Italy’s migration crisis took on a deadly new twist Thursday as police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants had thrown 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya, and an aid group said another 41 were feared drowned in a separate incident.
Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea by the ship Ellensborg.
The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement.
The survivors said they had boarded a rubber boat April 14 on the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, part of the wave of migrants taking advantage of calm seas and warm weather to make the risky crossing from Libya, where most smuggling operations originate.
During the crossing, the migrants from Nigeria and Ghana — believed to be Christians — were threatened with being abandoned at sea by some 15 other passengers from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea Bissau.
Eventually the threat was carried out and 12 were pushed overboard. The statement said the motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.”
The AP story reports that the survivors did literally forge a bond through their shared experience of enduring a brutal, murderous attack of jihad terror:
The surviving Christians, the statement said, only managed to stay on board by forming a “human chain” to resist the assault.
But is there more to this story than migrant-Muslim-on-migrant-Christian jihad murder, even if one takes into account the smuggling angle?
Recall how the Islamic State titled its infamous video of the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, “A Message Signed With Blood to the Nation of the Cross,” and after the slaughter, with red-soaked foam lapping at the Libyan coast, the narrator threatened: “And we will conquer Rome, Allah willing.”
Italian officials did not take the threat lightly, warning, “ISIS is at the door.”
Alarmingly, as The Daily Beast reported back in February, ISIS may already have made it through the door, via the spiraling migrant influx challenging Italy’s security apparatus.
Italy saw “a 64 percent increase in illegal migrant arrivals by sea since last year. In all of 2014, more than 170,000 people arrived from Libya and Turkey, the highest number ever recorded.”
Even worse, defense analysts warn that Italy has never been so exposed to an attack, due in large measure to heavily armed sea-based smugglers melding with those illegal migrants. The Daily Beast article added that “The Office of Migration in Rome says there could be as many as half a million people in camps waiting to come to Italy and the unrest will push them out faster.”
And embedded within that half million, how many ISIS operatives might there be?
Looking beyond the specific threat to Italy and Rome, we continue to see shocking numbers of Muslims in the West being drawn to join the Islamic State. The attraction for certain Middle Eastern and African Muslims can hardly be less, as attested by the remorseless wave of crimes against Christians and their churches committed not only by ISIS or other jihadi groups, but more and more by the Christians’ very Muslim neighbors (see here, here and here).
Even statistical research reveals that more and more “ordinary” (or, as Western leaders invariably describe them, “moderate”) Muslims sympathize with the goals of the Islamic State as honoring Islam and purifying their lands of infidel presence. Here are some examples:
- 80% of London Muslims Support ISIS
- 27% of Young French Muslims (1.62 million) back the Islamic State, poll finds
- Newsweek: 16% of French Citizens Support ISIS, Poll Finds
- 92% of Saudi’s believe that ‘Islamic State conforms to the values of Islam and Islamic law’ – Poll
- New Poll of Muslim Countries Finds Large [Double-Digit] Support for Terrorists
As Raymond Ibrahim reports concerning Arabic media sources, such Muslim views are mainstream and deeply engrained in the Islamic mind. One Saudi writer recently wrote, “They [Saudi institutions] said that the Christian is an infidel, a denizen of hell, an enemy to Allah and Islam. So we said, ‘Allah’s curse on them’.”
Taking all this into account, the Muslim attack on Christians in a migrant boat crossing the Mediterranean is a sign of our times, a dark symbol and metaphor for a future which is rapidly beginning to come into focus:
We are all in a boat together, but there is a band of people in our boat which seeks to throw the rest of us overboard, to kill us, to sink and drown us, to eliminate us.
The fate of the murdered Christian migrants is the image of our future, unless we form a human chain to resist our attackers.
Ralph Sidway is an Orthodox Christian researcher and writer, and author of Facing Islam: What the Ancient Church has to say about the Religion of Muhammad. He operates the Facing Islam blog.
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