Demanding that Christians' human rights be respected would be a sign of embarrassingly parochial Western ethnocentrism, don't you know?
To be fair to the Obama Administration, this sort of insouciance regarding the plight of Christians in Moslem lands precedes the present regime; it goes back at least as far as the Carter Administration--which did not deign to side with the embattled Christians of Lebanon . . . nor did the Reagan Administration, for that matter, which _de facto_ confirmed Moslem supremacy there, and allowed that hapless country to become a staging ground for attacks on Israel, when it first pressured the Israelis to give up their hard-won victory over the Palestinians and Hezbollah in the 1982 Lebanon War, supposedly guaranteeing Israeli security with a multinational force presence, then reneging after the Beirut Airport terror bombing attack (thereby definitively reducing the Christians to vassal status in what had been a Christian land for almost two millennia). Bush I naturally continued Reagan's policy of tacitly looking the other way at the oppression of Christians by Moslems in the Middle East, while sending American servicemen in harm's way to protect Wahabi interests.
Clinton, of course, infamously took sides with he Moslems against the Orthodox Christians in the Bosnian Civil War, which undermined--perhaps irremediably--America's relationship with post-Bolshevik Russia (and made Putin's thugocracy possible).
Bush II was hardly better, refusing to protect Iraq's Christian minority from repeated, murderous terror attacks, leading to its nearly total exodus of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. (One of the--retrospectively--most poignant moments of the Iraq War was the image of a strikingly beautiful young Christian woman making the sign of the cross, while hanging out the window of a passing auto, on the night when the Coalition forces achieved effective control of Baghdad . . . little did she know!)
But then, the Western powers, including the U. S., had already racked up an impressive record of non-intervention in the plight of a beleaguered religious minority in the Middle East, when it refused so much as to raise its voice in defense of the historic Jewish communities of the region. How did that stirring mantra go? "Never again," I believe.
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Demanding that Christians' human rights be respected would be a sign of embarrassingly parochial Western ethnocentrism, don't you know?
To be fair to the Obama Administration, this sort of insouciance regarding the plight of Christians in Moslem lands precedes the present regime; it goes back at least as far as the Carter Administration--which did not deign to side with the embattled Christians of Lebanon . . . nor did the Reagan Administration, for that matter, which _de facto_ confirmed Moslem supremacy there, and allowed that hapless country to become a staging ground for attacks on Israel, when it first pressured the Israelis to give up their hard-won victory over the Palestinians and Hezbollah in the 1982 Lebanon War, supposedly guaranteeing Israeli security with a multinational force presence, then reneging after the Beirut Airport terror bombing attack (thereby definitively reducing the Christians to vassal status in what had been a Christian land for almost two millennia). Bush I naturally continued Reagan's policy of tacitly looking the other way at the oppression of Christians by Moslems in the Middle East, while sending American servicemen in harm's way to protect Wahabi interests.
Clinton, of course, infamously took sides with he Moslems against the Orthodox Christians in the Bosnian Civil War, which undermined--perhaps irremediably--America's relationship with post-Bolshevik Russia (and made Putin's thugocracy possible).
Bush II was hardly better, refusing to protect Iraq's Christian minority from repeated, murderous terror attacks, leading to its nearly total exodus of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. (One of the--retrospectively--most poignant moments of the Iraq War was the image of a strikingly beautiful young Christian woman making the sign of the cross, while hanging out the window of a passing auto, on the night when the Coalition forces achieved effective control of Baghdad . . . little did she know!)
But then, the Western powers, including the U. S., had already racked up an impressive record of non-intervention in the plight of a beleaguered religious minority in the Middle East, when it refused so much as to raise its voice in defense of the historic Jewish communities of the region. How did that stirring mantra go? "Never again," I believe.
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