“Please tell the American Christians that we need their help.”
I heard those words in 2005 from an Assyrian woman who had been displaced from her home in Baghdad by Islamic attacks against religious minorities in Iraq. Even across the airwaves, I could sense the exhaustion in her voice, both emotional and physical.
I promised her that I would deliver her message. Before we ended the conversation, however, she posed a question that stopped me in my tracks:
“Do you understand that the destruction we have endured will reach your country as well? When it does, ask your American friends what help would they need from us, the Christians of the Middle East.”
I never spoke to her again. Yet her chilling words transcended time and distance, remaining with me to this day. Her message was not only a personal warning, it foreshadowed an existential threat that has infiltrated the political, social, economic, and religious dimensions of our society.
There is a metaphorical and inexplicable blindness that has overtaken our society, but before we are cast into the absolute darkness of the abyss, we are forced to witness the murder of our children before our eyes, as though the sight of their stolen innocence is meant to be the final image etched into our memory; we remember the twenty-three-year-old Iryna Zarutska and the twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, both savagely murdered, their young lives extinguished before our very eyes.
We are witnessing our values being mocked even as we are told that Socialist and Islamic ideologies seek to occupy our homes and communities. We are forced to watch our Jewish citizens bullied and stabbed, churches surrendered to a foreign ideology or reduced to ashes, and the memory of our heroes desecrated through vandalism of war memorials. Even our American story is being re-written before our eyes as historical monuments are torn down.
Horror that No Longer Horrifies
