Christians, Jews are easy targets, but for how long?

The absurd attacks on Israel for exercising its right of self-defense in the past few weeks have only been surpassed in foolhardy dangerousness by the world’s virtual silence about the genocide being practiced against Christians and other minority religions in the Islamic State formerly known as northwestern Iraq.

No matter how you try to wrap your head around the hypocrisy of people calling out Israel for supposed war crimes while at the same time closing their eyes to the uncomfortable truth of the barbaric genocide being waged by Islamic fundamentalists, you cannot do so. Hypocrisy of this dimension is almost demonic.

What, after all, did Israel do that was so horrible? Fight back against an enemy that has been lobbing hundreds of missiles toward Tel Aviv and other populated areas. Yes, the Iron Dome defense has prevented massive casualties in Israel, but no credit should redound to the Gaza terrorists on account of Israel’s technological prowess. If you shoot bombs at a country, you have lost any right to the moral high ground.

Nonetheless, the United States and the horrid United Nations have condemned Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as “disgraceful” and “appalling.” When the terrorists launch missiles from inside schools and hospitals, the Israelis are supposed to just hunker down and tough it out. No fair fighting back if the enemy has surrounded himself with children and sick people.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles to the northeast, the terrorists vying to create an Islamic caliphate are beheading children and killing Christians and others for refusing to submit to Islamic law. In an interview with CNN, California businessman Mark Arabo described what is happening to his fellow Chaldean Christians in northern Iraq.

“There is a park in Mosul where they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick and have them in the park,” he told Jonathan Mann.

“You’re startling me with the severity of what you’re describing,” Mann replied “You said they are beheading children?”

Yes, that is exactly what he said, and there is video footage of such beheadings online. It appears that the Islamic State thinks it is good publicity to encourage other Christians to convert to Islam if they know what fate awaits them should they remain faithful to their own religion.

“They are systematically beheading children,” Arabo confirmed to the CNN reporter. “And mothers and fathers. The world hasn’t seen an evil like this for generations.”

Perhaps the Islamists know exactly what they are doing though. The evil of undaunted brutality has a tendency to shut up your enemies, and much of the world has been strangely silent before this growing holocaust just as they were silent before World War II as Hitler’s Germany began rounding up Jews and putting them in concentration camps.

Today, Christians and Jews are fair game in much of the world while the practitioners of death who wear the cloak of Islam are given a free pass.

So it comes down to this: Good and evil. It’s time to choose up sides. As Jesus said 2,000 years ago, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.