Middle Eastern Christians: To understand their plight, look to the past

Muslims have recently escalated killing Middle Eastern Christians. Robert Spencer explains the deep historic roots behind this new slaughter.

One of the family jokes is that, when the kids used to ask me for help with their history homework, no matter the historic subject at issue, I’d always say either “You need to go back to the Romans” or “You need to go back to the Bible.” Sometimes those answers were exaggerations. As often as not, though, I’d mean it.

It is impossible to understand the present without looking back and understanding what brought us here. To the extent that American and Western European history is an amalgam of the end of Rome and the ongoing influence of the Old and New Testaments, understanding both explains a great deal.

I thought of my commitment to the past as a necessary component to understand the present when I watched Robert Spencer explain the way in which Middle Eastern Christians, who had lived for centuries — indeed, millennia — relatively unmolested in the Muslim world (although always of lowly status), have found themselves the object of a full-scale jihad in the past few years. This bloody jihad has resulted in the destruction of many Middle Eastern Christian communities dating back to Jesus’s time. According to Spencer, the answer isn’t just written in the Koran, it’s written in the past, both the Middle Eastern and European past: