Just days ago hundreds of Alawite, Christian and Druze civilians — men, women and children — were killed by the Syrian forces which recently toppled the Assad regime and took control of the country. Ostensibly the conflict isn’t over quite yet, at least not in the western Syrian towns and cities where the aforementioned minorities are being targeted.
These Free Syrian troops, however, having been portrayed in Western media as “freedom fighters” for the last decade, aren’t likely to start receiving bad press now, no matter their behavior, and certainly inconsequential of their potential victims being Christians. The mainstream media rarely utters a peep in defense of Christianity under assault — whether in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world — too wrapped up in singing the praises of any and all theisms, regimes, and movements opposed to it.
The American press has long since engendered a strong anti-Christian element in their reportage, for the last six decades at least. Whether it’s preventing students from praying at school, removing Ten Commandment monuments from state houses, disallowing Nativity scenes from enjoying public view, or forcing Catholic nuns to kneel at the altar of sexual permissiveness and genuflect to contraceptives, the US mainstream media never met an opponent of Christianity or saw a proposal to hamstring and curb it with which it couldn’t find some common ground.
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Worse perhaps than their public finger-pointing and snarling denunciations is their silence though. For it’s a near certainty that when journalism temporarily dims its spotlight searching for all the errors, contradictions, faults and wrongs of Christianity, the lapse will sadly coincide with an uptick in mobs burning down churches around the world or ethnically cleansing whole regions with largely Christian populations. It’s when the West or its predominant religion is under assault that the media remains quiet, making no mention of the properties destroyed, the icons desecrated, the Christians killed, assaulted, kidnapped, raped or arrested.
Oe sometimes, the silence indicates that the mainstream media is purposefully whistling Dixie, doing nothing, looking the other way, and probing no one. Their indifference to real investigative journalism is giving cover to rogue elements within Western governments striving mightily to repress and forestall Christianity. The FBI, for example, only recently was discovered to have outrageously targeted “radical traditional Catholic” congregants. It’s only when the shocking episode finally came to light that the foremost newspaper in America, The New York Times, tepidly opted to weigh in, and even then it was to downplay everything. Sure, the Times admitted, there may have been “violations of professional standards” but aside from that there was “no malicious intent.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence for the Trump Administration, was one of the lonely voices calling for restraint in the world’s gushing over the Free Syrian forces, with their ISIS elements, and to moderate the desperate desire to see the Assad regime deposed. “I have no love for Assad, but just fear what will happen if Islamic terrorists take over the country,” she explained plainly. Her honesty, foresight, courage and perception were rewarded by the media tarring her — former congresswoman, Honolulu city councilwoman, Iraq war veteran, retired lieutenant colonel — with the most absurdly ludicrous insinuations, labeling her everything from a Russian asset to a paid Assad mouthpiece.
Gabbard’s only saving grace was her Hinduism; if she had been Christian the rabid press corps would have had to ratchet their slander of her up to fantastical Twilight Zone levels: they might have had to cast her then as an insidious plant working for extraterrestrial overlords.
In fact, the mainstream media’s visceral aversion for anything remotely Christian might even exceed their unhealthy anti-Semitism — and that’s certainly saying something.
Originally published at The Times of Israel.
David Nabhan is a science and science fiction writer. He is the author of Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology (2017) and three other books on seismic forecasting.
