Yesterday, the world learned of their fate. Each was beheaded.
I have no desire to speculate of how the mothers of the murdered will go on, or how nice it is that a church will be built in their names.
What I wish to do, instead, is analyze America’s response.
Though flawed from its very start for obvious reasons, America used to be great. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it often used its economic, political, and military might to promote goodness around the globe.
I miss that America. I weep at its decline. I feel deeply the implications of its absence on the world stage, particularly on days like today. I know that a shrinking American presence means liberty has lost its most steadfast friend.
The Copts who had their throats slit were murdered because they were Christian. ISIS said so. It did not identify them as Egyptians. It identified them as “people of the Cross.” The victims’ last words were pleas to the Savior, Christ Jesus. There was no talk of country—only of faith.
America, long in retreat, now, and led by a man so profoundly confused by the notions of good and evil, did not recognize this, and tweeted the following from its @NSCPress account:
“The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in #Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists #Egypt”
Hardly a coincidence, it made the mistake again, this time in the press secretary’s statement. Note the wording in both the title and first sentence of the condemnation.
“Statement by the Press Secretary on the Murder of Egyptian Citizens
The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists.”
What America, under the “leadership” of President Obama has done, is erase entirely and cruelly the identity of those butchered in an attempt to steer the global discussion away from the root of the problem: Islamism. Doing so ensures that you and I will continue to read of gruesome acts such as these for years to come.
Importantly, this is hardly an isolated incident. The president has a disturbing aversion to accuracy and truth.
In a recent interview with Vox, President Obama referred (condescendingly and incorrectly) to the targets of the Paris kosher store massacre, Jews, as “random.”
How wounding. How unintelligent. How illuminating.
What is clear to billions around the world, a supermajority of whom are not Harvard educated, seems embarrassingly unclear to Barack Obama, long hailed for his superior intellect and degree of enlightenment. The same man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after becoming president does not understand what has to be the simplest, most obvious reality facing us today: Islamists pose an existential threat, and they have a special bloodlust for Jews and Christians. It is his breathtaking and continued denial of these two facts that has allowed him to oversee the emergence and growth of a terror network so vast it controls a territory exceeding the size of Great Britain.
Jihadists tell us in plain terms using social media, propaganda videos, and more of their goals. They speak in explicit terms of their unbridled hatred for Jews and Christians in particular. Lucky for them, the American president has a deep reluctance to name them for who they are and an equally deep compulsion to spit on the graves of those they murder en masse. Just as his indifference to the identity of the aggressors enables them, his indifference to their victims dishonors them.
It was radical Muslims who belonged to a terror group named the Islamic State who abducted and beheaded twenty-one Copts for being Copts. This threat, the greatest since Nazism, will persist so long as America elects leaders who devalue confronting evil in all its forms, wherever it exists, however high the cost.
I imagine that, as they awaited their slaughter, all twenty-one Copts offered frantic, genuine confessions. I imagine God forgave them of their sins, and greeted them warmly into His eternal Kingdom.
What I cannot imagine, in contrast, is His response to those who committed the ghastly acts and those who enabled and then diminished them.