Next week we celebrate Christmas, the season of peace. Unfortunately, rather than peace, we’ve seen some pretty horrific examples of violence occur around the globe.
Down under, in Sydney, Australia, the world nervously watched as a Muslim terrorist, who had previously been involved in murdering and setting on fire his wife, had sexually assaulted a whole series of women, and had sent threatening letters to families of fallen Australian soldiers, held 17 innocent hostages for 16 hours in a coffee shop. Among the demands he made were than an ISIS flag be sent in so he could proudly display it over the terror he had wrought on these innocent people. The standoff ended with his death, and the deaths of a mother of three young children, and the coffee shop manager.
In northwest Pakistan, the Taliban attacked a school and slaughtered over 130 school children who had nothing more to defend themselves with than their school uniforms, green sweaters and blazers. Sounds remarkably similar to Muslim Boko Haram terrorists who have attacked and slaughtered dozens and dozens of innocent school children in Nigeria in recent years.
And closer to home, in Pennsylvania, a former Marine reservist who served in Iraq in 2011, went on a killing spree, brutally ending the lives of his ex-wife, and five of his former in-laws. He ended his life with the same sword he had apparently used on some of his victims.
These are terrible things. One thing they all had in common, is that they got extensive media coverage, particularly the Australian coffee shop hostage drama.
I’d like to focus now on something you probably didn’t see or hear about in the news. We of course know that ISIS has been running amuck in Syria and Iraq for some time now. They’ve executed hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, who initially dropped their weapons and surrendered to ISIS in terror. And we’ve heard rather vague stories of Christians being given a choice of converting to Islam or dying.
Well now Andrew White, an Anglican priest who is known as the “Vicar of Baghdad”, and was ordered by his superior, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to flee Iraq when it became known that ISIS was searching for him, has come forward with a particularly horrific, but at the same time, inspiring, story.
ISIS came upon a group of Christian children, all under 15 years of age, in one of the many villages they have overrun. The children were told they must say they would “follow Muhammad” (convert to Islam, and renounce their Christian faith) or die. Four of the Children responded that they would not convert to Islam, that they “loved Yesua” (Jesus), and that they would always love Jesus. The four children were beheaded on the spot.
ISIS of course does not invite a free press to come in and document their many acts of brutality in the areas they have conquered, but we have reason to believe that brutal executions like those of the four innocent Iraqi children, are being repeated over and over in ISIS-controlled areas of both Iraq and Syria.
ISIS is not a threat that can be contained, or reasoned with, or tolerated. It must be destroyed. ISIS is but one more head of a multi-headed hydra beast, whose other dangerous heads include al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, and many others. And we ignore this threat at our own peril.
Merry Christmas.