MR. TRUDEAU NAME AND SHAME THOSE ISLAMIC STATE TERRORISTS BENT ON GENOCIDE
Western democracies, including Canada, need to come to grips with Islamic extremism, and they need to do it now.
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is a case in point, but he is not the only Canadian political leader that tends to ignore Islamic-inspired terrorism, and terrorists, when it is in his perceived political interest to do so. The European Union, the US, and United Kingdom declared the ISIS killings of Christian minorities in Syria as a genocide in 2016. But the Trudeau Liberal government defeated a similar motion in the Canadian Parliament. This is the very same government that recently championed an Islamophobia motion through the House of Commons, and that immediately declared the shooting at the Islamic Center in Quebec City as a terrorist act. But when it comes to the vehicle attacks in London and Sweden by Islamic extremists, can hardly force the word terrorism from their mouths. It is a bizarre standard.
Yesterday, Egypt declared a three-month state of emergency after Coptic Christian churches in Egypt were bombed by the Islamic State. Coptic Christians make up about ten percent of the Egyptian population and have long-suffered persecution for their beliefs including; imprisonment, murder, rape, abduction, force conversion, slavery and the list goes on. Palm Sunday was very sadly, the latest installment of Islamic-inspired terrorism and violence directed at a religious minority. At least 28 people were killed in a bomb blast at a Coptic church in the northern Egyptian city of Tanta. Shortly thereafter, 17 people, including civilians and police officers, were killed in Alexandria after a suicide bomber blew detonated a device outside a Coptic church. Some 125 others were wounded in the terrorist attacks.
In February 2017, ISIS terrorists gunned down a Coptic Christian teacher on his way to school in the northern Sinai coastal city of el-Arish. That same month, suspected ISIS militants gunned down a Coptic Christian veterinarian in el-Arish, and in late January, A Coptic merchant was killed by terrorists in a raid on his shop. Terrorists attacked and bombed a Coptic church in Cairo in December 2016, killing 25 people. Later in July 2016, Archangel Mikhail Coptic Church in the southern Egyptian village of Naj al-Nassara was burned to the ground. On July 5th, a 16-year-old girl was kidnapped in Minya District by a Muslim neighbor to demand her conversion to Islam. On the same day, a Coptic nun was gunned down on the Cairo to Alexandria road by people unknown. Five Coptic Christians’ houses were torched and burned to the ground on July 16th, in Abu-Yacoub. In May 2016, a mob of Islamic extremists stripped a Coptic Christian woman in her 70s naked and dragged her through the streets. On average, over the last three years in Egypt, Christians are attacked once a month. On New Year's Day 2011, a Coptic church in Alexandria was bombed by the Army of Islam (Gaza Strip), that later merged with the Islamic State, and killed 21 people.
But the plight of minority Coptic Christians in Egypt are not alone, and Christians have been targeted by the ISIS in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. In 2014, ISIS ethnically cleansed Christians from Mosul, towns of the Ninewa Plain, and Raqqa. In February 2015, ISIS terrorists in Libya beheaded 21 Coptic Christian migrant workers kidnapped by the Islamic State over a period from 2014 to 2015 and then released a video of the mass execution. In that same month, ISIS kidnapped almost 300 Christian farmers from the Khabur valley and enslaved them with a ransom demand. Several have reportedly been killed. Then in April 2015, mirroring the February video, 30 Ethiopian Christians were beheaded or shot in Libya by ISIS. In August 2015, 11 Christian missionaries in Allepo, Syria were crucified and beheaded by ISIS for refusing to convert to Islam. On Good Friday 2016, ISIS gunned down four nuns in a retirement home in Yemen and crucified an Indian catholic priest, Father Tom Uzhunnalil.
In his recent statement on the bombing of Coptic Christian churches in Egypt and the Palm Sunday massacre the Prime Minister mentioned “terrorist” in the headline and “terrorism” in the 6th paragraph. “Coptic Christian” was mentioned twice and “Christianity” once, but no mention of Islamic extremism, a pattern of behavior that is genocide, and no condemnation of ISIS by name. Similarly, Jewish Canadians have watched with dismay as stabbing and vehicle attacks go virtually ignored in Israel by the current government and liberal media. But mere weeks ago anyone who questioned the Liberal’s Islamophobia motion was labelled a racist, and Liberal Members of Parliament blamed the Conservative Party, and Parti Quebecois, for the terrorist attack on the Islamic Center in Quebec City. The very Conservative Party that established the Office of Religious Freedom at Foreign Affairs in 2013, to monitor religious persecution abroad and support freedom of worship for all. Not surprisingly, the Office of Religious Freedom was closed by the Trudeau government shortly after taking power. At the end of the day, if Prime Minister Trudeau wants to promote human rights and religious tolerance, then he must bring those that engage in genocide out into the light of day, and expose and name the terrorists for what they are, because we know that those bent on genocide will do it again, and again.
Edmund Burke put it best when he said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
