Many of the world's most persecuted Christians have nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism or missionaries. Those most faced with the threat of genocide — including Syria's and Iraq's Assyrians or Egypt's Copts — were Christian several centuries before the ancestors of Europe's colonizers became Christian and went missionizing

The BBC report highlights "political correctness" as being especially responsible for the West's indifference....

Among the worst persecutors are those that rule according to Islamic law, or Sharia -- which academics such as Georgetown University's John Esposito insist is equitable and just. In Afghanistan (ranked #2), "Christianity is not permitted to exist."

To start with, we must realize that the crisis in question isn't caused by any of the traditional causes of conflict between nation-states.... In other words, the conflict isn't a classical international one. The reason is that Iran no longer behaves as a nation-state but as a vehicle for an ideology.

The madness that is Khomeinism has always had its method, which includes abject surrender when pressed too hard and brazen aggression when pressure is eased.

Contrary to claims by the pro-mullah lobby in Washington, the choice isn't between surrender to Khomeminist madness and full-scale invasion of Iran. Only when the threshold of tolerable pain is reached the "Supreme Guide" may well reconsider his options. We are not there yet.

A few days after the Finnish elections, Hussein Al-Taee, the son of the governor of Najaf in Iraq and a pro-Iranian regime advocate, was exposed for having spent eight years posting anti-Semitic, anti-American and homophobic comments on Facebook... For four of these years, Al-Taee served as an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a state-run conflict-resolution firm... currently headed by former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.

Although Stubb publicly condemned Al-Taee's hate-filled social media comments... he has not been asked why a pro-Iranian regime advocate was working for CMI in the first place.

In other words, Al-Taee was expressing "embarrassment" about his "prejudices, thoughts and language" -- and lying about them -- but did not disavow the sentiments.

Failure on the part of the "center-left" Social Democrats to oust Al-Taee would constitute hypocrisy of the highest order, or else a tacit agreement with hateful positions that the MP has not denied espousing.

No one ever lost money betting against peace between Israelis and Palestinians.... It would be far better if The New York Times waited until the plan was released and then commented on its specific provisions rather than stacking the deck against it by quoting only its most strident critics.

There are those who will criticize any plan, no matter how positive it may be, if it emanates from the Trump administration. When President Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, many Democrats who would have favored such moves if they had been done by Barack Obama, opposed them only because these same moves were done by President Trump. These Democrats do not want to see Trump succeed at anything, even if his success would be good for America, for Israel and for peace.

If the editors of The New York Times refuse to separate opinion and analysis from hard reporting, every reader has an obligation to make that separation for herself or himself. Bear this in mind when you read The New York Times.

One of the Arabs who have dared to speak the truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is Nadim Koteich, a prominent Lebanese journalist, who recently accused Islamic Jihad of starting the last round of fighting with Israel.

In an interview with the Lebanese LDC TV channel, Koteich said that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, representing the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran respectively, should have turned the Gaza Strip after Israel's withdrawal in 2005 into an opportunity for a national Palestinian compromise.

Instead, he said, the two groups have "thwarted all opportunities for peace" and have ended up in a prison called Gaza."

Such voices from some Palestinians and Arabs are a sign they may have finally woken up to realize that Palestinian leaders, particularly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are leading their people towards the abyss. If the voices of the critics grow, then there will be hope that one day the extremist camp among the Palestinians will be weakened.

A leading Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), also the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that recent intelligence obtained about Iran's threat was extremely detailed.

These are simply preemptive measures that any rational state would take in the face of those clear threats. They were being taken to save the lives of American citizens and prevent the world's official leading state sponsor of terrorism from destabilizing the region.

What do critics of the Trump administration expect the American government to do...? Do these critics want the Trump administration to ignore Iran and its terror groups until another terrorist act like 9/11 occurs? Or is it possible that these critics, deep-down, do not care about U.S. national security and the lives of ordinary citizens?

Russian President Valdimir Putin is actively cultivating a network of contacts in EU member states with the aim of building a pro-Russian bloc in the next EU parliament, one that will be active in calling for the sanctions to be lifted.

Concerns about Russian influence have also been raised in France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Germany, while questions remain as to whether Moscow tried to interfere in Britain's 2016 referendum on leaving the EU.

Elsewhere Moscow has worked hard to forge closer relations with Hungary and Bulgaria, two former Soviet satellites that appear to prefer maintaining good links with Russia over their support for the EU.

As part of his effort to broaden his ties with pro-Russian states, Mr Putin is now focusing on the Czech Republic, where the Kremlin is actively engaged with the country's pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, as well as Andrej Babiš, the controversial prime minister.... Certainly, from Moscow's perspective, adding the Czech Republic to the burgeoning list of EU states and political parties with pro-Russian sympathies can only strengthen its efforts to undermine the EU's efforts to maintain a united front against Russia.

"What Erdogan refers to as 'relocation' was actually the genocidal deportation of civilian populations --mainly women, children and the elderly -- to the very interior of Asia Minor. These populations were not simply relocated to another place, contrary to what the Turkish state claims. They were sent to concentration and extermination camps or remote places in the interior to be slaughtered or to die from exposure, exhaustion, hunger or epidemics -- either on the way to, or at the place of, their destinations." — Vasileios Meichanetsidis, an Athens-based genocide scholar and editor of the 2012 book, The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, in an interview with Gatestone Institute.

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) walked away from the negotiating table a long time ago and show no interest in returning. They have continually refused to do what the Trump administration has asked: stop funding terrorism. They have shown again and again that they do not want a state living peacefully alongside Israel; they want to displace Israel. They have rejected the most generous proposals made by Israeli prime ministers, such as one made by Ehud Olmert in 2008, which included a near-total withdrawal from West Bank and the end of Israeli control of Jerusalem's Old City.

The Middle East scholar, Daniel Pipes, observing that Israel's leaders shy away from victory, writes: "The only way for the conflict to be resolved is for one side to give up."

"[F]iring 600 rockets at civilian targets in a neighboring country is an act of war... and as such it grants the nation-state [Israel] the authority under the international law of armed conflict not just to disable the specific military assets used to carry it out but to destroy those who carried it out... It's time for the world community to stop imposing these double standards on Israel, and start doing what international law requires: holding Hamas responsible for the devastation that results from Israel's legal, necessary, and proper responses to its provocations. Only then will Hamas know that if it sows the wind, it could truly reap the whirlwind..." — David French, National Review, May 6, 2019.

President Trump should be lauded for working toward a withdrawal from Afghanistan, where 14,000 U.S. troops still remain. But he should not expect to leave behind a peaceful situation in the failed state, which is made up of a complex web of tribal divisions and hostilities.

Yet another factor militating against national unity is that Pashtun clans appear not to view Afghanistan's non-Pashtun ethnic minorities as equal partners in a future Afghanistan.

These Persian, Mongol and Turkic peoples, based upon their past armed resistance to Pashtun attempts to control the whole of Afghanistan, will most likely fight to maintain their autonomy. This historical reality alone should be sufficient cause for U.S. policy-makers to abandon the seemingly impossible task of building a unified, democratic, pro-Western Afghanistan.

Sadly, no amount of blood, money or time spent in Afghanistan has been, or possibly will be, able to fashion it into a peaceful, united and democratic country.

"We have tasers, but they are stored in a closet because of political cowardice." — Spokesperson, Municipal Police of Bilbao.

In Madrid, an elderly couple returning home from vacation discovered that their apartment had been "occupied" by African migrants. When a camera crew from the Madrid television channel Telecinco went to investigate, the migrants destroyed the camera.... Spain's notoriously lethargic justice system now rules on who is the apartment's rightful owner.

The Madrid city council, run by Mayor Manuela Carmena, in a case study of political correctness run amok, ordered police to keep out of the neighborhood of Lavapiés. The result is that illegal immigrants, far from facing the threat of deportation, are now secure in the knowledge that their violent actions have empowered them effectively to take control of an entire neighborhood of a major European capital.

"My main contribution was revealing the flaws in the détente policy and urging a policy designed to reform the Soviet Union through a strategy of economic denial." In other words, the USSR could be changed from within by raising the costs of its aggression. — Richard Pipes.

Daniel Pipes argues that, ironically, the Palestinians would actually fare far better if they were defeated: they could end their fantasies of genocide and, like post-WWII Germany, finally start to build a constructive and flourishing civil society.

"The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is... the nature of the enemy's ultimate goal... to apply the Islamic law (the Shari'a) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur'an.... now it's become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis' words, 'Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.'" — Daniel Pipes, "The Islamic States of America?", FrontPageMagazine.com, September 23, 2004.

"Although the moderate Muslims appear -- and in fact are -- weak, they have a crucial role to play, for they alone can reconcile Islam with modernity..." — Daniel Pipes, Introduction, Militant Islam Reaches America.

"The assailants asked the Christians to convert to Islam, but the pastor and the others refused. They ordered them to gather under a tree and took their Bibles and mobile phones. Then they called them, one after the other, behind the church building where they shot them dead." — Local Christian, reported by World Watch Monitor, May 2, 2019.

"Much of the Islamic anger in Burkina Faso has to do with the teaching of so-called Western thoughts and ideals. Besides churches, schools are also a favorite target of the militants, who are pushing to make the country an Islamic state and impose Sharia Law... Of 2,869 schools in Burkina Faso, 1,111 have been closed in the last three years as a direct result of Islamic extremist violence." — James Murphy, The New American, May 16, 2019.

As with other African Islamic terror groups, the motivating ideology fueling the terrorists of Burkina Faso is distinctly Islamic and jihadi in nature. For example, after eight Muslims were arrested for their role in terrorist attacks that killed 14, their prosecutor said, "they all carried on their foreheads or had white bands on which were written in Arabic the following expression — translated as — 'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger.'" — Africa News, July 3, 2018.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif has acknowledged that.... if anyone notices the Islamic Republic it is because its leaders are or pretend to be anti-American. In other words, anti-Americanism upgrades a ramshackle and incompetent regime that is visibly incapable of running a kebab-shop let alone a modern developing society. Zarif says that without anti-Americanism we would, at best, "be something like Pakistan". And, he adds, who cares about Pakistan?

"Our solution is clear. In response to the cost of economic sanctions imposed on us we have to impose costs on the other side so that this war is no longer one-sided.... We have a free hand in striking economic blows at the enemy. America's allies in the region, that is to say Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, are heavily dependent on two things: oil and the glass towers they have built around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea... We must absolutely, hit the vital vein of those two countries, that is to say their oil exports. And we can do this in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Such an operation will, without a doubt, force Saudi and Emirati leaders to seek peace with Iran." — Kayhan, the day before the sabotage of four ships in the UAE port of Fujairah.

It is not enough to be anti-American or even anti-Trump to be automatically classed on the side of the angels. It is possible to be anti-American and anti-Trump and yet be a thoroughly obnoxious oppressor of the people and warmonger.

The official Facebook page of Turkey's pro-government daily, Sabah, for example, is filled with praise for the destruction of the cathedral.

Sadly, Islamic supremacism not only targets the churches of Western Christians. It targets Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu temples too. These religious minorities in the Muslim world are completely vulnerable, defenseless and severely persecuted.... In many Muslim countries, Muslim-on-Muslim violence is also quite commonplace. The Islamic hatred of different religious groups is not about geography -- the East or the West. It is about religious faith.

What is heartbreaking is that arson and other forms of desecration of churches have been going on in France and other countries on a regular basis, with barely a mention by the media or Western governments.