The Roots of Genocide

Genocide doesn’t suddenly appear. A foundation for the extermination of one people by another requires extensive preparation. Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, has an intense interest in genocide. His father was a Holocaust survivor. He recently produced a documentary on genocide, Worse than War. He too insists that you don’t need a telescope to see genocide coming. Its clamorous march is unmistakable.

It starts with the systematic denigration of a certain group of people – whether Jews, Gypsies, or Tutses. Once they become demeaned in the minds, they soon will be victimized by demeaning actions. If they are held in contempt in our minds, they will soon be hated through our spit and fists.

• Volunteers from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) visited Brown University during their statewide tour for traditional marriage in Rhode Island on March 23. While peacefully demonstrating on the Ivy League campus, their pro-family banner was vandalized and a volunteer was spat upon in the face. March 30, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com)

According to TFP Student Action Director John Ritchie.

• “Dozens of pro-homosexual students screamed, spat, taunted, and even attempted to destroy our traditional marriage banner…Suddenly, a loud thud-rip noise was heard. I looked up and saw a pro-homosexual student literally crashing through our traditional marriage banner, attempting to destroy it. Running at top speed, he flung himself into it and ripped one side loose. Some students watching from a distance approvingly cheered the act of violence… Seeing the violent attitude of the pro-homosexual students, the police wanted to escort us to our vans after the campaign was over to protect us. And thank God they did, because when we pulled away from the curb, many pro-homosexual students closed in to hit the sides of our vehicles with their fists or palms. A hard object, maybe a rock, was even thrown against one of the vans.”

Why the violence? The traditional-marriage group wasn’t promoting something new, something that would radically undermine a way of life that we have grown to respect and love. They were merely championing something that had been universally accepted. Nor were their means violent, coercive or even disruptive. Had they been demonstrating in favor of Hitler or a terroristic organization, such student conduct might be easier to understand.

Nor do I think that Brown and other universities will require student to go for awareness or sensitivity training in response to their violent conduct. Nor will seminars on the virtues of necessity of free speech be provided. The absence of these forms of remediation will be indicting evidence that the persecution of conservative Christians is more than acceptable. Instead, had it been a demonstration in favor of women’s rights, the matter would have been handled entirely differently.

Why this violent conduct in regards to a prosaic pro-family demonstration? We should hardly expect violence in regards to a demonstration in favor of having more children or eating a more natural diet! Violence doesn’t spring out of a vacuum. Its legitimacy and justification must be carefully established. Students don’t just rush to violence and then laugh at their unacceptable conduct unless there is already a sizable well-respected group that they believe will honor them for it. And there is!

The university has long heaped their undeserved scorn upon conservative Christians. Their bias has become so passé that they can talk openly among themselves about not hiring or granting tenure to Evangelicals as the recent rejection by the University of Kentucky of Martin Haskell’s employment application has made very apparent.

In a survey of non-Evangelical professors conducted about five years ago by a Jewish group, it was found that 53% of the faculty admitted that they had negative attitudes towards Evangelicals – far more than towards Muslims. This is in stark contrast to their negative attitudes to Jews (3%) and Buddhists (4%). This disparity is shocking, and it is perfectly understandable that their antipathy would find expression in their teaching.

Secular humanism is the religion enthroned on the college campus. We find this bias infused within many textbooks. One claims that secular humanism,

• "reflects the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality, science, and personal effort rather than blind faith in supernatural powers…Among the tenets of humanist philosophy:

1. A faith in human intelligence and abilities.
2. A commitment to democracy and civil liberties.
3. A belief in the importance of, if not the divine origin, of the Ten Commandments and of the ideals of social equity, the community of humankind, and world peace.
4. Opposition to all theories of predestination, divine determination, and fatalism.
5. Compassionate concern for all human beings.”

• "These are the beliefs that conservative Christians in the United States fear being taught to their children." (Sociology, p. 400)

There’s no appreciation of the fact that equality and democracy arose within a Biblical context. This imbalance might be partially explainable by virtue of the lack of Evangelicals in academia. Recently, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, University of Virginia,

• polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

Of the three conservatives, we can only wonder if any were Evangelicals. And even if all three of them are Evangelicals, they most likely lead a closeted existence within the hostile university atmosphere.

The media has also proved hostile and demeaning to Christians, consistently portraying them in a negative light. In a recent NPR expose, the CEO was not at all hesitant to speak negatively of social conservatives, even among those who identified themselves as part of the Muslim Brotherhood. This openness reflects the fact that contempt for social conservatives is endemic within the industry. It’s often expressed in terms of what mainstream media will report and what it won’t report. When Sarah Palin made an innocuous comment about getting someone in the cross-hairs of her scope, the media wouldn’t let go of it. However, more explicit death wishes, when made by liberals, get a free-pass:

• “Rush Limbaugh is beginning to look more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet, but we’ll be there to watch.” — Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, Oct. 13, 2009.

• “So, Michele, slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to — or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.” – Montel Williams talking about Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) on Air America’s Montel Across America, Sept. 2, 2009.

While the mainstream media has reported copiously about the genocide against Muslims in Darfur, it has totally neglected the decade-long genocide against the largely Christian southern Sudan which has left 2 million dead. While mainstream media reported on the Myanmar military regimes crackdown on its Buddhist monks, it has been silent on the decades-long genocide against the largely Christian Karen and Karenni peoples in the north. Brent Bosell of Newsbusters.org, reports about this systematic imbalance:

• Christians getting slaughtered and maimed in the Middle East by radical Islamists during the Christmas season. That story rates barely a media eyebrow lift. On Christmas Eve in Nigeria, AP reported that Danjuma Akawu, secretary of Victory Baptist Church in the city of Maidiguri, charged that a mob of about 30 men attacked his church on Christmas Eve, killing five people, including the pastor, two choir members rehearsing for a late-night carol service and two passersby. He said the attackers came in three cars and dragged the pastor out of his house before shooting him to death. They drove off after setting the church and pastor's house on fire. On the other end of the same city, a security guard was shot and killed at a Church of Christ. Network coverage? Katie Couric’s CBS aired nothing. Neither did ABC.

• This is a pattern. On Halloween, 58 were killed at a Catholic church in Baghdad, as Islamic radicals took church members hostage during Mass and executed the priests. ABC, CBS , and NBC aired little anchor briefs, yet managed to put the weight of scrutiny on Iraqi government forces for attempting to storm the church and defeat the radicals. On New Year’s Eve, the New York Times reported from Baghdad on a cluster of 10 bomb attacks in which two people were killed and 20 wounded, all of them Christians. One week after an Islamic extremist group vowed to kill Christians in Iraq, the bombs were placed near the homes of at least 14 Christian families around the city. The networks didn’t find that compelling, either.
On 2/15/11, LifeSiteNews.com reported that according to the estimates of Aid to the Church in Need

• …as many as 170,000 Christians are killed out of hatred for their beliefs around the world each year, largely in Muslim dominated countries.

Why is the mainstream media silent about this genocide? Why the systematic imbalance in reporting? Perhaps the secular humanistic elites would rather portray Christians as the persecutors rather than the persecuted. Persecutors are scorned; the persecuted are pitied. Perhaps the mainstream media detests Christianity to such a degree that they want to disparage it and its message. Clearly, they have their favorites. While TV consistently portrays gay characters in a favorable light, Christians are portrayed as biased hate-mongers, small-minded, and homophobic.

Christians are so consistently degraded as “homophobic” that many now are arguing in favor of curtailing our right of free speech. And this is just what is happening. While the media will view much programming in favor of homosexual marriage, the traditional stance is seldom if ever heard. Meanwhile, the media asks the rhetorical question, “Why are Christians so opposed to gays?” without ever giving a Christian a chance to fully respond.

The New Hate Crimes legislation, signed into effect last year, not only criminalizes the action itself, but also speech that can possibly be construed to lead to a hate crime. An amendment to this bill that would exempt religious speech was defeated. Consequently, we now hear more talk about the Bible itself as “homophobic!” And since we are “homophobic,” the media can more conveniently justify not showing the increasing victimization of Christians

• Days after the videotaped incident [at Brown] was posted on YouTube, the video sharing website pulled down the footage, leaving a message stating: “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

Unbalanced reporting serves propaganda better than outright lies. The media remains silent regarding to such hate crimes, favoring instead their own causes and victims. Some are presented as the good guys worthy of our compassion, while others aren’t. I’m not saying that the systematic denigration of Christians and the accompanying refusal to air anything that might put Christians in a favorable light will lead to genocide, but this is how genocide begins. Besides, this discrimination is taking place in a culture that prides itself on tolerance and justice. Should not this hypocrisy be exposed?

However, to put it all in historical context, hating Christians is to be expected as Jesus had warned:

• "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.” (John 15:18-20)

• "All this I have told you so that you will not go astray. They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.” (John 16:1-2)