After Muhammad Cartoon Attack in Texas, When Will ISIS Strike in Another American City?
There is warning of a “slow-motion Christian genocide” that the world can no longer ignore, and the recent shootings in Garland, Texas are further evidence that this genocide is moving to American shores. So says Dr. Richard Land, President of Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES).
“Radical Islamist jihad is a direct threat to our basic freedoms as Americans. Our fellow citizens were exercising their First Amendment rights in Garland, Texas—as ‘heart of middle America’ as you can get—and they were targeted in an attack that sought to cause maximum damage.
As Land sees it, it’s clear that the terrorists showed up when the meeting was supposed to adjourn, armed with AK-47s with maximum magazines, seeking to spray the crowd and inflict as much damage as possible. He says the Garland police are to be commended for their quick, life-saving actions. We should all be thankful that many more people were not killed.
“The response of the targeted victims in the hall was exactly the right response. They waved the American flag and sang ‘God Bless America.’ Personally, I do not think it’s appropriate to mock someone else’s religion, and I wouldn’t do it,” he says. “However, my religious faith as an evangelical Christian gets mocked all the time, and I do not for one moment believe I have the right to even legally restrict people from doing so, much less seek to kill them because they’ve mocked my faith.”
Land, for one, is angered and saddened when he sees someone desecrate the American flag, but that is protected speech. It’s when speech is controversial that it most needs protection. Make no mistake about it, he says, if we were to voluntarily forego mockery of someone else’s faith, these Islamist jihadist fascists would find something else to object to and threaten to kill us if we didn’t comply with their new demands.
“I suspect most Americans agree with me—better to die on our feet, exercising our God-given rights, than to live on our knees before a bunch of murderous terrorists,” he says. “And we should remember if it can happen in Garland, it can happen anywhere. It’s time to get serious with ISIS and its affiliates—deadly serious.”
Land added that the events in Garland are an extension of deadly attacks targeting Christians in the Middle East.
Writing recently of the attack on 150 university students in Kenya last month—many slaughtered for their Christian faith—Land noted.
“This savage attack is merely the latest in a series of such violent attacks perpetrated by the al-Shabaab terrorist group. They have murdered hundreds of Kenyans in churches, on public transport and perhaps most infamously in the terrible 2013 massacre at the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.”
Land also addressed the “slow-motion genocide” recently in his daily two-minute radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” which airs on 200 stations on the American Family Radio Network and 100 stations on the Bott Radio Network.
“Taken together with the targeting and killing of Christians by Islamist militants in countries such as Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria, the world is witnessing a slow-motion genocide of Christians in the Middle East. A recent Newsweek cover declared, ‘Targeting Christians in the Middle East, Believers Are Fleeing or Being Killed,’ told the sad, tragic story of ancient Christian communities being brutalized and extinguished by ISIS militants. And this genocide is clearly a growing threat here at home as well.”
Land served as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) from 2001 to 2011, both as a presidential appointee and as a senatorial appointee, and in this position, witnessed the disturbing and rapid increases in religious persecution around the world—much of it focused on Christians.
One reason, Land added, for the increased martyrdom of Christians over the past century is the rapid, unprecedented expansion of Christianity in developing countries, generating significant numbers of Christians in places where historically there have been far fewer believers.
“The civilized world must respond,” Land says. “If not, such barbarism will metastasize and the human family will descend into a new abyss of religiously fueled crimes against humanity. The people perpetrating these atrocities must be held accountable and be brought to justice.
“As a matter of conscience and conviction,” he continues, “we must all activate our personal circle of influence and seek to raise the awareness of all we can reach to the horrific suffering of our fellow human beings. We must insist that our elected officials and the world community act to stop this tidal wave of barbarism. And above all, we must pray for our brothers and sisters as though we shared in their sufferings.”
