When two fanatics pledged to ISIS slit the throat of 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel at mass on Tuesday morning, we steadied the knife. Our tolerance for Islam’s intolerance is the greatest weapon these blood-cult terrorists have.

How, exactly, did we help kill that priest?

We ignored the Islamist slaughter of Christians elsewhere. When Coptic Christians were murdered in Egypt, we dismissed it as an internal matter. When Christians were butchered in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, we merely shrugged.

Ordered to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians to “avoid perceptions of bias,” our troops watched as Christians were slaughtered or driven out. The 2,000-year-old Christian civilization of Mesopotamia has been reduced to bones.

With Syria ravaged, President Obama refused to acknowledge the torture, rape, kidnapping, enslavement and mass murder of Christians at the hands of Islamist fanatics (and not just ISIS). When alarmed voices raised the prospect of giving priority to Christian refugees, the administration cried, “Bigotry!” — and gave priority to Muslim migrants.

When Israelis were killed by Muslims for being Jewish, we blamed “Israeli policy.” Outside of Israel, the 3,000-year-old Jewish civilization of the Middle East has been annihilated. Our Leftists want to finish the job.

As the terrorists grew ever bolder and more zealous, we claimed they had nothing at all to do with Islam. We explained attacks as workplace violence, the result of mental illness, or the acts of “lone wolves”…anything but jihad.



We embraced their lies as Islamists rewrote history to vilify Christians. Every Muslim failure became the fault of the Crusades, a two-century occupation of a tiny coastal strip in the Levant that ended seven centuries ago. We can’t discuss fourteen centuries of relentless jihad, of the savage Muslim conquest of much of Europe and occupations of Christian lands that began in the Middle East in the seventh century and only faded from Europe in 1912.

In the name of tolerance, we’ve allowed foreign-funded hate mosques to tyrannize our Muslim fellow citizens. Citing religious freedom, we won’t even eavesdrop on incitements to murder or prevent rabid foreign institutions from sending militant mullahs to bully Muslim communities

in the West.

We empower the worst elements among our Muslim citizens. Especially, in the USA, most Muslims just want to prosper and live decent lives.

We undercut them by inviting America-hating, Jew-baiting militants to the White House. Instead of embracing Muslims who assimilate, we kowtow to apostles of separatism.

We blame our foreign policy for crises created by Islamic culture.

Even our dumbest fumbles are tiny footnotes to the self-inflicted collapse of the Middle East. Decayed societies implode six-thousand miles away — and we blame ourselves.

We’ve coddled monsters, faked history, ignored the slaughter of Christians and smirked at the murder of Jews. Now we’re shocked that the human beasts we’ve welcomed to our societies slaughter a priest like a heathen sacrifice?

History just arrived in a sleepy town in French flyover country, a region best known as the home of the fictional Madame Bovary. We can twist the past into all the politically correct shapes we imagine, but it only springs back with vengeance.

Our comforting lies to ourselves killed Father Hamel.

Ralph Peters is Fox News’ Strategic Analyst.