Merry Christmas to all Jihad Watchers who are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ today.

The question before us this Christmas, as it is every Christmas these days, is whether or not Christians should be allowed to be Christian and celebrate Christmas freely, without being brutalized or discriminated against, if they live in Iran, or Iraq, or Egypt, or Pakistan, or Nigeria, or Indonesia, or other Muslim countries, and whether free people of all creeds and perspectives should defend their right to do so.

In many countries today, Christians are being kidnapped, imprisoned, wrongly arrested, beaten, and murdered — not because of anything they have done, but because they have dared to have beliefs that are considered blasphemous in authoritative Islam. We see this at Jihad Watch on a regular basis. We see jihadists attacking Christians with unremitting fury. We also see the world continuing to yawn and remain indifferent as all this goes on, and weak and cowardly Christian leaders saying that we must not talk about it for fear of “provoking” Muslims and harming a chimerical and fruitless (at best) Muslim/Christian “dialogue.” Those who dare anyway to speak out about the persecution of Christians that the persecutors justify by invoking the Qur’an and Sunnah are vilified, demonized, and silenced as “bigots” and “Islamophobes.” Even some Christians do this to their fellow Christians who speak unwelcome truths on these matters.

So here is something to remember this Christmas: if you are a free human being, whether or not you are Christian, those Christians who are being persecuted in Iran, and Iraq, and Indonesia, and Nigeria, and Egypt, and Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, are standing in your place. The jihadis would just as soon attack you as well, and will eventually if they get the chance. Remember that the Islamic jihad program has you on its list. You may not be a Christian. You may not be a Jew. You may not be a Hindu. You may not be a Buddhist. You may not wish to pay attention to the jihad at all. But the jihad is universal, and relentless. And you are on its list.

So this Christmas, may all of us whose conversion, subjugation, or death is envisioned by the adherents of Sharia stand together. Let us stand together as Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, secularists, what have you, and stand up against those who would kill us or subject us to institutionalized discrimination and harassment (at best) because they find our beliefs offensive.

For be assured: if we do not stand together, they will prevail. And if they prevail, then all the richest manifestations of the unfettered human spirit, from the Hagia Sophia to the temple of mausoleums of Timbuktu, from the works of Socrates and Aristotle to those of Confucius and Moses Maimonides and Dante Alighieri and Winston Churchill and Oriana Fallaci, will be trampled into the mud, destroyed, exploded, ruined, effaced. We will all be the poorer. Our children will be the poorer.

It is time to fight for our lives.

Merry Christmas.