By DEXTER DUGGAN
The death squads of ISIS plan and hope to rip out what’s close to our hearts, and drain our hearts themselves.
The black jihadist ISIS flag flying in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. That was the superimposed image for the cover picture of the ISIS magazine in October 2014.
The Pope dead, the Sistine Chapel turned into a market for sex slaves or a prison for those awaiting execution, the severed heads of Vatican workers atop the Bernini colonnade stretching out from Catholicism’s greatest basilica.
On the march to “conquer Rome” was the message in February when ISIS terrorists beheaded Coptic Christians on the beach in Libya.
“This isn’t a far-fetched dream they aim to realize. This is a rock-solid goal they are pursuing at this very moment, and they believe entirely that they are capable of executing their plan,” writes Johnnie Moore in his book Defying ISIS; Preserving Christianity in the Place of Its Birth and in Your Own Backyard.
Moore, a champion of international religious freedom whose efforts have taken him to more than two dozen nations, on topics widely ranging from agriculture to genocide, drives home the threat from radical Islam in Defying ISIS, released as an ebook on March 13 and in paperback from HarperCollins April 21. The website is defyingisis.com.
“ISIS is unabashed at their desire to eliminate Christianity altogether,” Moore writes. “This isn’t just a part of their plan. It is the heart of it.”
He writes as an evangelical concerning a religious heritage that long predates the Reformation. Ancient Mideast Christian communities, almost as old as the faith’s beginnings with the founding of the Jerusalem church after Christ’s Resurrection, are being destroyed today.
For the first time in 1,600 years, there are no church bells sounding in Mosul, Iraq, he said during a March 9 interview with The Wanderer. Mosul is the biblical city of Nineveh, where the Prophet Jonah preached, his book explains.
Considering the chaos and corruption enveloping much of the world now, The Wanderer asked Moore’s opinion about the “end times.”
“The Bible makes it clear no one knows when this is going to take place,” he replied. But there’s “no question this is a once-in-a-thousand-years crisis” occurring now.
The terrorists “massacre [Christians] with pure joy,” Moore writes, because the killers think they’re doing justice for the world, even when this means beheading children and cutting a four-year-old boy in half. A little girl wearing a party dress, with a red band around her wrist, lies on the ground — but her head missing.
The terrorists refer to captured women as “items” they sell, and have a price list of what females of different ages are worth, the youngest being worth the most, $172.
Yet Christians and Muslims have lived in peace for centuries in the Mideast, with Christians “known to be friends of all, enemies of none, and filled with love and kindness,” Defying ISIS says.
It’s important, Moore told The Wanderer, that individual Christians and Muslims know one another today, so they won’t think of each other as dangerous crusaders and jihadists.
“ISIS will only be defeated, and that region of the world will only be stabilized, through the cooperation of Eastern and Western countries, and through the collaboration of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders,” he writes in Defying ISIS.
“When Christians raise their voices with incendiary rhetoric, they not only demonstrate their lack of understanding, they alienate the very people who are more than willing to align themselves with us in order to address that which threatens us all, and which we can only solve together,” Moore adds.
“There are Christians that have lost absolutely everything they have” under ISIS terrorism, but their faith in Christ was only strengthened, he said during the interview — a point he illustrates with examples in the book. “I found people that were more committed to [the faith] than ever. . . . ’Jesus is all I need’.”
The motivation to become ISIS terrorists is varied. “They’re not born” that way. “. . . . It’s very, very clear we don’t know” how this happens, Moore told The Wanderer. Some come from affluent families, while others, he writes in the book, are from disenfranchised and poor communities.
“And many of those who hate Christianity come to their hatred having never benefited from the best of our faith,” Moore writes. “They package our faith within the context of our country’s politics, and assume that Christianity is synonymous with all kinds of things, except the one thing that we ought to be synonymous with — love.”
It’s an “unmistakable fact…that over the last 20 years, increasing military engagement in the region by Western powers has caused a rebranding of Christianity in the Middle East — allowing radical Muslims to be able to define Western war as a new crusade of Christian countries against Muslim ones,” he writes.
“I think we have to face the reality,” Moore told The Wanderer, “that while in the West we don’t consider this a holy war, they [ISIS] absolutely” see it that way.
Nor is it a case of the United States simply taking war to the Mideast in this current world. “It’s incredibly alarming” that ISIS militants can and are bringing their attacks to the soil of the U.S. and Europe, Moore said during the interview.
Unlike most of the United States’ history, when two broad oceans kept threats at a distance, modern communications have altered the access. Moore recalls Abraham Lincoln saying in 1838 that all the most powerful foreign military forces could never come here to take a drink from the Ohio River. But that was then. Nor do they even need ranks of troops on the march.
After the Internet recruits individual ISIS militants right in the Western world, they can take their terror training online, too, he said — having no need to travel to an overseas camp.
He mentioned some recent jihadist attacks including a beheading in Oklahoma and an axe assault in New York. From Canada to France to Belgium to Australia, Defying ISIS notes this new face of war.
Yet the world’s Muslim community “has suffered the most at the hands of these radicals,” Moore writes. And Christians and others who’ve survived “have only survived because of the efforts of Islamic leaders in the region.”
One thinks of the friendship toward Christians shown by Egypt’s Muslim president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
A Stable Future
Moore also is a founder of The Cradle of Christianity Fund, “whose mission is to rescue, restore, and return displaced Christians, and others, in the Middle East. . . .
“We are providing immediate humanitarian assistance,” he writes, “but we are also focused on developing a stable future for the entire region.”
The Fund believes people ought to have the opportunity to go back to their homes, although that’s “a moot point” currently, he said.
Asked how he became involved in this mission in life to the suffering, Moore replied, “It’s been a journey for me. Part of it I stumbled into, part of it I jumped into,” resolving that as long as he had a voice and an opportunity, “at least they would not be forgotten.”
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