100 years ago there was an obscure “archduke” assassinated by a small faction of a small ethnic group that just seemed like nothing in the news. It was so out of the way, WHY would it be significant? There were bigger things on the table at the time. People wouldn’t pay attention to some backwater story when Germany was the big elephant to worry about.

It’s amazing to me as to what passes for “backwater” stories these days. Yet, it demonstrates our own political and cultural biases.

Because of our political and theological biases, Israel and Gaza have become the story. It is NOT insignificant that nearly 2000 Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis have lost their lives. Not by a long shot.

But I have come to believe it is the smokescreen. IT is the “backwater” story, but we’ve made it center stage.

The “backwater” story we never pay attention to is Syria and the Islamist group ISIS. And while we haven’t paid attention to this “tiny” story, millions have been displaced and thousands of Christians and other “opposition” religious groups have been slaughtered. Israel and Gaza raise such passionate debates and arguments, we’ve hardly given a look to Syria. In fact, when it may have been we were starting to pay attention, THAT is when Gaza blew up. (I’m just a conspiracy theorist at heart… and it’s my blog.)

While we have relegated passages like Matthew 24 to the “end times” (and somehow only to American Christians), brothers and sisters in Christ are living this today. 

Observe:

The Chaldean-Assyrian Christians, Maronites, Melkites and Copts are also being “butchered under the banner of ‘There is no God but Allah’”. They, too, are fleeing into the mountains for refuge, as Christ exhorted at the time of the end. They, too, are being reviled, persecuted, and their children murdered. But we’re not hearing an awful lot about it.

More HERE.

It is hard for me to fathom, as a Christian, that we have cared so little about Christians in Syria and Iraq. It just doesn’t hit our radar. But the moment Israel comes into the conversation… BAM! We rant and rage and defend and attack…

There has been a civil war raging for quite some time all over the world… and we’ve virtually ignored it. And radical groups are counting on us to keep ignoring it. Rant all we want about Israel and Gaza… it just keeps us pre-occupied, and they get to keep on killing.