October 7, 2013: Non-Moslem religious leaders around the world have become increasingly vocal about the growing Moslem violence against “infidels” (non-Moslems). Most Islamic terror groups are Sunni, and these groups tend to be extremely violent against non-Moslems and even other Moslems who do not practice the Sunni form of Islam or the ultra-orthodox forms favored by terrorist groups, like al Qaeda which prefers the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi version. Most world leaders seem embarrassed by this religion-based violence and tend to avoid speaking up or taking any decisive action to criticize or halt it.

Meanwhile, the slaughter continues. A major cause of this violence is the fact that al Qaeda, as a radical Sunni Moslem group, finds it offensive for non-Moslems to live among Moslems. This produces horrific violence in many Moslem majority nations. For example, while 96 percent of Pakistanis are Moslem, there are 6 million Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs living there and Islamic terrorists (not just al Qaeda) have been terrorizing and murdering them for decades. There is also long standing violence between radicals among the 138 million Sunni Moslems and the 35 million Shia. The Sunnis generally initiate the violence and these killers don't always get along with al Qaeda. That's because the Islamic radicals often have violent conflicts with each other over minor points of theology or customs. The dozens of Islamic radical groups in places like Pakistan are often at war with each other when they are not going after non-Moslems and foreigners.

Many of the minorities, especially the non-Moslem ones, want to get out of Pakistan and other countries where they constantly face lethal persecution. But poverty, corruption, and a shortage of willing destinations limits this option. Islamic radical hostility to non-Moslems has been growing for over a century. In the 19th century Turkey and Western nations ruled most of the worlds' Moslems and kept this terrorism under control. But the Turks (who are Moslem) lost their empire in 1918, and Western nations withdrew from Moslem areas by the 1960s. Since then, the Islamic terrorism has grown, even though Islamic leaders deny it. The religious hostility is something of a dirty little secret within the Moslem world, where there is not a lot of serious effort to eliminate it. Many dictators of Moslem populations quietly support the violence against non-Moslems, as a way to distract the population from their primary problem (living in a dictatorship). Worse, the Islamic scripture (the Koran) is quite explicit in calling for violent hostility to non-Moslems. Any Moslem leader trying to halt the violence is liable to become the target of Islamic fanatics seeking to “defend Islam.”

Meanwhile, Israel gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage because decades of Arab and leftist propaganda has sought to portray the embattled country as an aggressor rather than a victim. When Israel was created (by a UN proposal to create a Jewish and Arab state out of Palestine), the local Arabs, and most Arab countries, refused to go along and declared war on the Jews. Many Arabs had supported the Nazis during World War II and, partly because of that, the West generally supported Israel at first. But as the decades rolled on, Israel kept defeating Arab attempts to destroy it. Arab propaganda, fueled by massive oil wealth, took on an anti-Semitic and genocidal tone, and Western leftists, especially after the Cold War ended (leaving many European leftists in search of a new cause), gradually came to agree with the Arabs. Western leftists have long been anti-clerical (hostile to religion) and would rather ignore the sufferings of non-Moslems worldwide than offend their new Islamic allies and victims of Jewish oppression. Anti-Semitism has also been present among many Western reformers and progressives. That has evolved to the point where it’s politically correct to be anti-Semitic again and ignore the persecution of Christians and other infidels in the Islamic world.

The Israel situation is what happens when you don't let a war end. Millions of Palestinians are now stateless refugees in Arab countries (which refuse to accept them as legal immigrants). The West took in many Palestinians and accepted the fact that Israel won the 1948 war. But the Palestinians, and most of the Arab world, keep the war going, losing battle after battle. The media loves it because the situation produces an endless supply of absurd (and they very newsworthy) situations. To sustain that narrative the media have to downplay the violent treatment of non-Moslems in the Islamic world (and increasingly in Europe and other Western nations with lots of Moslems).