Why Christian Massacres Get Too Little News Coverage

I don't read or watch mainstream news very often, but I'm always curious about which stories are being covered. So a few days ago I asked a friend of mine (I know he watches CNN) if he'd seen any stories about ISIS throwing gay people off roofs.

"Yes," he said. He'd read about it.

"Have you seen any stories about the massacres of Christians?"

He asked, "What massacres?"

The reason I asked is because of something I heard Raymond Ibrahim say. He was explaining why you don't hear much about the Christian persecution now happening all over the Muslim world. His explanation struck me as insightful. Brilliant really.

He said that the general narrative in mainstream news is that the Palestinians are the besieged underdogs who have been forced out of their homeland, and Israel is the powerful oppressor. And all the bombings and killings committed by the Palestinians are somewhat understandable, so this narrative goes, given that the Palestinians have been so mistreated.

But the reason Palestinians bomb and kill Israelis is that orthodox Muslims hate Jews (because Muhammad hated Jews and believing Muslims follow Muhammad's example).

When Jews are mistreated by Muslims anywhere, it can always be explained by this mainstream news narrative that its source is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But the burning of churches and the massacres of Christians by Muslims casts this kind of Islamic violence in a whole different light. The Christians are, in reality, a besieged minority in Muslim countries and the Muslims have no political grievance they can use to justify what they're doing. They're killing the Christians because they're Christians.

So far, the news media seems reluctant to change their narrative, so instead they just don't say much about these very "newsworthy" stories. If gays were being massacred, it would be headline news. If neo-Nazis were lining up Muslims on a beach and beheading them on film (as Muslims recently did to Christians in Libya) and burning down their mosques, you can bet everything you own it would be front page news.

In other words, the actions themselves are certainly newsworthy. But because it is Muslims massacring Christians, to cover it would not only discredit the Israeli-is-the-evil-one narrative, but it would also cast all that previous violence into a whole new worldview — a horrifying, frightening view of the world (that the problem might be the ideology considered sacred by 1.6 billion people) — and that is something that most news organizations seem as yet unwilling to confront.