ICC Note: As the conflict in Syria continues on, people are slowly waking up to the horrors confronting Syrian Christians. Syria is the birthplace of the Christian church. Far from being a “foreign import,” the spread of Christianity around the world has its roots in Syria, and has been active ever since. The rising influence of violent Islamic extremists is now driving Christians out of their homes, by the hundreds of thousands.
By Lela Gilbert
01/21/2014 Syria (Fox News) – It all started during the early days of the Arab Spring — another “peaceful” protest defying another despotic regime. Today, nearly three years later, that protest has exploded into Syria’s ferocious civil war.
Radicalized Sunni warriors have swept across the borders, seized control of moderate forces, and are waging jihad against Iran-backed President Bashar Assad and his Shia fighters.
News reports have grown increasingly horrific: Massacres. Chemical weapons. “Barrel bombs” designed to mutilate. “Infidels” beheaded on YouTube videos.  The U.N. has given up trying to accurately update the death toll, which has soared beyond 100,000.
And in the midst of widespread butchery, Syria’s ancient Christian community is being devastated.
Just days ago, Investors Business Daily reported, “the relentless carnage and horror that has engulfed Syria over the past two and a half years has taken a particularly heavy toll on the country’s Christian minority. An unknown number of civilians, including religious figures, have been kidnapped or killed or remain missing, in a conflagration that seems to have no end….”
Friday, my friend Judy Feld Carr emailed me.  “I cannot understand,” she wrote, “why there is not one word in the media about thedestruction of the churches in Syria. Nobody even mentions it!”
Judy Feld Carr knows more than her share about dangers emanating from Damascus, and about how an historic population’s way of life can be annihilated. Besides the torture, murder, or flight of thousands of 20^th Century Syrian Jews, most of their synagogues, sacred books and millennia of their history are lost forever.
Carr also knows something about activism. Over the course of 30 years, she all but single-handedly smuggled, ransomed or otherwise snatched 3,228 Syrian Jews out of Hafez al-Assad’s iron fist.
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