ICC Note: In this article, the author makes the devastating comparison of his feelings leaving Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and witnessing the destruction of Syrian Christian communities. Not only have 500,000 people died in the Syrian Civil War, but the systematic targeting of ancient Christian communities bares a terrifying resemblance to past genocides. ISIS has not been bashful of its purposes, it wants Christians and their history wiped from the face of the Middle East.

10/14/2016 Middle East (US News): I did not want to go to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, during our pilgrimage in Israel last week. It seems enough to know (without the accompanying tragic images) that European Jews of the last century endured an amount of suffering that boggles the mind.

Although violence and misery were everywhere during the dark years of World War II, the museum focuses on what has rightly been called the “crime of crimes,” or genocide. A U.N. convention defines it as an attempt to destroy a group through extermination, torture and forced deportation. At Yad Vashem you get a sickening understanding of the process and its vicious, systematic ruthlessness. European Jewry was coldly, efficiently and mercilessly reduced in a few short years from 9.5 to 3.5 million – not only an incalculable loss of God’s children, but of a whole beautiful and rich culture and community. During that hour in the museum, each person lost seems to clutch at your heart.

Later that week, far to the north of Jerusalem, we saw something else which clutched at our hearts. From the top of a ruined and bullet-pocked building on the Golan Heights we saw an eerily deserted Syrian town – dusty, dry and rubbled, with a church rising from its center. And we could hear the sound of constant bombing like low rumbles of distant thunder. Hazy puffs of black smoke on the horizon accompanied the sound of destruction and death.

As during the worldwide convulsions of World War II, death rains down on Syria indiscriminately – 500,000 souls lost in five years by some estimates. This is horror enough. But on top of that tragedy is the conscious and systematic attempt by the Islamic State group to cleanse the Middle East of its ancient Christian communities and their suffering people. The Islamic State group is not bashful about what it intends to do. Its members tell us in their magazine Dabiq: “We will conquer Rome, break your crosses and enslave your women.” And it “will continue to wage war against the Christians … thereafter the slave markets will commence in Rome.” The Caliphate has set its heart on the destruction of Christianity, and the cleansing of the land of the Christian people.

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