I wrote that Jews and Christians should stand together.
The comments filled up with Muslims and leftists telling me it should be Christians and Muslims. Same floor. Same root. Brothers of the book.
Last year that brotherhood killed 4,849 of us.
Christians are the most persecuted group on earth. 388 million now live under high or extreme persecution. More than one in seven Christians on the planet.
Of those 4,849 killed for their faith, 93 percent died in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nigeria alone: 3,490 people, murdered for being Christian. 125,000 have been killed since 2009. Around 32 a day right now.
Go look up who killed them.
Boko Haram and ISWAP in Nigeria. Al-Shabaab in Somalia, where not one open church remains. Islamic militias in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, handing villages the choice of conversion, jizya or flight. The ADF in Congo, beheading villagers in Allah's name. ISIS in Mozambique. The Taliban in Afghanistan, where a Christian has no legal existence at all. The blasphemy laws in Pakistan, where Christian girls of twelve are abducted, forcibly converted, and handed back to their kidnapper by a court. The Copts in Egypt, bombed inside their own churches.
Iraq had one and a half million Christians in 2003. Today under 250,000. Syria had more than two million. They are gone.
That is not crossfire. That is a direction.
Now the part where the conversation always gets shut down.
Islam was not built as a private faith. It was built as a state. Muhammad was lawgiver, judge and commander in one.
Christianity began with a man on a cross who said his kingdom was not of this world.
Islam began in Medina with an army. Classical jurisprudence divides the world into dar al-islam and dar al-harb, the house of Islam and the house of war. The objective is that the first expands until the second no longer exists.
And people want it. Pew surveyed 38,000 Muslims across 39 countries. 99 percent in Afghanistan want sharia as the official law of the land. 84 percent in Pakistan. 86 percent in Malaysia. Nearly eight in ten across sub-Saharan Africa.
That is not the fringe. That is the centre.
Now try this.
A Muslim stands up and says: Jesus is God.
In that second he is no longer a Muslim. Placing anything beside Allah is shirk, and according to the Quran it is the one sin that is not forgiven. Sura 5:72 says it plainly: whoever calls Christ God is an unbeliever.
What does it cost? At least 22 countries criminalise leaving Islam. In roughly a dozen of them it can cost your life. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania, Qatar, the Emirates, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Brunei.
Elsewhere you lose your marriage instead, your children, your inheritance, your citizenship. In Malaysia, Lina Joy fought six years for the legal right to leave Islam. She lost.
And outside the courtrooms, the family is waiting.
A Christian who converts to Islam in the West gets a welcome ceremony and a post on social media. A Muslim who converts to Christianity changes his name, moves city, and never tells his mother.
There is your same root.
So no.
If that solidarity were real, it would run both ways. Where were the marches for the 3,490 Nigerians? Where was the Friday sermon about the burned churches in Burkina Faso?
It does not exist. Solidarity that only switches on when it can be aimed at a third party is not solidarity. It is an alliance against someone.
There is not one Muslim-majority country where Christians hold full and equal rights. Not one.
Meanwhile there are Western countries where Muslims hold more rights than Christians hold anywhere in the Muslim world. The whole case sits inside that asymmetry.
And let us not pretend this only happens out there. We carried the ideology forward ourselves. Not under force. Out of politeness.
Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. The Charlie Hebdo newsroom was shot dead in Paris. Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his own school for showing his pupils a drawing. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on a stage, 33 years after the fatwa.
And what did we do? We pulled the cartoons. We cancelled the plays. We called it respect. We abolished blasphemy law for our own faith and reinvented it for another one, voluntarily, without anyone having to threaten us.
But none of it could have happened if something had been standing there.
We emptied the churches ourselves. We called our own foundation superstition, our history a source of shame, our faith a private hobby. Then we opened the door wide and acted surprised when something walked in that actually believed in itself.
A civilisation that will not defend its own does not become neutral. It becomes occupied. And what occupies it is always the thing that still believes.
Islam did not gain ground in Europe because it was strong. It gained ground because we put ours down.
And what is being offered now is not fellowship. It is dhimmi status. You may stay, provided you stay quiet, pay for the privilege, and never build your tower higher than the minaret. That is the historical arrangement. That is what is on the table again, in kinder words.
Islam cannot recognise Jesus as God without ceasing to be Islam. There is no common ground to stand on. There is only the question of who gives way.
Christians die in their thousands every year where Islam holds power. Muslims build mosques where Christianity used to.
That is not two sides of the same story. That is a bill, and it has not been paid.