I am very grateful to Judge Jeanine Pirro that last night (Saturday, 12/27/14), the interview segments embedded above, were aired as part of her special on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. The Judge was kind enough to display two of my books in the course of the exchanges, The Legacy of Jihad, and Sharia Versus Freedom—formally quoting from the latter.

My brief comments led off with a quote from Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406; elaborated below), a towering figure in Muslim intellectual history, on the Islamic religious obligation to wage jihad warfare. These remarks were in response to Judge Pirro’s citation of an observation by the late Sudanese Christian leader John Garang (via Sharia Versus Freedom) which complements Ibn Khaldun’s triumphal pronouncement, from the perspective of the hundreds of millions of non-Muslim victims of countless jihad campaigns, and their genocidal impact, since the advent of Islam, through ISIS’s current depredations (see here; here;here). In the midst of the jihad genocide against Sudan’s black southern Christians and animists by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government of northern Sudan, Garang (in 1999) queried, plaintively,

Is the call for jihad against a particular people a religious right of those calling for it, or is it a human rights violation against the people upon whom jihad is declared and waged?

I also alluded to how ISIS’s jihad ravages epitomize a modern continuum that dates from the era of the “Islamic revival/Caliphate movements” during the late 19^th century, particularly in India, which sought to bolster or replace the tottering Ottoman Empire/Caliphate. The Ottoman Caliphate’s dissolution in the World War I era was accompanied by a convulsive jihad genocide it committed against many of the very same Middle Eastern Christian (and Yazidi) populations targeted by ISIS, at present. Moreover, the Ottoman jihad genocide a century ago, was an order of magnitude larger than ISIS’s current jihadist onslaughts, and just as brutal and depraved, punctuated by massacres (which also “featured” beheadings, disembowelments, and crucifixions), pillage, enslavement (for harems, etc.), and deportations. Occurring largely between 1915-16 (and continuing through at least 1918), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations orchestrated by their Ottoman Muslim rulers, through arid wastelands. Also, like the ISIS campaigns of today, the Ottoman jihadist rampages were aided and abetted by local Muslim populations, who were often the most aggressive perpetrators of atrocities and pillaging against their erstwhile non-Muslim “neighbors.”

More here.