The United Nations recently named a special day to fight “Islamophobia,” based on a lone attacker’s murders of 51 at two New Zealand mosques, while at the same time ignoring the thousands of Christians who have been killed by Islamists.

And author Raymond Ibrahim, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, wonders why.

It was the decision by the United Nations to mark March 15 as its “international day to combat Islamophobia” that drew the rebuke from Ibrahim.

The action was taken because of the March 15, 2019, mass shootings at the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand by a lone gunman that left 51 dead.

The attacker, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 28, from Australia, was described in media reports as a white supremacist.

Ibrahim pointed out the atrocity was “widely condemned throughout the West – and rightfully so.”

But he raised a “critically important question.”

That would be, “If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the U.N. to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the U.N.?”

He listed “some” of the “fatal Muslim attacks on Christian churches” in recent years:

• In Sri Lanka on Eastern Sunday in 2019, Muslim terrorists bombed three churches and more, killing 359.
• In Nigeria on Easter Sunday in 2014, Islamic terrorists burned a packed church, killing the 150 inside.
• In Pakistan in 2016, as Easter Sunday services closed, Islamic terrorists bombed a park where Christians gathered, killing 70 mostly women and children.
• In Iraq in 2011, “Islamic terrorists stormed a church in Baghdad during worship and opened fire indiscriminately before detonating their suicide vests. Nearly 60 Christians — including women, children, and babies — were killed.”
• In Nigeria in 2012, Easter Sunday, more than 50 died when Muslims exploded bombs near two packed churches.
• In Egypt in 2017, Palm Sunday, “Muslims bombed two packed churches; at least 45 were killed, more than 100 wounded.”

He also cited Muslim attacks on Christians in Indonesia where 13 were killed in 2018, in the Philippines where 20 were killed in a bombing, in Indonesia where 18 were killed in a bombing, in Pakistan where 14 were killed by Muslim suicide bombers, and more.

The “dismissal” of the tragedies ignores places like Nigeria, “where Christians are being purged hourly in a Muslim-produced genocide,” he said.

One recent report noted “Muslims have eliminated 60,000 Christians between just 2009 and 2021,” and “destroyed or torched 17,500 churches and 2,000 Christian schools,” he explained.

“Muslims have massacred hundreds of Christians, not even including the thousands of Christians and other Western people massacred in non-church attacks, including 9/11, London’s 7/7/2005 transit system attacks, Paris’s Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan Theater attack, Barcelona’s Las Ramblas attack, Nice’s July 14 attack, Toulouse’s Jewish school attack, Berlin’s Winter Market and Copenhagen’s terror attacks, to name just a few,” he said.

“Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the U.N. to establish an ‘international day to combat Islamophobia,’ why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the U.N. to establish an “international day to combat Christianophobia”?

He pointed out that the New Zealand mosque attack was “an aberration — evidenced by its singularity.” But he said, “Muslim attacks on churches are extremely common, not only now but throughout history.”

He said the attackers of Christians are bound together by their religion.

“Muslim attacks on churches seem to have an ideological source, are systemic, and therefore an actual, ongoing problem that the international community needs to highlight and ameliorate,” he said.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Raymond Ibrahim