worth noting indeed...

Powerline today notes that the death toll in the shootings in those two Colorado church settings exceeds the sum total of all 'hate crimes' against Muslims committed in the United States in the six years after September 11th.

One week = four dead in Christian settings.

Six years = one dead, a gas station owner in Arizona- in 2001.

(Meanwhile they kill each other, even their own children.)

I'm for the founding of the Christian equivalent of CAIR, so we can go on endless TV shows every time a Christian is killed, attacked or glared at, and blame anti-Christian forces and bigotry and racism (I know, but hey, it works for them).

The contrast Powerline has given us makes it clear that, for all the noise and whining from the Muslim "victim groups", they really aren't the victim of anything in particular, before or after 9/11. Nor are Jews, blacks or gays subject to any rise in hate-- quite the opposite. Remember almost all the so called hate crimes of the past few years have turned out to be faked by liberals trying to 'raise awareness of hate crimes' that aren't actually happening.

Meanwhile the real rise in hate, and hate crimes, is pretty much targeted at Christians. Church shootings are on the increase. Christians are called all sorts of ugly names and excluded from participation in campus life on several levels, political candidates are demanded to explain theological fine points of their faiths in media interviews, and overall the Christian faith is less tolerated and more suspected than ever in the life of this country.

So much of European history comes down, as in the case of the Dreyfus affair, to "it must have been the dirty Jew! He did it! It makes sense, after all you can't trust the scum, they're just out to steal from us all! Kill the Jew!!"

Dreyfus was, of course, innocent, and a proper legal exercise would have determined this in short order. However, he was a Jew, and the men trying to hide the crime and protect their reputations made a quick decision to blame it on the Jew, simply because the public would accept that.

And they did. And Dreyfus spent years in a dreadful penal colony, innocent but in chains, crying the tears of the bewildered victim of Jew hatred....

And he was a towering example of a French people, like the rest of the Europeans, easy to convince of a Jew's guilt, easy to blame them for all that went wrong, easy to kick them around and treat them badly because it's all their own fault after all, skulking around stealing money and so forth... all the stereotypes were in play and still are, of the money-grubbing usurer Jew who gets rich off the backs of hard workers of a more noble heritage...

Anti-Semitism had then been around Europe for hundreds of years, expressing itself in the occasional mass-murder of Jews called a Pogrom, and now and then in a national exile driven by local politics. Dreyfus was a new level, an entire nation, 99% or more of the citizenship, completely certain that an innocent man was guilty simply because he was Jewish.

I bring up these points of fairly recent history to offer the chance to think about what happened before, as the signs of it happening again are becoming less and less easy to avoid. America is unlikely to erupt in a wave of antisemitism-- there are too many liberal and secular Jews here, and they are a part of every level of society-- but anti-Christianity can certainly be seen crawling around, somewhere between infancy and its first upright steps.

It was in the Soviet Union that children were encouraged to look under their parents' beds and report to 'the State' if they kept a bible. It was an act of treason to have an allegiance, even a spiritual one, other than 'the State'.

Are we there yet? No, with emphasis on yet.