“If we do not wake up, Islam will impose its law and culture on us," Cardinal Robert Sarah said on Le Figaro TV, appearing to be the last prelate in the Vatican still willing to speak uncomfortable truths.
But I fear Sarah is wrong. Judging by what happened last week, it’s not that we won’t wake up-it’s that the loudest part of us has already chosen to sleep deeply.
The death toll of Christians massacred on Palm Sunday in Nigeria rises to 53: just background noise in the global media chaos.
But a mass prevented for Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem due to possible missile fire? A global scandal, bipartisan outrage, calls from heads of state, furious editorials.
The contrast is grotesque and obscene in its obviousness-something only Western hypocrisy-muddy, hypocritical, selective-could produce without blushing.
They shoot into a crowd gathered for a celebration-families, children. The toll: 53 dead, including women and minors, dozens injured, homes burned. Not an isolated episode: yet another chapter in a systematic persecution and a creeping genocide, a daily calvary that has lasted decades, under the eyes of a West that pretends not to see because the executioner wears the turban of radical Islam, not the Star of David.
Slaughtered pastors, looted villages, girls kidnapped and forced to convert, bells silenced under threat of death. A slow, methodical calvary. But statistically irrelevant slaughter for a West that has replaced its Judeo-Christian roots with the cult of the migrant, the “other," and the abstract “weak."
On the same day as the massacre, in Jerusalem, Israeli police stop Cardinal Pizzaballa and the Custos of the Holy Land, Francesco Ielpo, as they head to the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate mass. Reason: security concerns linked to the war context and Iranian missiles that fell on the Old City, which lacks shelters.
All Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem are closed.
Prime Minister Netanyahu-the bogeyman who drives the West mad-authorizes Pizzaballa’s access for the rest of Holy Week. End of crisis. A contained incident.
Now compare the two scenes.
On one side, a sea of blood: 53 bodies, families torn apart, churches unable to ring bells without risking death.
On the other, a mass postponed by a few hours, resolved with a diplomatic reversal and a photo of Pizzaballa with Israeli police.
Israeli police protecting the cardinal and Islamic terrorists killing Christians. Whose side does the West take?
The Nigerian massacre? Silence from the same outlets. A few short notes on niche Catholic sites or Baptist Press. No front pages, no studio debates, no collective outrage. No calls to Lagos asking the Nigerian government to protect Christians.
Why?
Because the dead of Jos are useless. They don’t fit the script. They don’t feed the narrative of the “evil Israel" that poisons Western public discourse.
The media mainstream-this industrial-cultural complex that proclaims itself “guardian of truth"-is hypnotized by a single conflict: the Israeli-Arab one. Everything else is just background noise.
Christians massacred in Nigeria (50,000 dead and 18,000 churches destroyed), in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq? Abstract statistics for Open Doors reports that end up in drawers. The 380 million persecuted Christians worldwide-according to the latest data-are a folkloric detail, something for conservative bishops or right-wing American think tanks.
But a cardinal stopped in Jerusalem? Pure gold.
Because it allows Israel to be painted as the eternal oppressor, occupation, biblical colonialism. It’s the same perverse logic that turned Gaza into a global obsession while ignoring Chinese camps for Uyghurs, church burnings in India, or beheadings in Somalia.
This hypocrisy has deep, cultured, poisonous roots.
It goes back to post-1968 liberation theology and a left-wing intelligentsia that overturned the Gospel: no longer “blessed are the persecuted," but “blessed are the Palestinian Arabs because they are the new Jews." It is rooted in antisemitism disguised as anti-colonialism. It thrives in cultural relativism that refuses to name jihadism: not “extremism," but radical Islam that sees Christians as enemies to eradicate.
Better to remain silent and point the finger at Tel Aviv.
One thinks of George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." Persecuted Christians are second-rate animals. Their flesh has no value. It does not spark viral hashtags, does not fill squares with activists wearing keffiyehs, does not sell copies.
The blocked cardinal, on the other hand, is perfect: European, Vatican, media-friendly.
It allows people to shout “freedom of worship!" without ever asking why in Saudi Arabia or Iran a public mass is unthinkable.
And the secular West? The one that uprooted Christianity to replace it with the cult of the “other" and the “weak"? It is the same one that cries tears for Gaza and remains silent about Jos.
It preaches universal human rights but applies a selective filter: if the persecutor is the West or Israel, it is genocide; if it is Islam, it is a “post-colonial complexity."
Truth dies bleeding on the margins of the Western media empire, slaughtered by fanatics and betrayed by its supposed cultural allies.
The media are not neutral: they are weapons. They have chosen their enemy. Israel is the perfect scapegoat because it is small, Jewish, successful. Nigerian Christians are too many, too poor, too far from the circuits of woke talk shows.
The massacre in Nigeria is dismissed as “ethnic violence" or “agricultural conflict." A lie. It is creeping jihad.
But admitting this would mean admitting that political Islam is incompatible with coexistence in certain regions (and now also in ours). And that is haram for political correctness.
There are ontological culprits and eternal victims. And Christians slaughtered in the name of Islam are not victims.
Try finding a word about Christians in the accounts of Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He speaks only about the death penalty for terrorists in Israel.
The UN seems to have a moral compass that points obsessively toward Jerusalem, while showing selective blindness toward Tehran and Jos.
To my eyes, everything is very clear. While in Jerusalem a postponed mass was resolved with a tweet from Netanyahu, in Nigeria mass graves were being dug.
And the West? Celebrating its ridiculous secular Easter: viral tweets against Jews, obsessive silence about murdered Christians.
The rest is just background noise.