by Robert Royal.

In just the past few days, hundreds of Christians have been murdered, raped, and tortured in Syria. When news outlets even notice what's happening - yesterday's New York Times only carried an "update" of a previous article and the Washington Post's latest story on the massacres appeared Friday - they usually only mention the attacks on "civilians" or Alawites, the Islamic sect followed by the al-Assad family, the former rulers of Syria. It's true that Syrian Christians are caught up in the larger political turmoil in their homeland. But like Christians around the world, it's also true that they are being killed and persecuted specifically because of their faith.

I'm more than a little sensitive to injustices like these because my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century will be published in a few weeks. Anyone who looks systematically at what's been happening to Christians in the first quarter of our century - and not only in the Middle East, Africa, China, and the Far East, but even in our once Christian "West" - cannot help but be shocked. By quite sober estimates, something like 300 million Christians worldwide are under threat.

This book is something of a sequel to my Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, which responded to Pope John Paul II's request that, as part of the celebrations of the 2000 Jubilee Year, the Church remember the martyrs of the previous century. He organized an inspiring event at the Colosseum on May 7, 2000, where representatives of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, and Protestants told their martyrs' stories. I gave the pope a copy of my book that morning.

Aid to the Church in Need USA asked me to write the new book because of the essential work they do in many countries where Christians are not only dying but need outside support. ACN International will translate it into several languages and publish it in various countries as part of the 2025 Jubilee celebrations. And we're hoping, as in 2000, to present the pope with a copy in May.

The shift that has occurred in the years between these two volumes is telling. In 2000, to write of Christian martyrs was to look back at the totalitarianism that produced high body counts in the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact nations, Nazi Germany, China, the Mexican and Spanish civil wars, and so forth. The clashes and deaths occurred almost entirely as a result of modern atheism seeking to stamp out Christianity. Communism was the world champion.

That's still the case in North Korea (by common agreement the current champ), China (with little pushback from Rome), and Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba (ditto). But by far the largest body counts now are from militant Islam. The Indian/British novelist Salman Rushdie, who was the subject of a fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and was severely injured and blinded in one eye by a militant Muslim in New York, has said: "after having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism."

The threat exists not only in the Middle East, though it waxes and wanes there owing to circumstances. Western forces were able to suppress ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa for a while, though ISIS affiliates and similar organizations linger on. But the ideology migrated to central Africa, where many of the most violent persecutions of Christians now take place.

In Nigeria alone, almost 5,000 Christians are murdered every year. (The Biden administration dropped Nigeria from the list of Countries of Particular Concern; the Trump administration could do Christians a great service by putting Nigeria back). Even worse, movements in several African nations as well as in the Far East are explicitly in the business of trying to create a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

International institutions and Western governments do little to stop these developments, don't even say very much, for two reasons, in my esti...