‘Crusader’ beheadings

(NYP) If nothing else, the Islamic State’s gruesome beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians should put the lie to the claim that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute lies at the heart of the Middle East’s problems.

The terrorist who presided over these beheadings didn’t complain about Israel. Instead, he called the victims — migrant workers who’d gone to Libya seeking jobs — “followers of the Cross” and “Coptic crusaders.” Perhaps he imagined himself avenging the medieval Crusader wrongs President Obama recently invoked.

Nor was this the first time ISIS has targeted Middle Eastern Christians. In October 2010, it staged a massacre at a church in Baghdad, which it denounced as “a dirty den of idolatry,” killing 58 Chaldean Catholic worshipers. Other atrocities abound.

None of this is to suggest that Jews have vanished from the list of Islamist targets. The weekend attack on a Copenhagen synagogue, just weeks after a similar brutal attack on a kosher food store in Paris, underscores the growing vulnerability of Jews across Europe.

But as Grame Wood writes in The Atlantic, ISIS is an apocalyptic movement, out to destroy “moderns” and restore through a modern caliphate the 7th-century world in which Islam was founded. It takes its religious claims seriously.

So while the president and his secretary of state John Kerry obsessed over an Israeli-Palestinian accord, the Islamic State took territory and declared a caliphate.

Good thing for the defenseless folks in ISIS’ path that Egypt and Jordan, which responded to atrocities with airstrikes, aren’t afraid to get on their “high horse” and attack.