Timothy R. Furnish, Ph.D., is a recovering college professor and current writer, researcher and analyst specializing in Islamic history, sects, eschatology, ideology and Mahdism. He learned Arabic at taxpayers' expense while in the U.S. Army and, later, studied Farsi, Turkish and Ottoman while a doctoral student at Ohio State University. His first book was Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden and his second, due out in 2010, is The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? He maintains an HNN blog, Occidental Jihadist, as well as a website dedicated to covering Mahdism and Muslim eschatology: mahdiwatch.org.

AP reported yesterday that “ten members of [a] Christian medical team,” six of them American, “were gunned down in a gruesome slaughter that the Taliban said they carried out, alleging the volunteers were spying and trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. The gunmen spared an Afghan driver, who recited verses from the Islamic holy book Quran….” The lead American was Dr. Tom Little, who had worked in Afghanistan for 30 years, was fluent in Dari and supervised a number of eye hospitals and clinics throughout Afghanistan. The Islam-motivated murders took place in Badakhshan, in Afghanistan’s northeast.

Now if the United States were really the “Crusader” state that many Muslims (and American liberals) hyperbolically accuse it of being, by now we would’ve rained down Predator or B-2 death indiscriminately on that region or, at the very least, be sending in our Christian retribution units, otherwise known as Special Forces. But neither of those things is happening. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that not one Obama Administration mouthpiece even deigns to mention, much less condemn, these Muslim religious murders of truly good Christians. That would run counter to the mendacious liberal narrative espoused by the President himself, and expressed by his sycophants like Eric Holder and John Brennan, that Islam teaches peace, love and universal brotherhood and only a relatively few “violent extremists” believe otherwise.

Obama and his merry band of dhimmis [second-class Christian and Jewish subjects under Islamic law] can lie all they want, but the fact is that the Qur’an literally teaches that Allah approves killing non-Muslims for various offenses; for example, Sura 9:5ff mandates attacking al-mushrikun, “polytheists”—and Christians are deemed such because of their belief in the Trinity. This is not something that Bin Ladin or Mullah Omar recently devised, or that the Bush Administration dreamed up to indict Muslims; this understanding goes back to the earliest days of Islam. And, unfortunately, it’s stll being acted on today. Yet the elected rulers of the world’s most populous Christian nation won’t lift a finger to help its own Christian citizens in foreign lands, to say nothing of the millions of non-American Christians around the globe being persecuted on a daily basis—mainly by Muslims. Some “Crusader” state we are.

In a recent article about the group LibForAll, which supports allegedly moderate Muslim groups, there is an account of a meeting between some Germans and a delegation from Cairo’s al-Azhar University/Mosque. The German official said “if the majority [of Germans] vote for Muslim law, that is what we will have”—whereupon the Egyptian Muslim muttered “they have no manhood.”

Neither, apparently, does Barack Obama –who talismanically recites the Qur’an in speeches, much like that Afghan driver did to save his own life, yet does nothing to prevent (or at the very least avenge) the Muslim murder of his own countrymen simply for living out their Christian faith. Our President, alas, has become a modern-day traditor: a “Christian” who betrays co-religionists to their persecutors—only now it’s the Muslims, not the pagan Romans, doing the persecuting.