Last week, Senator Ted Cruz helped unmask an organization ostensibly founded to protect a Middle East minority. When the Texas legislator, the keynote speaker, asked the gala dinner audience comprising mostly Middle Eastern Christians at the In Defense of Christians conference in Washington to stand with Israel, many hooted and booed him off the stage. The hostility came as no surprise to me: When I found myself the night before in the same bar as a group of IDC speakers and organizers—at the Four Seasons in Georgetown—I ordered a bottle of champagne and had it sent to their table. Not long after, the D.C. Metropolitan Police detained me and a friend for an hour.
IDC’s proclaimed purpose—to protect Christians in the face of a jihadist onslaught led at present by ISIS—is of utmost importance. However, too many of the priests, prelates, and patriarchs from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, as well as one of the organization’s key benefactors, Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury, have also identified themselves as supporters of the Iranian axis in the Middle East. ISIS is a murderous group, but so is the regime in Tehran and so are its clients, chief among them Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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