I’m not sure I concur that “ISIS is…a civilization” at all, as it seems to simply be barbarism through and through. Anyway, Flynn has a point:
We should all pray that the systematic killing of children might evoke a reaction strong enough to hasten our military response.
But we should also pray that this story might lead to more conversation about the treatment of children with Down syndrome in the West. With few exceptions, disabled children don’t suffer infanticide in the West, but they do suffer abortion, at staggering rates. Some sociologists suggest that nearly 90% of European children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, and that American figures are not much better. The veneer of civility does precious little to protect disabled children from extermination at the hands of Western medicine.
ISIS is obviously a civilization in which the strong assert violent supremacy over the weak. That problem exists in the West as well, in the forms of abortion, euthanasia, the dismantling of the family, and the “new orthodoxy” of statist control over religious perspectives and activity. Pope St. John Paul II wrote that the “war of the powerful against the weak” runs through each of our hearts, and “goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.“
The “war of the powerful against the weak” is waged under the veneer of religious purity in the Middle East. In our own civilization, it is waged under the idolatrous adulation of efficiency, profitability, independence, and technological advancement.