LOS ANGELES, Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- YELLOWPAGES.travel and SearchBoth.com have officially launched their long-anticipated Muslim Heritage Video Program. The three-minute emotional rollercoaster takes you through the trials and tribulations of Muslim-Americans before leading into the vast contributions Muslims from around the world have made. -- from this press release

Among the "Muslims" whose contributions this video celebrates are Donna Shalala, Edward Said, John Sununu, Frank Zappa, George Mitchell, Spencer Abraham, and Joseph Abboud -- non-Muslims all. The main point about Joseph Abboud, George Mitchell, and the others is that among their ancestors are Christians from Lebanon or Syria -- usually Maronites. And these Christians, like the Copts in Egypt, or the Assyrians and Chaldeans (or "Chaldo-Assyrians" as some have, a bit too premature in their eager ecumenism, taken to calling members of both groups), came to the United States as refugees from the pressure of being Christian in a Muslim world.

They understood, as some of those descendants may not, what Islam was all about. Or at very least they understood what the permanent position of Christians in a Muslim society, unchecked by Western pressure, was (and is) all about.

This is, therefore, a shameless attempt to exploit the reputation of, for example, Lebanese Christians. Those who are partly or completely of Christian Lebanese descent, and who understand the issue, are keen to perceive and quick to reject the attempt by Muslims in this country to use the Lebanese and other Arabic-using non-Arabs (Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans) as a cover for their own pushing of what is not an "Arab" agenda at all, but rather a Muslim Arab one. Or rather again, it is a Muslim agenda -- an agenda that for many reasons would have appalled the Lebanese ancestors of Abboud or Mitchell.

Unfortunately there is the by-now well-known phenomenon of the Arab "islamochristian," who in order to survive in a predominately Muslim environment has internalized and convinced himself he agrees with the Islamic cause with naive Christians in the outside world. He even helps promote this cause, using his "Christian" identity to do so. Think of how carefully and insidiously Naim Ateek has, with the help of other "islamochristians" and their collaborators, burrowed into the bureaucracies of organized Protestantism -- from the World Council of Churches to the National Council of Churches. See, to take one insidious example, those "divestment" efforts that Naim Ateek and others have had, until recently, such success in pushing. Then there are the Arabs in the Catholic hierarchy who have, for too long at the Vatican, managed to sustain a hands-off approach to the persecution of Christians by Muslims in the Muslim lands. And of course they have at the same time carefully appealed to those in the Vatican who have adhered to an anti-Israel and pro-"Palestinian" line.

Fortunately, there seems to be a bit less of that, among both Catholics and Protestants, as the news keeps coming -- news no longer to be explained away as easily as it once was -- of Muslim attacks on Christians everywhere from the Sudan to Pakistan to the Arab-dominated lands. And the Muslim attacks on Hindus and Buddhists, or on Christians in non-Western lands, are particularly difficult even to explain away for those in the West who, out of a diseased sympathy and misplaced guilt, are eager to appease Muslims and find excuses for their behavior, and find ways to ignore, or misread, the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira. It can't go on for much longer, this farce of willfully ignoring what Islam is all about, and what the apostates from Islam tell us, so eloquently, it is about.

Meanwhile, if you have relatives, non-Muslims, who arrived from what are generally known as Muslim lands, and especially if you have relatives who arrived from Lebanon and Syria, and if you look a little more deeply into why they left the Ottoman Empire, as it decomposed, for non-Muslim lands, you will find out the reasons why soon enough. And then you will be particularly outraged at the nonsense that is now being offered by "YellowPages" and, of course, by the by-now-Muslim-and-Islamochristian dominated "Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee," with that whiff of the mosque and the madrasa about everything it does.