Before the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany — which was arguably Europe’s most civilized country — there were approximately 9.5 million Jews living in Europe. As a result of Hitler’s genocidal policies, two out of three Jews were killed over the next 20 years.

This is not ancient history. It is the story of what happens in the modern world when the truth becomes secondary to self-interest.

In the case of the Holocaust, 6 million people died. Imagine what a monstrous task killing 6 million people would be. And do you think it happened all at once? Before anyone had a chance to stop it? No, not at all — there were plenty of warning signs.

But America and the rest of the world had an agenda that did not involve being the world’s policeman. Besides our economic woes, we were still weary from our battle with Germany and the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The truth of what was happening in Europe — the horror of what was happening in Europe — could not budge us from our self-interest.

Self-interest dies hard, and is much more powerful than the intangible benefits of civilization. Consider the strange case of American slavery — a brutal, barbaric, dehumanizing institution which existed side by side with American democracy — the most ennobling experiment in human equality ever undertaken. Nothing could prove it better: Self-interest covers up a multitude of sins, or at least makes it remarkably tempting for even the most “enlightened” among us to overlook that which is beyond understanding.

Which brings us to the carpet under which the contemporary world is sweeping the remains of murdered Christians, along with their living cousins — the falsely imprisoned, persecuted, and tortured — who survive for now among an increasingly hostile Muslim population in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Just last week, mobs attacked the main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo, following the funeral of four Copts who were murdered in earlier sectarian violence. Nor were the mobs only the unruly young men who generally are at the center of such violence; indeed Egyptian riot police seemed to join in on the side of the thugs, lobbing tear gas canisters into the cathedral compound. So far, no new deaths have ensued, but that is more a matter of luck than intention.

Coptic Christians make up roughly 10 percent of the Egyptian population, or about 8.5 million altogether. Throw in a smaller Christian population in other Mideastern countries, and we are talking about a total population of Christians comparable to the number of Jews in Europe before Hitler came to power. Considering the similarities of ideology, methodology and rhetoric between the Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood, which now rules Egypt and wields influence throughout the region, it is not inconceivable that we are on the verge of another genocide to include both Christians and Jews.

Consider the hateful words of Egypt’s president, Mohammed Morsi, who in 2010, less than two years before he took office, called Jews “apes and pigs.” He was also videotaped just a few short months ago praying at a mosque while the preacher urged Allah to “destroy the Jews and their supporters.”

This is a climate of hate which you would think would rouse the concern of all Americans, on both the left and the right, but again we must ask, where is the outrage?

Nor is it just Egypt where there is a problem. American pastor Saeed Abedini, who returned to his homeland in Iran to preach the gospel, was arrested on trumped-up “national security” charges and sentenced in January to eight years in prison. But the Iranians have made clear that what they want is for Abedini to stop preaching and even to renounce his Christian faith.

Just last week, a letter by Abedini was smuggled out of prison that lays bare the chilling ordeal he faces. He wrote that authorities told him to “Deny your faith in Jesus Christ and return to Islam or else you will not be released from prison.”

Secretary of State John Kerry has demanded Abedini’s release, but so far this case too is receiving limited attention, mostly in the Christian media.

Nor should one assume that Christians and Jews  alone are threatened by the growing hegemony of the Islamic ideology on at least a third of the world’s populations. Just as the Nazis persecuted Gypsies, gays, Slavs, the physically disabled, and members of minority Christian populations, so too do Islamic majorities persecute many minorities. Homosexuals are routinely imprisoned or executed for their lifestyle in Muslim countries. Non-Christian minorities such as the Mandaeans in Iraq have been targeted for extermination, and even within the larger umbrella of Islam, millions of people have been wiped out because of sectarian differences.  

As anyone who has studied Islam knows, the religion emphasizes submission to the will of Allah and does not tolerate deviation from the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, which in many ways are written as a guidebook for conquest and colonization of competing cultures. Even the Islamic media group al-Jazeera highlighted last week the beating of Wilfred de Bruijn, a French resident who said he was assaulted while walking with his boyfriend in a Muslim neighborhood in Paris. He posted pictures of his mangled face on Facebook and said poignantly that it was “the face of homophobia.”

He was right, but it was also the face of religious and lifestyle intolerance that is the norm in Islamic countries. Seven countries in the world impose the death penalty for homosexuality, and all seven are Muslim. Many of these same countries also endorse oppression of women in ways that go far beyond forcing them to wear veils or accept other kinds of male domination, but rather often put their very lives at risk if they stray from orthodoxy.

Whether it is women, gays, Christians or Jews who are being marginalized, intimidated and terrorized, at some point the rest of the world has to stand up and defend the defenseless.

Don’t we?