To this, the official Western response has been to cry “racism!”  Barack Obama, for instance, once called such a suggestion “shameful,” loftily adding: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” Meanwhile, it was later revealed that his administration was doing precisely that—but in reverse: discriminating against persecuted Christian asylum seekers, while favoring Muslims.

All emotionalism and name calling aside—that is, the stuff of American politics—there are, in fact, several objective reasons why the West should give priority, if not exclusivity, to Christian refugees from the Muslim world—and some of these are actually to the benefit of Western nations.  Consider:

Christians are real victims of persecution.  From a humanitarian point of view—and humanitarianism is the chief reason cited in accepting refugees—Christians should receive top priority simply because they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East.  As former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop once put it, “I think that Christian minorities are being persecuted in Syria and even if the conflict were over they would still be persecuted.”

Indeed.  While they are especially targeted by the Islamic State and other professional jihadists, before ISIS, Christians were and continue to be targeted by Muslims—Muslim mobs, Muslim individuals, Muslim regimes, and Muslim terrorists, from Muslim countries of all races (Arab, African, Asian, etc.)—and for the same reason: Christians are infidel number one.  (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for hundreds of anecdotes before the rise of ISIS as well as the Muslim doctrines that create such hate and contempt for Christians.)

Conversely, Muslim refugees are not fleeing direct persecution, but chaos created by the violent and intolerant teachings of their own religion, Islam—hence why violence and intolerance follows Muslims into Europe.

Muslim persecution of Christians has been further enabled by Western policies.  Western nations should accept Christian refugees on the basis that Western actions in the Middle East are directly responsible for exacerbating the plight of Christian minorities.  Christians were not terrorized in Bashar Assad’s Syria, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muamar Gaddafi’s Libya.  Their persecution grew exponentially only after the U.S. and other Western states interfered in those nations in the name of “democracy.”  All they did is unleash the jihadist forces that the dictators had long kept suppressed.

Unlike Muslims, Christians are easily assimilated in Western countries, due to a shared Christian heritage.  As a Slovakian official once explained, Muslims would not fit in, including because there are no mosques in the Slavic nation. Conversely, “Slovakia as a Christian country can really help Christians from Syria to find a new home in Slovakia.”

This too is common sense.  The same Christian teachings that molded Europe over the centuries are the same ones that mold Middle Eastern Christians—whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant.   As San Diego’s Father Noel once said, Mideast Christians “who come here [America] ‘want to be good citizens’ and many who came here a decade ago are now lawyers, teachers, or other productive members of society.”

Meanwhile, Muslims follow a completely different blueprint, the Koran—which condemns Christians by name, calls for constant war (jihad) against all non-Muslims, and advocates any number of distinctly anti-Western practices.   Hence it is no surprise that many Muslim migrants are anti-Western at heart.