The year has just begun, and already Fox News' Sean Hannity is telling the story of how Christians are being persecuted in the Arab world.
Hannity observed that a holy war may be "brewing" in the Middle East, as he reported on the New Year's Eve bombing of a Christian church in Egypt.
Cliff May, a notorious neoconservative and creator of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, was a little more excited about the prediction than Hannity.
"In your intro you said a holy war is brewing," May began. "It is not brewing, it is taking place."
"Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities are being not just discriminated, but persecuted in Egypt and throughout the broader Middle East," he added.
"Do you think we are headed for a modern day religious war in the Middle East?" Hannity asked.
"The war that is being fought now, the great global conflict in the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Gaza, this is one war and it is a religious war," May explained. "Not because we want it to be, but because al Qaeda and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and various other radical Islamists and jihadists, they say it's a religious war. That's what a jihad means."
"People forget jihad equals holy war," Hannity concluded.
It was President George W. Bush who first invoked images of a holy war in the Middle East, when he suggested soon after Sept. 11, 2001 that the US was on a "crusade" in the region.
Years later, GQ magazine uncovered top-secret military briefings prepared by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for President George W. Bush that included Bible passages.
"Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand," was the quote from Ephesians that appeared on a March 2003 briefing cover sheet along with a picture of a US tank in Iraq.
In 2009, a US church provided Bibles printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, for American soldiers to give to Afghan citizens. Al Jazeera obtained video of a military pastor urging service members to "hunt people for Jesus."
Trijicon Inc., a defense contractor, was discovered last Janurary to have been placing scriptural references on military gun sights used in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. The company was forced to provide the Pentagon with kits to remove the Bible codes.
