Ten years ago, during Eastertide, 30 Christians were murdered on video and used in a propaganda production to argue that Christianity was both false and needed to be persecuted. Half of the victims were shot, while the rest were beheaded. The date was April 19, 2015, and the 29-minute video was a new production of the so-called “Islamic State” or ISIS.

The on-camera killing in Libya of 30 Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, desperate migrants trying to get into Europe, received considerable coverage. Easter that year fell on April 5 in the Catholic Church and on April 12 among the Eastern Orthodox Churches, including the Ethiopians. It followed the massacre of 20 Coptic Christians in Libya by ISIS in February 2015 and, in the latter half of 2014, much larger ISIS massacres of Shiite Muslims and Yazidis in Iraq.

Ethiopia declared three days of mourning. Pope Francis sent a message to the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, saying that “the blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard by everyone who can still distinguish between good and evil. All the more this cry must be heard by those who have the destiny of peoples in their hands.”

There was global media outrage, which fleetingly appeared and then moved on to the next passing outrage.

The video was in Arabic, and so it was not surprising that Westerners focused on the slaughter rather than the argument. Titled “Until There Came to Them Clear Evidence” (a quote taken from the Quranic Surat al-Bayyinah), it was an ambitious, polished propaganda product, including sections filmed in Syria and Libya, opening with a restating of traditional Islamic criticism of the basic tenets of Christianity.

That was followed by a skewed, hostile telling of Christian history (using extensive footage culled from Hollywood movies, including Kingdom of Heaven and The Passion of the Christ). Catholics, Orthodox (including Copts, Ethiopians, Armenians, Greeks and Russians, all mentioned by name) and Protestants were derided as “a nation that deviated from the benevolent religion of monotheism.”

The video then segued to its “star,” a Saudi ISIS cleric and military commander named Abu Malik Anas Al-Nashwan. A graduate of the hardcore Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Al-Nashwan was on a Saudi wanted list for his extremism, after having fought in Afghanistan and then made it to Syria, where he swore allegiance to the Islamic State. He made five appearances in the video, focusing on how Christians should be treated when “real” Muslims rule. Relying heavily on noted Islamic scholars from the 14th century — students of Ibn Taymiyya, the intellectual precursor of Salafi Islam — he explained that Christians living under true Islamic rule have only three choices: conversion; pay the jizya tax and be protected as long as they fulfill certain conditions, or be killed. The stated goal of jizya was not only to take money but to “to subdue, disgrace and humiliate” the unbelievers.

The propaganda then, for those who are not convinced fanatics, seemed to falter. The next segment featured brief interviews with actual Christians then living under ISIS rule in Raqqa. These were scared, nervous people, mostly old men, who were made to say that Christians should return to ISIS-ruled Syria. But there were no smiles, no normal images of Christian life in Raqqa and, not surprisingly, no images of Christian worship, given that the city’s few churches had been seized by the terror group.

Al-Nashwan returned to castigate the Christians of Mosul, who fled in 2014 with the clothes on their backs, in contrast to the tiny number of Raqqa Christians who remained. Unintentionally, the video made it seem that the Mosul Christians who fled made the far better decision.

Ironically, the Saudi star of the video, clearly being groomed for greater things, died in battle at Al-Sukhnah only a week after the video was posted online by ISIS supporters.

Today, the video remains as one of the most comprehensive assaults on Christianity ever produced by the Islamic State (matched only by written propaganda produced in English by the late American ISIS devotee John Georgelas). The aim was to move the terms of the debate even more harshly and uniformly against Christians in the Muslim world.

Thankfully, that effort failed, even though Christians, especially in the Middle East and Africa, paid a tremendous price in suffering at the hands of Jihadists a decade ago and continue to do so today. The extreme Saudi Arabia that nurtured Al-Nashwan has been mostly dismantled by the reformist leadership in Riyadh.

In Syria, the new Islamist government in power is criticized by ISIS for being too accommodating and tolerant of non-Muslims. ISIS in Libya was defeated.

But it was the horrific world conjured by this video and its acolytes that prompted efforts that would lead, less than four years after the slaughter of the Ethiopians, to the Abu Dhabi declaration signed by Pope Francis in 2019. While derided by some Francis critics in the West as some sort of concession, the document set a clear goal of creating much-needed space and breathing room for the Christians of the East.

In the text, terrorism is due to “an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride.” Minorities are not to be described as such, engendering “feelings of isolation and inferiority,” but rather the call is for “full citizenship” based on “equality of rights and duties, under which all enjoy justice.” These are direct rebukes to the Islamist supremacy agenda.

This Easter, as we remember the Ethiopian Martyrs (less well known in the West than their Coptic brethren) and the martyrs of today, let us also recall the tenuous, painful and yet real progress made against the ideological underpinning of anti-Christian hate — a struggle that continues.