“It was only last week, when the torture and killing had reached such extreme levels that the world began to take notice, that President Barack Obama ordered United States humanitarian and military intervention to rescue some 40,000 members of the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority cornered by radical Muslims on a mountain outside of Mosul.”

When Jews are killed, we make sure the world knows. When Palestinians are killed, the Web explodes. So why is it that when Christians are murdered and persecuted en masse, no one seems to care — not even other Christians?

We see this mystery playing out in Iraq with the hundreds of thousands of members of Christian minorities whose deaths have not yet provoked an outcry.

It was only last week, when the torture and killing had reached such extreme levels that the world began to take notice, that President Barack Obama ordered United States humanitarian and military intervention to rescue some 40,000 members of the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority cornered by radical Muslims on a mountain outside of Mosul.

“It’s a full-scale genocide,” Nuri Kino, a Swedish-Assyrian journalist, told me recently. “They are bombing near Mosul as we speak.  It’s so frustrating to hear the U.S. media say this is so sudden and surprising. Systematic ethnic cleansing has been going on from day one, and it’s going to get worse.”

For 10 years, Kino has been writing about the growing strength of fundamentalist Sunni groups in Iraq and Syria, and of their persecution of those countries’ non-Muslim groups.

What Kino has been writing and speaking about for years is now on CNN. But when I reached him by phone last week in Sweden, just before his next secret trip into the Middle East, Kino was far too emotionally wrought to feel vindicated.

A fundamentalist Sunni Muslim group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has taken over swaths of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. It is murdering, pillaging and exiling thousands of people from other ethnic and religious groups. ISIS gives Christians who live in the many villages in northern Iraq a choice: Convert to Islam, leave or be killed.

“Being a Turkmen, a Shabak, a Yazidi or a Christian in [Islamic State] territory can cost you your livelihood, your liberty or even your life,” Human Rights Watch’s Middle East executive director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a press release on Saturday from Iraqi Kurdistan.

As of last week, America has finally taken notice — and action. Kino and others fighting for the cause worry that tomorrow the airdrops and the spotlight will disappear, but the problem won’t.

The Yazidis are an ancient minority whose religion recognizes Jesus as a prophet, but also combines elements of Zoroastrianism, Islam and other local traditions. They are just the latest target in ISIS’ genocidal campaign focused largely on Christian minorities.

Assyrians are Christians who speak a linguistic relative of Aramaic. Of the 2 million Assyrians worldwide, about 400,000 live in the United States. Only 250,000 remain in their homeland.

There, ISIS’ documented abuses include executing Assyrian women who refuse to wear a hijab; raping a mother and daughter for not paying a religious tax; destroying the purported tomb of the Prophet Jonah, whom Assyrians revere; kidnapping; forced sexual slavery; and depriving refugees of clean water and food.

Since taking power from the Iraq army, ISIS has gone on a spree of killing and forcibly exiling all of the Assyrian, Chaldean and other Christian communities in its path. As far back as 2007, ISIS bombed a Yazidi village and killed 500 people.

In July, in Mosul, ISIS thugs painted the Arabic letter ن (noon) on the doors of Christian homes after their original inhabitants fled, were forced out or murdered. ن is the first letter of the Arabic Nasrani, the word for Christians.

The Assyrian diaspora community in Europe and America has been trying, without success, to draw the world’s attention to this campaign of intimidation and terror. A group called A Demand for Action organized a series of protests across the United States earlier this month, including one in front of the Federal Building in Westwood that drew about 200 marchers, mostly local Assyrians and Chaldeans.

“It is a modern-day Holocaust,” Suzan Younan, the organization’s spokeswoman, told me. “I compare Jewish homes that the Nazis painted a Star of David on with Christian homes that ISIS painted an ‘N’ on. There is a another genocide happening as we speak.”

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Read Kirsten Powers’ commentary, Obama’s Inattention To Iraqi Christians