Assyrian International News Agency
Dec 26 2007

Creche Without Christians: Christian Persecution in the Middle East

In the two millennia since the child’s birth in a humble manger in
Bethlehem, the good news of Christianity has spread to every
continent, inspiring more followers than any other religion today.
But the lands that once were the cradle of Christianity have turned
distinctively inhospitable to the faith. Fiercely intolerant variants
of Islam are taking hold in the region, many of them fueled with
ideology and funds from Saudi and Iranian extremists.

>From Morocco to the Persian Gulf, we are seeing the rapid erosion of
Christian populations, thought to now number no more than 15 million.
These are the communities that have disproportionately been the
region’s modernizers, the mediators bridging east and west, its
educators and academics, as the Lebanese Catholic scholar Habib Malik
observes. For empirical evidence he has to look no further than his
own father, a principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.

The loss of Middle Eastern Christianity has profound meaning for the
Church. But it should not be a matter of concern to Christians only.
These Christian communities, along with a handful of other non-Muslim
minority groups, such as the Bahais, Mandeans, Yizidis, Jews,
together with the anti-Islamist Muslims, are the front-line in the
terrible worldwide struggle taking place today between Islamist
totalitarianism and individual rights and freedoms. The extinction of
these ancient church communities will lead to ever more extremism
within the region and polarization from the non-Muslim world. This
will hurt us all.

The new religious survey, Freedom in the World, produced by the
Center for Religious Freedom shows that while some Muslim governments
do respect religious freedom, none are to be found in the Middle
East. Israel is the only "free" country, and their Christian numbers
are increasing.

The survey ranks Jordan, Oman, Morocco, and Lebanon as "partly free."
Here the Christian populations are either miniscule and largely
foreign, or, in the case of Lebanon, shrinking precipitously from
majority to about a third of the population in recent decades.

The rest of the region is further down the freedom scale. In Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Tunisia there are virtually no indigenous
Christian communities left, though some converts there carry out
religious lives in the catacombs and expats quietly hold services. In
Saudi Arabia, religious intolerance is official state policy.

Over half of Iraq’s one million Christians have fled since a
coordinated bombing of their churches in August 2004 was followed by
sustained violence against them. A Catholic Chaldean bishop raised
the possibility last month that we may now be witnessing "the end of
Christianity in Iraq." Anglican Canon Andrew White, who leads a
Baghdad ecumenical congregation, agrees: "All of my leadership were
originally taken and killed — all dead," he asserted in November.

Iraq’s Christian community, which dates from the Apostle Thomas, is
not simply caught in the cross hairs of a sectarian civil war between
Shiites and Sunnis. It is targeted for its non-Muslim faith — a
reality U.S. policy fails to acknowledge. An extremist Sunni fatwa
issued to Christians this year in a Baghdad neighborhood could not be
clearer: "If you do not leave your home, your blood will be spilled.
You and your family will be killed.’"

The Christian presence in Palestine may hold out no more than 15
years, according to Israeli human rights lawyer Justus Weiner, due to
increasing Muslim persecution and maltreatment. Amidst a Muslim
population of 1.4 million, some 3,000 Greek Orthodox live in the
Hamas-run Gaza strip. An extreme Wahhabi-style group wearing
seventh-century robes recently emerged, calling them "Crusaders" and
vowing to drive them out. It has succeeded in killing several
Christians in recent months, including a prominent member of the
community, Rami Khader.

The West Bank is hardly better. "No one city in the Holy Land is more
indicative of the great exodus of Christians than Bethlehem, which
fell under full Palestinian control last decade as part of the Oslo
Accords," states Weiner. This town of 30,000 is now less than
20-percent Christian, after centuries in which Christians were the
majority. In the West Bank’s only all-Christian town, now called
Taybeh and once known by the Biblical name Ephraim, a Muslim mob from
a neighboring village torched 14 houses last September to avenge the
honor of a Muslim woman allegedly impregnated by her Christian
employer.

Demographic decline isn’t perfectly correlated with religious
repression. Lower birth rates, conversions, and some voluntary
emigration also account for shrinking numbers of Christians. Israel’s
barrier fence, erected relatively recently in its history in response
to terrorist attacks, is a hardship and is commonly blamed for the
Christian exodus from Palestine.

But when the decline is so dramatic, when only the Christian and
other non-Muslim populations are dwindling and when this pattern
holds in country after country, the facts on the ground deserve a
closer look. There we see a region-wide, steady, grinding economic,
legal, and social discrimination, and political disempowerment
punctuated by horrific acts of terror by social forces that
governments are unable or unwilling to control. The smaller a
minority in the brutally sectarian world of the Middle East, the more
vulnerable it is and the more rapid its decline.

Egypt, with some ten million Copts, has the region’s largest
Christian minority. The state systematically discriminates against
them and frustrates their efforts to build and repair churches.
Fanatical Islamist groups rise up periodically and threaten or kill
priests and individual Christian believers, especially converts, and
the state often fails to bring justice in such cases. Earlier this
month, an Islamist website urged a terrorist attack on the Cairo
office of the Knights of Malta, a Catholic charitable group founded
in 1087 to care for poor and sick pilgrims to the Holy Land. Posting
photos of the Malta office, it exhorted: "Do not stint on your
attacks, Egyptians, either with car or truck bombs."

Turkey, where Paul preached to the Ephesians and Galatians, once the
seat of the Eastern Christianity known as Byzantium, has one of the
smallest Christian minorities. It is now home to less than 75,000
Christians, out of a population of 70 million. The persecutions, even
genocide, of the Assyrians, Pontic Greeks and Armenians, the
population exchange with Greece and other mass Christian emigrations
of the last century, all took their toll. Things are quieter today
for the Christians. To be sure the Orthodox Church is being slowly
strangled by the state closure of its seminary, but the violence is
no longer systematic or official. It is more targeted, and carried
out by zealous young men acting outside the law. Last Sunday, Italian
Catholic priest, Fr. Adriano Franchini, was stabbed after Mass at a
church in Izmir. In April three evangelicals were mutilated and
killed at their Christian publishing house.

Last June, speaking of Iraq but in words applicable to the region,
the pope told President Bush of his concerns that "the society that
was evolving would not tolerate the Christian religion." Chaldean
Bishop Audo elaborated: "This is very sad and very dangerous for the
church, for Iraq and even for Muslim people, because it means the end
of an old experience of living together."

Christian hearts are filled with joy and wonder reflecting on the
first Christmas. They should also make room in this season for the
persecuted faithful of the Middle East.

By Nina Shea
National Review Online

Nina Shea is the director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the
Hudson Institute.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress