THE NEVER-ENDING EXODUS OF CHRISTIANS FROM MIDDLE EAST

Belfast Telegraph
January 25, 2010 Monday
Ireland

Was I the only one to react with a total lack of surprise to the news
that Muslim Afghan soldiers are fighting Muslim Taliban fighters
with a coded inscription on their rifle sights from the Bible’s
Book of John? Could Holman Hunt have imagined that his Light of the
World (Jesus, no less, painted in 1854) would be guiding the path
of American as well as Afghan army bullets into the hearts of the
Muslim Taliban? Possibly. So it turns out that another bunch of
religious nutters, the makers of Trijicon rifle sights in the US,
believe the inscription is "part of our faith and our belief in
service to our country".

Not since the Serbs and Lebanese Phalangists set off to massacre and
rape their Muslim enemies over the past three decades with pictures
of the Virgin Mary on their rifle butts has there been anything so
preposterous. Indeed, ’twas I who first spotted two American M1A1
Abrams tanks parked in central Baghdad in 2003 with "Crusader 1"
and "Crusader 2" painted on their barrels. Don’t tell me no one in
the Pentagon (or MoD, which has an order in for another 400 Trijicon
sites) didn’t query that weird "JN8:12" on the equipment.

No wonder then — and here’s a real tragedy — that Christians are in
a state of perpetual exodus from the Middle East. In Egypt, six Coptic
Christians were killed at Christmas, along with a Muslim policeman,
when local Muslims attacked them.

The Copts are maybe 10% of their country’s 80m people but they are
heading in droves for America. One problem they have is seeking
official permission to build churches in Egypt — and if they get
this permission, sure enough, up will pop a mosque right next door.

Courtesy of that great Bible-reader George W Bush, the Christians of
post-invasion Iraq are still fleeing sectarian violence for the West.

They’ve been murdered and burned out of their homes. Why, even the head
of the superior Islamic council of Iraq, Ammar al-Hakim, turned up in
Beirut this week to tell the Maronite Catholic patriarch of Lebanon
that he was doing "all he could" for his Iraqi Christian brothers and
sisters. Algerian Islamists have just burned a Protestant church in
an apartment in Tizi Ouzou.

There’s not much point, of course, in looking for the last known
resting place of one and a half million Christian Armenians, because
they were mass-slaughtered by the Turks in 1915 — although neither
Bush nor his successor will call it a genocide because they are
frightened of Muslim Turkey.

But I was heartened to read a fine article by Jihad Zein in the
Lebanese newspaper An Nahar last week. He believes that governments
in the Muslim world have been repressing societies but — and I hope
I have grasped his complex argument correctly — repressed societies
are now repressing minorities.

The Zein thesis is that Middle East rulers have abandoned the idea
of cultural authority in the interests of safeguarding the security
of their political society.

The Fisk thesis is that minorities don’t count any more.

But don’t bet on it. Was it not the army of Israel which named its 1996
bombardment of Lebanon "Grapes of Wrath", an operation which included
the atrocity at Qana, when 106 Lebanese civilians were torn to bits by
Israeli shells? And did not Grapes of Wrath take its name from chapter
32, verse 25 of the Book of Deuteronomy in which it is said that
"the sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young
man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of grey hairs".

All in all, a good description of the massacre at Qana.

Or of those innocent Afghan villagers torn to bits in Nato’s heroic
air strikes. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that DY32:25 is
inscribed on Nato’s bombs. Work that one out.