Ralph Peters
Islamist terrorists and fanatics are methodically
exterminating the 2,000-year-old Christian civilization of the Middle
East through oppression, threats, appropriations and deadly violence.
Our
media ignore the intensifying savagery against Christians in Muslim
Brotherhood-controlled Egypt. Unconfirmed reports assert that, last
month, Muslim Brothers dragged Christian protesters to a mosque and
tortured them — but our reporters won’t look into an Islamist Abu
Ghraib.
For a century and a half, the varied strands of Middle
East Christianity have faced increasingly fierce pogroms and, for the
Armenians, outright genocide. But with the rise of Wahhabi and Salafist
terror, the long, slow-motion Holocaust accelerated.
AP
Another attack on Egypt’s 10 million Coptic Christians: Firemen dousing a
blaze at a New Year’s car bombing outside a Coptic church.
Western liberals romanticize barbaric cultures but have no interest
in the destruction — before their averted eyes — of a great and
brilliant religious civilization. It’s as if they accept the Islamist
creed that Christians don’t belong in the realms of Islam.
But the Middle East was more than just Christianity’s birthplace. The faith we know
matured
in the Middle East and North Africa, from Ephesus and Antioch to
Alexandria and beyond. St. Augustine, the most influential church father
after St. Paul, was a North African.
Rome was a latecomer to
Christian authority. Through the Middle Ages, substantially more
Christians lived east of Constantinople (now Istanbul) than in Europe,
the faith’s backwater, whose northern reaches had yet to be evangelized.
Christianity’s
greatest thinkers, greatest monuments and greatest triumphs for its
first 1,000 years rose in the Middle East. Even the Muslim conquest and
relative servitude could not dislodge Christianity. In the worst of
times, Christianity turned the other cheek and endured. Some Christians
flourished.
Today, the end is in sight.
In Iraq, cities
such as Mosul and Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit, were once vital centers of
Christianity. But the country’s Christian population, estimated at up to
2 million a decade ago, has fallen by half — perhaps by three-quarters.
Over 2 million Christians in Syria dread Islamist terror and
religious cleansing so much, they lean toward the vicious Assad regime,
which at least shielded minorities. Those who can, flee the country.
Christians
were early supporters of Arab nationalism. One of the fiercest
Palestinian leaders, George Habash, was a Christian, as was the wife of
Yasser Arafat. Their thanks? Two-thirds of the West Bank’s and more of
Gaza’s Christians have been driven out. They’re now a small minority
even in Bethlehem (a situation ignored by our visiting president).
Egypt
has the region’s largest remaining Christian population, at least 10
million Copts. With rare exceptions, they’ve long been confined to
squalid quarters and treated as third-class citizens. Now the Salafist
fanatics have been unleashed. The nation’s Muslim Brotherhood rulers
could put a stop to anti-Christian violence, but appear willing to let
the Salafists do the dirty work for them. They’re playing bad cop,
not-so-bad cop.
And we’ll send the regime at least a billion
dollars this year — with no stipulations or conditions except that
military-related funds must purchase US-made or US-licensed equipment.
With Egypt’s economy in desperate straits and the Brotherhood’s
popularity fading, we’re propping up religious-cleansing bigots.
Christians
in Iran? Gone. Turkey? Almost gone. Saudi Arabia? The once-thriving
Christian and Jewish populations of Mecca and Medina were finished off
centuries ago.
And in Lebanon, the only Middle East country that
until recently had a Christian majority, Christian rights have been so
threatened by Sunni fanaticism that some Christians have reached out to
Shia Hezbollah in their desperate hunt for allies.
Far to the
east, in Pakistan, Christians face trumped-up charges of insulting Islam
or rape, beatings, murder and church bombings. And we
still pour billions into Pakistan.
It’s the end of a world as we know it.
If Islam is a “religion of peace,” it’s time to show the evidence to the endangered Christians of the Middle East.
Of
course, not all Christians are angels, nor are all Muslims demons. Most
humans of any faith just want to get through the day. And some
Christians have collaborated with odious Baathist regimes (usually, to
ensure their community’s survival). Nor are most Muslims active
supporters of the religious cleansing of Christians from their shared
homelands.
But disappointingly few Muslims actively defend
religious minorities. It’s not unlike Nazi Germany, where most Germans
didn’t want to murder Jews, but were complicit through their silence.
If
a Michigan mosque is defaced with graffiti, it makes national news and
the Justice Department views it as a hate crime. It’s time for our
government and media to apply the same standard abroad on behalf of
Christians.
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