The Americans have gone now, and Iraq’s Christian communities ”“ some of the world’s oldest ”“ are undergoing an exodus on a biblical scale.
Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled. Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.
We are just too spooked by manipulative comparisons to the well-meant but tragically executed European efforts to save Near Eastern Christians the first time that foreign invaders attempted to destroy their birthright in the early Middle Ages. Those ancestors of today’s victims of persecution may have had no love for Christian Byzantium, but never guessed that the uneasy truce with their new Arab overloads would lead to the very brink of their complete eradication. Will the chaotic version of democracy now touted as a “spring” in the region include freedom of religion, or are the Copts, Assyrians and others doomed to a winter of despair as only Islam is allowed to survive there?
A while back the media was awash with the words “ethnic cleansing” over events in the Balkans. Now we have “religious cleansing” of Christians all across the Middle East. But somehow the words “religious cleansing” seems to have constipated the media’s thought processes.
Almost nothing is more hated among western liberals than Christians and Christianity. And nothing is more approved of than Islam.