“Democracy can lead to more Islam but Islam may lead to Christianity,” he said. As evidence he noted that, even with Islam seemingly on the rise in many of the regions undergoing unrest, interest about Christianity is also peaking among young people in the Middle East.

Dr. Walid Phares signs a book Saturday after giving a talk on the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world at the Double Tree Guest Suites in Downers Grove. | Hank Beckman~For Sun-Times Media

With the only Christian in Pakistan’s government murdered outside his mother’s home, Coptic Christian churches being burnt in Egypt, and Iraq’s Christian population reduced by about half of its 1.4 million total of 25 years ago, the future for many Christians in the Muslim world looks at best uncertain.

Dr. Walid Phares wants the Chicago area to be aware of the ongoing persecution and Saturday stressed the unknowns of the political situation in many countries in the region. He is particularly anxious about what type of government might replace any overturned regimes.

“Are they really going to be democratic?” Phares asked. “Will they give rights to minorities … will they be better or worse?”

Phares was the keynote speaker at “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”

The daylong conference was sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, and held at the Double Tree Guest Suites in Downers Grove.

Phares, born in Beirut, is an attorney and Ph.D. holder who teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., has authored several books on the Middle East, and serves as an adviser to both the Homeland Security Administration and the U.S. House Anti-Terrorism Caucus.

Phares called for a concerted effort to bring awareness to Americans of the plight of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East, joking that he would call it, “The Chicago Initiative.”

Phares outlined the modern history of the region, asking why so many other regions had agitated for freedom in the last generation — he noted democracy movements in Europe, Latin America and South Africa — while so many Middle Eastern people still lacked basic freedoms.

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