Persecution of Christians in the Islamic Middle East has intensified in recent years, and the fear now is that Christianity may be becoming extinct in the area where it has existed for two millennia. They are criticized, absurdly, as Crusaders, or as colonialists associated with the West, or as infidels. The exception, and the only country in the area where Christians possess full religious rights and can exercise them, and have increased both in absolute number and proportion of the population, is Israel.

Now is the winter of Christian discontent in Arab Middle Eastern countries. In all those countries, Christians have been suffering a sad fate: killings; torture; rape; abduction; forced conversion to Islam; seizure of homes and property; and bombings of churches, Christian institutions, and schools, and Christian businesses.

All too many well-meaning individuals and group have swallowed the fallacious Palestinian Narrative of Victimhood in the contemporary Middle East and fail to recognize that the Christians living there are the real victims.

It was fitting that Pope Francis, on December 26, 2013, urged people to speak out about the discrimination and violence that Christians were suffering; “injustice must be denounced and eliminated.”

For some time the puzzling question has been why human rights groups, non-governmental organizations, and mainstream Western churches have been so completely or relatively silent on the issue of the persecution of Christians, individuals, and groups rooted in their societies and loyal to them.

On December 10,1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.” In the Arab countries today, this worthy principle does not apply to Christians or to Jews.

The world is aware that since 1948 Jews have almost completely departed from those countries and only a small number remain.It is less well known that Christian communities, many living in fear, have also been leaving or fleeing or forced to leave their countries.

With 12.8 million (3.8 percent of the total population) estimated in the whole Middle East region, those communities now constitute less than 1 percent of the world’s Christian population.

Even the figures reported in the mainstream Western media of Christians in Arab countries are wildly overstated.The Pew Research Center report of December 2011, corrected February 2013, on Global Christianity provides what appears to be an objective statistical summary of present reality.

Taking just three of the countries in the report, the estimates are as follows: Egypt has a Christian population of 4.2 million (5.3 percent of the population) ; Syria has 1.0 million (5.2 percent); and Iraq 270,000 (0.9 percent). Of these 43.5 percent are Catholics, 43 percent are Orthodox, and 13.5 percent are Protestant.

These figures have to be put into the context of the history of the Middle East. The Christians suffering today are the descendants of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

In the early years of Islamic rule, Christian scholars and doctors played a considerable role in the life of Middle East countries. Monks translated medical, scientific, and philosophical texts into Arabic. But for four centuries, until the early 16th century, Christians were persecuted and massacred.

Under the Ottoman Empire from that point on Christians, as well as Jews, were treated as second-class citizens.

Persecution of Christians in the Islamic Middle East has intensified in recent years, and the fear now is that Christianity may be becoming extinct in the area where it has existed for two millennia. They are criticized, absurdly, as Crusaders, or as colonialists associated with the West, or as infidels.

The exception, and the only country in the area where Christians possess full religious rights and can exercise them, and have increased both in absolute number and proportion of the population, is Israel.

Read More