Christianity in the Middle East: Persecution Escalates
America’s wars in the Middle East have resulted in the widespread persecution of Christians in the region. When George W. Bush called America’s response to September 11 a crusade, this revived memories of medieval invasions.
Islamic nations are the main persecutors, but some regions in India have also joined in.
This strategy has limits in this era of digital communications. People can read literature that promotes controversial ideas of all kinds. Christianity historically is a text-based religion more than most. Attempts to suppress it will fail. But these attempts create terrible problems in the meantime for Christians whose churches have existed in the Middle East for many centuries.
A report published in the British Telegraph has been picked up by other sites. Sadly, the organization that prepared the report, Civitas, has no American website. A search for www.civitas.org does not connect with a server. The article did not identify the organization’s location or provide a link to the report, which is a major lapse in online reporting.
I tracked down the report. It is here. The site is www.civitas.org.uk. Here, we read this:
A glance at the position on several continents confirms the picture. In the large area between Morocco and Pakistan, for example, there is scarcely a country in which church life operates without restrictions. Syria has been one of the exceptions until now. As I write, however, the country is enduring full-scale civil war, and tens of thousands of Christians have been ousted from places including Homs and Qusayr. The prognosis for the rest of the Middle East is hardly encouraging: there is now a serious risk that Christianity will disappear from its biblical heartlands. Anthony O’Mahony of Heythrop College, London, echoes other scholars in estimating that between a half and two-thirds of Christians in the region have left or been killed over the past century. Comparable tragedies have unfolded elsewhere.
The report’s author, Rupert Shortt, has written a book on this: Christianophobia. It has received some reviews. On Amazon, it is listed, but there is not one word on it. I have never seen an Amazon book in print with less information. The publisher is asleep at the wheel.
Continue reading on telegraph.co.uk.
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Published on December 24, 2012. The original is here.
This has continued. In 2019, the British site, The Guardian, reported on this.
Pervasive persecution of Christians, sometimes amounting to genocide, is ongoing in parts of the Middle East, and has prompted an exodus in the past two decades, according to a report commissioned by the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt.Millions of Christians in the region have been uprooted from their homes, and many have been killed, kidnapped, imprisoned and discriminated against, the report finds. It also highlights discrimination across south-east Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and in east Asia – often driven by state authoritarianism.
“The inconvenient truth,” the report finds, is “that the overwhelming majority (80%) of persecuted religious believers are Christians”.
The report is here. We read:
The political failures in the Middle East have created a fertile ground for religious extremists and other actors to exploit religion, and to intensify religious and sectarian divisions in MENA. The rise of religious extremism, civil wars and general violence in various countries, especially since early 2000, has caused a huge migration of Christians (and non-Christians) from the Middle East. It has also impacted Muslim-Christian relationships, and compromised significantly the safety of Christians and other religious minority groups in the region.
The BBC ran this article in May 2019: Iraq's Christians 'close to extinction'.
The Archbishop of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, has accused Britain's Christian leaders of failing to do enough in defence of the vanishing Christian community in Iraq.In an impassioned address in London, the Rt Rev Bashar Warda said Iraq's Christians now faced extinction after 1,400 years of persecution.
Since the US-led invasion toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, he said, the Christian community had dwindled by 83%, from around 1.5 million to just 250,000.
"Christianity in Iraq," he said, "one of the oldest Churches, if not the oldest Church in the world, is perilously close to extinction. Those of us who remain must be ready to face martyrdom."
He referred to the current, pressing threat from Islamic State (IS) jihadists as a "final, existential struggle", following the group's initial assault in 2014 that displaced more than 125,000 Christians from their historic homelands.