Only One Safe Place in Middle East -- For Christians

                                                                                                                                       photo Armenia Information Portal

According to someone who speaks with authority on the subject, there is only one place in the Middle East that is safe for Christians. And it’s the same place that’s safe for Jews. 

Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest who is Arab-Israeli, reported last week to the UN Human Rights Council on the situation for Christians in the Middle East and called for an end to the “witch hunt” against Israel. 

“Every year in the last decade a hundred thousand Christians were killed throughout the Middle East, meaning that every five minutes a Christian was killed because of his faith … those who could escape persecution by Muslim extremists, fled, and those that remained are second- if not third-class citizens, under Muslim rulers,” Nadaf said.

“In the societies of the Middle East, there is one country where Christianity is not persecuted,” he said, referring to Israel. “Moreover, there is freedom of speech, worship and security warmly bestowed by Israel, the Jewish State.  

"Leaders, peace activists, end this witch hunt against the only free country in the region..."

Interestingly, Father Gabriel’s statement that one million Christians, because they are Christian, have been killed in the past ten years--the official Vatican calculation--is disputed.  A BBC challenge claimed that because the war in the Congo accounts for the highest percentage of these deaths, it’s inaccurate to attribute the deaths to a religion, that these people were simply caught up in a civil war and further, that blaming Christian deaths on Muslim terrorism is “nonsense.”  

During these past ten years, little attention has been paid to the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

It seems that Middle Eastern Christians are following the Jews in a double way.  Not only are they being forced from their homes by persecution and threats of death -- nearly all the centuries old Jewish communities (2 ½ millennia in the case of Iraq) were decimated due to persecution and attacks -- like the Jews of the Middle East, the Christians’ stories are disputed and silenced.

The only country of Middle East with a growing rather than shrinking Christian population is Israel. There are four times as many Christians in Israel now as there were in 1948.  

UN, Media: No Outrage

Last week in Syria, one percent of the al-Sheitaat tribe was killed, 700 people, some by beheading. Their murderers are members of ISIS, known also as Islamic State.

On a single weekend last month, another 700 people were killed in Syria. Syria’s war death toll is up to nearly 200,000.

This past Friday, in one small village in Iraq, ISIS executed 80 Kurdish men and kidnapped 100 women and children. Elsewhere in Iraq, they hauled off 300 Kurdish women to rape. Young girls returned to their families and committed suicide.

On a single day this month, ISIS slaughtered 1,500 Iraqi Christians. Christians have been fleeing Iraq, where they will be murdered unless they convert to Islam. At least 200,000 have fled to Kurdistan.

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority apparently believe that ISIS is responsible for some of the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. 

ISIS objects that Hamas is “not doing enough to destroy Israel” and Hamas considers ISIS to be a threat to their own power.  But they have the same long-term goals—establishing an Islamic caliphate.

A practical difference between ISIS and Hamas at the moment is that Hamas is attacking Israel, a strong country with a strong army. The Jews of Iraq, a community with a 2500-year history, experienced over many years what the Iraqi Christians are experiencing now. There are no longer Jews in Iraq.

Like ISIS, Hamas uses terror, targets civilians, and executes political opponents. They kill their own people as “suspected collaborators.” Using cement intended for building homes to instead build terror tunnels, setting up headquarters in hospitals, launching rockets from neighborhoods, ordering their own citizens not to evacuate dangerous areas and at the same time preventing or intimidating journalists from filming or reporting Hamas’s actions are all in line with their strategies that may seem more complex than those used by ISIS. But their larger agendas are the same.

That there is so little attention to the horrific slaughters by ISIS or to the violence and subterfuge of Hamas threatens all of us who are their intended targets.

--published at Times of Israel