Mid East
After Arab Spring, danger arises for Christians
By Jeff Jacoby | Boston Globe Columnist | December 07, 2011
In October, Egyptian troops in Cairo’s Maspero district slaughtered Christians as they protested the burning of churches in Upper Egypt. Even before the Maspero pogrom, Christians by the tens of thousands had been fleeing post-Mubarak Egypt. You don’t have to be a “lingering colonialist and racist’’ to fear there may be even worse to come.
Egypt isn’t the only Arab country whose Christian communities are being decimated by Islamist brutality.
Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, The Wall Street Journal noted on Monday, “at least 54 Iraqi churches have been bombed and at least 905 Christians killed in various acts of violence.’’ The archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Kirkuk and Sulimaniya calls the emigration a “hemorrhage,’’ warning that “Iraq could be emptied of Christians.’’ In Syria, Catholic and Orthodox communities are terrified of what awaits them if the current regime is overthrown.
The harrying of non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East is hardly a new phenomenon — nearly all of the Arab world’s Jews were driven out long ago — but the rise of radical Islam has lethally intensified the problem. Last month, Christian Solidarity International, a respected human-rights organization with deep experience in the region, warned that Christians there may be facing genocide. “The crisis of survival for non-Muslim communities is especially acute in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, and Pakistan,’’ the group’s CEO, John Eibner, wrote in a letter to President Obama, imploring him to act urgently to prevent the kind of “religious cleansing’’ that eradicated Turkey’s “once-thriving Christian communities’’ a century ago.
It takes more than voting to sustain decent democratic values. Totalitarians from Hitler to Hamas, after all, have come to power via the ballot. Revolts and demonstrations may topple Arab dictators, and their replacements may be chosen in elections. But there will be no Arab Spring without pluralism, freedom, and tolerance.
“Such tolerance is particularly important when it comes to religion,’’ Obama declared last May — so important that America would defend it with “all of the diplomatic, economic, and strategic tools at our disposal.’’ Fine words. But with Islamists sweeping to power and human-rights activists warning of genocide, the beleaguered Christians of the Middle East need more than words.