Experts say Christian communities in Middle East will ‘die out’ unless urgent action taken

[웃 910]

Experts say Christian communities in Middle East will ‘die out’ unless urgent action taken

With attacks against Christians on the rise in majority-Muslim nations in the Middle East, experts say the future of Christianity in the region is gravely threatened.

From the most restrictive countries to the more open ones, Christians are facing an uphill battle for survival in a majority of Middle Eastern countries. In the last ten years and especially in recent months, attacks against churches and Christian populations in Muslim lands have reached crisis proportions.

In almost every majority-Muslim nation in the Middle East the situation of Christians is worsening, according to Paul Marshall, senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute.

“You are seeing more of this violence across the board….You get governments which may be relatively secular, like Egypt. But the opposition is Islamist,” Marshall told The Daily Caller. “[Governments] want to look like they are defending Islam too. So [countries like] Egypt do not effectively protect its Christian communities.”

More substantial Christian communities, such as the Copts in Egypt, will likely have more of a chance for survival, Marshall said. Those countries in which Christians are already significantly out-numbered will likely see their Christian population vanish unless the violence against them is brought to an end.

“In a lot of the other countries [besides Egypt and Lebanon] where you have smaller [Christian] communities — Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran — at the moment, the fear is those communities will continue to diminish. It is parallel to Jews about fifty years ago,” said Marshall. “These communities are beginning to go and in a couple of decades, unless the situation changes, you’ll just have remnants of communities. They will die out.”

While avoiding Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, said he believes Islamists see the fight against the West as also an opportunity to purify their lands of religious minorities — namely Jews and Christians.

“It’s not just about Jews or Israel. What’s unfolding is a struggle between the West — Israel and the United States, Jews and Christians — against this strand of militant Islam. We’re all in this together,” he said.

Marshall noted that the Islamists are not only trying to purify the region of Jews and Christians but all of the various religious minorities.

“We use these monolithic terms like Muslim and Arab and so we miss the minorities even though that part of the world has as many minorities as else where,” he said.

While Marshall said the decrease in tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities is not directly linked to American actions in the Middle East, he does believe that American actions are used as an excuse for attacking Christians who they identify as an appendage of the “Great Satan.”

“In terms of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, those are used by radical groups, terrorist groups, as justification for attacking Christians — eventhough the local Christians did not invade Iraq, they have been their for 2,000 years,” he said.

Brog told TheDC that unless governments step in there is little doubt that the presence of Christians in the region will dramatically taper off, leaving behind a negligible population.

“For every Christian killed, you’re going to see multiples fleeing for their lives. Thus I fear unless governments step up — particularly the governments of Iraq and Egypt — the violence will continue and the exodus will continue and we will see some of the oldest Christian communities on earth disappear,” Brog said.

Nina Shea, an international human-rights lawyer, concurrs.

“Unless something happens fast there is not going to be a future for Christianity in the Middle East,” she told TheDC.

But while governments may have a humanitarian obligation to step in, Daniel Pipes, founder and director of the Middle East Forum, told TheDC that Christian institutions that have shied away from the conflict in the past, such as the Vatican, would do well to step in.

“I think it is more a matter for Christian institutions, in particular the Vatican, which is always concerned that if it makes noise things will get even worse,” he said.

Pope Benedict XVI briefly touched on the issue in his yearly “State of the World” address last week. Benedict spoke about the intolerance toward Christians throughout the Middle East and the world — calling on those in power to act to help Christians fighting for survival.

”Looking to the east, the attacks which brought death, grief and dismay among the Christians of Iraq, even to the point of inducing them to leave the land where their families have lived for centuries, has troubled us deeply. To the authorities of that country and to the Muslim religious leaders, I renew my heartfelt appeal that their Christian fellow-citizens be able to live in security, continuing to contribute to the society in which they are fully members,” he said.

The fact that Christians are being forced out of Muslim lands at this moment in history is “particularly ironic,” according to Pipes.

“I think the future is bleak,” said Pipes, “and it comes at a particularly ironic moment when the Muslim populations, in the traditional Christian world, are burgeoning. It is not just in terms of numbers, but they are demanding rights [in the West] and so it is almost a mirror reflection of what is going on in traditional Muslim countries.”

A woman lights a candle among pictures of slain Iraqi Christians at

Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Dec. 31, 2010.

Militants in Iraq have attacked at least four Christian homes with a

combination of grenades and bombs, killing and wounding a few

people and sending fear into the country's already terrified tiny Christian

community, police said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/18/experts-say-christian-communities-in-middle-east-will-die-out-unless-urgent-action-taken/2/

[Jenn! 918]

Not sure what your little subtitle commentary means. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Murdering religious minorities is wrong. Duh.

Oh, and Daniel Pipes?

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Anyone surprised?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Hey OP! What's the big deal? I thought you hated Christians?

[웃 910]

Not sure what your little subtitle commentary means.

Certain members repeatedly make posts about how Muslims are so stereotyped, the media is out to get Muslims, everyone in America is so biased towards Muslims, for every Muslim attack there is another equivalent attack from other religions, the attacks from other religions around the world is not reported because our media is biased. The 9/11 attacks were blown out of proportion. It was nothing compared to what Hitler did. Muslims have such a bad reputation now and that is so unfair.....

When in reality every group has stereotypes. Muslims are terrorists. Mexicans are landscapers and housekeepers. Black people have big johnsons and if they don't play sports or rap then they are gonna be on welfare the rest of their lives or in prison.

All of these stereotypes are unfair and untrue. But that is life. And when I put all the stereotypes and all the racism on a scale in America I place Muslims towards the bottom of the list in terms of which group has it the worst. At the top are gays and blacks. Pretty much every black male in America has been pulled over by police at least once in their lives for a petty reason due to skin color.

The fact is Muslims do not have it bad at all. Not in America. Not in the world.

[Ban Hammer 13,520]

Anyone surprised?

me! i thought they were all sitting around a campfire singing

[^_^ 5,021]

All of these stereotypes are unfair and untrue. But that is life. And when I put all the stereotypes and all the racism on a scale in America I place Muslims towards the bottom of the list in terms of which group has it the worst. At the top are gays and blacks. Pretty much every black male in America has been pulled over by police at least once in their lives for a petty reason due to skin color.

The fact is Muslims do not have it bad at all. Not in America. Not in the world.

Well said, LI. Although I wouldn't place gays at the top. Black people, yes. Muslims, not even close.

+1

[ready4ONE 5,400]

We recently had an OP on Egyptian Muslims by the thousands surrounding Christian Churches to protect worshippers so all is not negative. That does not excuse those who persecute of course.

[alienlovechild 75]

“In a lot of the other countries [besides Egypt and Lebanon] where you have smaller [Christian] communities — Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran — at the moment, the fear is those communities will continue to diminish. It is parallel to Jews about fifty years ago,” said Marshall. “These communities are beginning to go and in a couple of decades, unless the situation changes, you’ll just have remnants of communities. They will die out.”

Nothing will be done to change the trend. Christianity will be wiped out in most of the region and there won't be much in the news about it. Most people in the West aren't aware there are Christians in the region so they won't be missed.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

If this wasn't from Pipes, a confirmed, decades long Muslim hater and a devotee of the school of "don't let a (manufactured) crisis go to waste", it could have more credibility.

FIGHTING WORDS

Pipes the Propagandist

Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2003, at 11:23 AM ET

When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.

I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.

This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience. One of the most frontal challenges from Islamic theocracy came in February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death upon Salman Rushdie. There then followed a long campaign by writers and scholars and diplomats, culminating in September 1998 in a formal repudiation of the fatwa by the Iranian regime. Good cause for celebration, one might think. But not to Pipes, who weighed in with a sour, sophomoric article arguing that nothing whatsoever had changed and that the Iranian authorities were as committed to Rushdie's elimination as ever. His "sources" were a few clips from the Iranian press and a few stray statements from extremists. That was five years ago. Today, Salman Rushdie lives in New York without body guards and travels freely, and there are leading Shiite voices raised in Iran in favor of the coalition's successful demolition of the Iraqi Baath Party. To put it bluntly, I suspect that Pipes is so consumed by dislike that he will not recognize good news from the Islamic world even when it arrives. And this makes him dangerous and unreliable.

Then, I heard recently, Pipes has maintained that professor Edward Said of Columbia University is not really a Palestinian and never lost his family home in Jerusalem in the fighting of 1947-48. I have my own disagreements with Said, but this is a much-discredited libel that undermines the credibility of anybody circulating it. Professor Said is deservedly respected for his long advocacy of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians; yet, once again, Pipes spits and curses at anything short of his own highly emotional agenda. In the February 2003 issue of Commentary magazine, he wrote an attack on the "road map" proposals, which included the words "the so-called Palestinian refugees," and which by other crude tricks of language insinuated that there had been no Palestinian dispossession in the first place. In which case, there is obviously nothing to negotiate about, is there? It's one thing to argue, as many Palestinians are prepared to do, that not every refugee can expect "the right of return." It's quite another to deny history and to assert that there is no refugee problem to begin with.

By coincidence, that same issue of Commentary contained several columns of letters from aggrieved scholars, complaining at the way in which Pipes had misrepresented their work. Pipes himself was forced to concede grudgingly that he had been in error when he described professor John Kelsay of Princeton and professor James Turner Johnson of Rutgers as having denied that the term "jihad" had any military meaning. I admire those who admit their mistakes, especially under the pressure of fact. But Pipes hasn't just been engaged in a dispute in print with other academics. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a Web-site crusade that purports to expose heretical or subversive teachers in America. It's not pleasant to think of such an organization being run by somebody who won't, or who can't, read the published work of more distinguished colleagues.

On more than one occasion, Pipes has called for the extension of Israel's already ruthless policy of collective punishment, arguing that leveling Palestinian villages is justifiable if attacks are launched from among their inhabitants. It seems to me from observing his style that he came to this conclusion with rather more relish than regret. And, invited recently to comment on the wartime internment of the Japanese—as a comparison case to his own call for the profiling and surveillance of Muslim and Arab-Americans—he declined on the grounds that he didn't know enough about the subject. One isn't necessarily obliged to know the history of discrimination as it has been applied to American security policy—unless, that is, one is proposing a new form of it. To be uninformed at that point is to disqualify oneself, as the Senate should disqualify Pipes.

The board of USIP already contains enough people to make sure that the hawkish viewpoint does not go unrepresented. It includes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, and Harriet Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Nothing will be done to change the trend. Christianity will be wiped out in most of the region and there won't be much in the news about it. Most people in the West aren't aware there are Christians in the region so they won't be missed.

They're so busy listening to pundits who insist that there are no churches or synagogues in predominantly Muslim countries, so how can there be Jews and Christians?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

And, from Mr. Pipes, himself.

1-10-05

Japanese Internment: Why It Was a Good Idea--And the Lessons It Offers Today

By Daniel Pipes

Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org.

For years, it has been my position that the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population.

And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion survey that finds nearly half the U.S. population agreeing with this proposition. Specifically, 44 percent of Americans believe that government authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in America, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their organizations.

Also encouraging, the survey finds the more people follow TV news, the more likely they are to support these common-sense steps. Those who are best informed about current issues, in other words, are also the most sensible about adopting self-evident defensive measures.

That's the good news; the bad news is the near-universal disapproval of this realism. Leftist and Islamist organizations have so successfully intimidated public opinion that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims.

In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy.

Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of Michelle Malkin, "like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy.

Fortunately, the intrepid Ms. Malkin, a columnist and specialist on immigration issues, has re-opened the internment file. Her recently published book, bearing the provocative title In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery), starts with the unarguable premise that in time of war, "the survival of the nation comes first." From there, she draws the corollary that "Civil liberties are not sacrosanct."

She then reviews the historical record of the early 1940s and finds that:

Within hours of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, two American citizens of Japanese ancestry, with no prior history of anti-Americanism, shockingly collaborated with a Japanese soldier against their fellow Hawaiians.

The Japanese government established "an extensive espionage network within the United States" believed to include hundreds of agents.

In contrast to loose talk about "American concentration camps," the relocation camps for Japanese were "spartan facilities that were for the most part administered humanely." As proof, she notes that over 200 individuals voluntarily chose to move into the camps.

The relocation process itself won praise from Carey McWilliams, a contemporary leftist critic (and future editor of the Nation), for taking place "without a hitch."

A federal panel that reviewed these issues in 1981-83, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, was, Ms. Malkin explains, "Stacked with left-leaning lawyers, politicians, and civil rights activists – but not a single military officer or intelligence expert."

The apology for internment by Ronald Reagan in 1988, in addition to the nearly $1.65 billion in reparations paid to former internees was premised on faulty scholarship. In particular, it largely ignored the top-secret decoding of Japanese diplomatic traffic, codenamed the MAGIC messages, which revealed Tokyo's plans to exploit Japanese-Americans.

Ms. Malkin has done the singular service of breaking the academic single-note scholarship on a critical subject, cutting through a shabby, stultifying consensus to reveal how, "given what was known and not known at the time," President Roosevelt and his staff did the right thing.

She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies and engage in what she calls "threat profiling." These steps may entail bothersome or offensive measures but, she argues, they are preferable to "being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane."

[dolphin1 5]

Experts say Christian communities in Middle East will ‘die out’ unless urgent action taken

With attacks against Christians on the rise in majority-Muslim nations in the Middle East, experts say the future of Christianity in the region is gravely threatened.

From the most restrictive countries to the more open ones, Christians are facing an uphill battle for survival in a majority of Middle Eastern countries. In the last ten years and especially in recent months, attacks against churches and Christian populations in Muslim lands have reached crisis proportions.

In almost every majority-Muslim nation in the Middle East the situation of Christians is worsening, according to Paul Marshall, senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute.

“You are seeing more of this violence across the board….You get governments which may be relatively secular, like Egypt. But the opposition is Islamist,” Marshall told The Daily Caller. “[Governments] want to look like they are defending Islam too. So [countries like] Egypt do not effectively protect its Christian communities.”

More substantial Christian communities, such as the Copts in Egypt, will likely have more of a chance for survival, Marshall said. Those countries in which Christians are already significantly out-numbered will likely see their Christian population vanish unless the violence against them is brought to an end.

“In a lot of the other countries [besides Egypt and Lebanon] where you have smaller [Christian] communities — Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran — at the moment, the fear is those communities will continue to diminish. It is parallel to Jews about fifty years ago,” said Marshall. “These communities are beginning to go and in a couple of decades, unless the situation changes, you’ll just have remnants of communities. They will die out.”

While avoiding Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, said he believes Islamists see the fight against the West as also an opportunity to purify their lands of religious minorities — namely Jews and Christians.

“It’s not just about Jews or Israel. What’s unfolding is a struggle between the West — Israel and the United States, Jews and Christians — against this strand of militant Islam. We’re all in this together,” he said.

Marshall noted that the Islamists are not only trying to purify the region of Jews and Christians but all of the various religious minorities.

“We use these monolithic terms like Muslim and Arab and so we miss the minorities even though that part of the world has as many minorities as else where,” he said.

While Marshall said the decrease in tolerance for Christians and other religious minorities is not directly linked to American actions in the Middle East, he does believe that American actions are used as an excuse for attacking Christians who they identify as an appendage of the “Great Satan.”

“In terms of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, those are used by radical groups, terrorist groups, as justification for attacking Christians — eventhough the local Christians did not invade Iraq, they have been their for 2,000 years,” he said.

Brog told TheDC that unless governments step in there is little doubt that the presence of Christians in the region will dramatically taper off, leaving behind a negligible population.

“For every Christian killed, you’re going to see multiples fleeing for their lives. Thus I fear unless governments step up — particularly the governments of Iraq and Egypt — the violence will continue and the exodus will continue and we will see some of the oldest Christian communities on earth disappear,” Brog said.

Nina Shea, an international human-rights lawyer, concurrs.

“Unless something happens fast there is not going to be a future for Christianity in the Middle East,” she told TheDC.

But while governments may have a humanitarian obligation to step in, Daniel Pipes, founder and director of the Middle East Forum, told TheDC that Christian institutions that have shied away from the conflict in the past, such as the Vatican, would do well to step in.

“I think it is more a matter for Christian institutions, in particular the Vatican, which is always concerned that if it makes noise things will get even worse,” he said.

Pope Benedict XVI briefly touched on the issue in his yearly “State of the World” address last week. Benedict spoke about the intolerance toward Christians throughout the Middle East and the world — calling on those in power to act to help Christians fighting for survival.

”Looking to the east, the attacks which brought death, grief and dismay among the Christians of Iraq, even to the point of inducing them to leave the land where their families have lived for centuries, has troubled us deeply. To the authorities of that country and to the Muslim religious leaders, I renew my heartfelt appeal that their Christian fellow-citizens be able to live in security, continuing to contribute to the society in which they are fully members,” he said.

The fact that Christians are being forced out of Muslim lands at this moment in history is “particularly ironic,” according to Pipes.

“I think the future is bleak,” said Pipes, “and it comes at a particularly ironic moment when the Muslim populations, in the traditional Christian world, are burgeoning. It is not just in terms of numbers, but they are demanding rights [in the West] and so it is almost a mirror reflection of what is going on in traditional Muslim countries.”

A woman lights a candle among pictures of slain Iraqi Christians at

Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Dec. 31, 2010.

Militants in Iraq have attacked at least four Christian homes with a

combination of grenades and bombs, killing and wounding a few

people and sending fear into the country's already terrified tiny Christian

community, police said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/18/experts-say-christian-communities-in-middle-east-will-die-out-unless-urgent-action-taken/2/

Christians and jews lived in harmony and peace inside Muslims countries for a looooooong time. What is happening in Iraq and Egypt is a dirty job of Isrealian government and people who have goals and agendas. Why the bombing and killing some christians in middle east is happening now? why didnt happen 100s yrs ago? Dont be damn stupid and believe whatever you hear and watch on tv, you are not there, you didnt study history from both sides, you dont know what s going on and you post nonesene, there are lots of spies and people from other governments doing dirty work to start instability, clashes between people and religions.

Christians and jews lived in harmony and peace inside Muslims countries for a looooooong time. What is happening in Iraq and Egypt is a dirty job of Isrealian government and people who have goals and agendas. Why the bombing and killing some christians in middle east is happening now? why didnt happen 100s yrs ago? Dont be damn stupid and believe whatever you hear and watch on tv, you are not there, you didnt study history from both sides, you dont know what s going on and you post nonesene, there are lots of spies and people from other governments doing dirty work to start instability, clashes between people and religions.

By the way none ask for people to be sorry for muslims.

[^_^ 5,021]

What is happening in Iraq and Egypt is a dirty job of Isrealian government ...

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

[The_Dude 1,142]