The quote is now inscribed on one of the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Most Canadians do not realize that, despite the fact that Christianity originated in today’s Israel, Christians for centuries following the introduction of Islam in the region still constituted a majority of the population in the Middle East. From Greece to Egypt, this was the eastern half of Christendom.
When the first Islamic armies arrived from the Arabian Peninsula during the 7th century, the Assyrian Church of the East was sending missionaries to China, India and Mongolia. The shift from Christianity to Islam happened gradually.
In the lands of the Fertile Crescent, Eastern Orthodox Christians were divided between Jacobites and Greek Orthodox. Catholics included Melkites and Maronites, as well as followers of the Latin rite.
There were Assyrian Nestorians, Chaldeans, and various small groups of Protestants, who were converted by 19th-century Europeans.
Non-Arab Armenians, most of them Armenian Orthodox, arrived in the early 20th century, fleeing the Turks. And then of course, there are the Copts, the largest Christian group in the Middle East.
But today, repression and religious cleansing is taking place in the Middle East. Entire communities have been uprooted, many fleeing for their lives, in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
The percentage of Christians in the region has dropped precipitously, as fanatical forces such as the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and others, seeking to re-create the expansionist Islamic empires of the past, make it clear that for them, all Christians are enemies.
From 1910 to now, the percentage of the Middle Eastern population that is Christian has declined from 14 per cent to just four per cent; this is large-scale ethnic cleansing, often ignored by the West.
The Aid to the Church in Need papal charity last year described the current level of persecution against Christians as being “worse than at any time in history.”
The report “Persecuted and Forgotten?” examined the plight of Christians in 13 countries over the past 12 years, and found the number of Christians in the Middle East had dropped drastically.
In Syria, it fell to just 500,000 from about 1.5 million when the Syrian civil war began, driven out by extremist groups like the Nusra Front and Islamic State.
With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq in large numbers, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.
“Governments in the West and the UN failed to offer Christians in countries such as Iraq and Syria the emergency help they needed as genocide got underway,” the report said.
Why the lack of attention? Politicians are reluctant to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the “crusader” and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing.
When the Islamic State massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya in 2015, the U.S. State Department referred to the victims merely as “Egyptian citizens.”
Aid to the Church in Need observed that “at a time in the West when there is increasing media focus on the rights of people regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexuality, it is ironic that there should be such limited coverage of the massive persecution experienced by so many Christians.”
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