Christians under siege

By JPOST EDITORIAL

http://tinyurl.com/l8nsccx

 08/21/2013

 

A few days ago, mobs of Muslim Brotherhood supporters attacked a Franciscan school in suburban Cairo.

An Egyptian Coptic Christian holds a cross with the Egyptian flag.Photo: REUTERS

A few days ago, mobs of Muslim Brotherhood supporters attacked a Franciscan school in suburban Cairo. They pulled down a cross, smashed it to bits and replaced it with the black flag of al-Qaida. That was just the beginning.

They looted the school, gutted it meticulously for hours, and later burned down what remained of the classrooms.

Then came the climax as three nuns were grabbed and paraded through the streets like humiliated prisoners of war.

The frenzied throngs spat on the helpless captives, poured refuse on them, slapped and groped at them and heaped abuse and scorn. This too lasted for hours during which the nuns literally ran the gauntlet, not knowing where they were headed.

The sacking of the school was not unique or unexpected.

Egypt’s Christians, who comprise 10 percent of the 80 million population, have long been hounded and persecuted.

Their lot grew alarmingly dire after Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow and during the short-lived tenure of Mohamed Morsi.

That said, none of the pre-Morsi regimes can be described as having gone out of it way to safeguard the beleaguered religious minority from plunder, murder, abductions of women and their involuntary conversions and forced marriages to Muslims. Despite occasional lip service, no real succor was offered.

The recent unrest has only escalated the peril to unprecedented proportions. This is not just payback for the fact that the Christians on the whole cheered Morsi’s removal.

What is happening in Egypt is not radically different from the anti-Christian ardor that has swept through much of the embattled Middle East ever since the advent of the Arab Spring.

Incredibly, all this appears to pass right under the radar of Western media. Ostensibly undetected and barely reported, anti-Christian drives stand out as yet further illustrations of mind-boggling selectivity by the press overseas.

Some suffering is not newsworthy.

The nonobjective criteria for free world outrage are particularly mystifying given the fact that hardest hit of all are the native churches – such as Syria’s Assyrians or Egypt’s Copts. These are among Christianity’s oldest sects and their members comprise the vestiges of ancient indigenous populations.

They face xenophobic fanaticism reminiscent of that brazenly practiced by Afghanistan’s Taliban honchos. In 2001, the latter dynamited the 6th-century monumental Buddha statues of Bamiyan – an iconic UNESCO World Heritage Site that offended Muslim fundamentalists for supposedly embodying idol worship. Some of Egypt’s Taliban counterparts have already served warning that they will target the Pyramids. But meanwhile, the ultra-vulnerable and reviled Copts are much easier and softer targets.

Dozens of churches, monasteries and schools have been ransacked during the past few weeks, with Morsi supporters whipping up passions by accusing the Copts of having orchestrated the killing of pro-Brotherhood demonstrators.

The Copts – whose Church traces its origins to 50 CE Alexandria – are now popularly portrayed as foreign interlopers who scheme to undermine Islam in the Land of the Nile.

Although the Copts were never remotely a friendly force so far as Israel was concerned – to no small degree feeling obliged to curry favor with the Muslim and nationalist Arab majority – their current travails are evocative of Egypt’s ethic cleansing of its Jews between 1948 and 1956.

Effectively, Egypt had been rendered judenrein. These days, many Copts are emigrating.

In the region as a whole, Christians account for between 2% and 5% of the region’s population, versus 20% 100 years ago. Lebanon’s Christians are at the mercy of the Shi’ite Hezbollah, whereas in Syria Christians are victimized by Sunnis. In Iraq they are walloped by everyone. In the Palestinian Authority Christian numbers are falling sharply too, as evidenced by the Muslim majority in once- Christian Bethlehem. Gaza’s Christians are running for their lives.

The one steadily growing Christian community in the Middle East is to be found in much-maligned little Israel.

Only under Jewish sovereignty are Christians safe and free from serial terror and harm. But the one beacon of genuine liberality in an unkind and callously intolerant region is hardly likely to win accolades from the self-styled enlightened world.

No settlement in Sight

The constant chatter over a UN condemnation of Israel's so-called "settlements" showed just how irrelevant Western diplomacy is to the real issues in the region. The riots in Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iran were not about a few Jewish villages on one side of a line on a map that has been redrawn half a dozen times in the 20th century. The trouble with the Muslim world does not lie in the vineyards of the Judean Hills, the glass factories of Ariel, the academies of the revived Maccabean town of Modi'in Illit, the solar panel plants of Nazareth Illit, the dairies of Carmel or the fruit orchards of Gush Etzion.

Ever since ten Arab nations lost a war to Israel over six days in the spring of 1967, too many diplomats have acted as if it were its responsibility to fix the Muslim world. In 1973, Israel was set up to lose a war in order to bolster Muslim self-esteem. But Israel still won and while its people buried more of their dead this time around, Muslim self-esteem did not noticeably improve. In the early 90's, Israel was pressured into providing an autonomous territory for Islamo-Marxist thugs who had been trained and equipped by its neighbors to carry out terrorist attacks on its citizens. And year after year, for almost two decades, Israel has been held responsible for all the problems in the region because it has been unable to achieve a lasting peace with the terrorists.

Only a few weeks before the rioting in the region started, American diplomats and journalists were being told by Arab leaders that a solution to the Palestinian problem would stabilize the region (?). It would be interesting to go out into the streets of Cairo, Manama, Tripoli and Tunis to find out how many of the rioters would be willing to go home if there were a Palestinian state tomorrow. The answer would be none. Palestine has never been anything but a myth used as a channel for Muslim anger. Like Al-Andalus or the Mu-Pan-Li myth, (which Muslims use to claim that they were the first discoverers of America), Palestine feeds the Muslim ego and its sense of victimization. And like all xenophobic myths, its emotional teeth cannot be pulled by any amount of appeasement or concessions.

The reason Western intelligence didn't see this coming, and Israeli intelligence did, is that the West was successfully gulled and deceived by Arab leaders who insisted that the only real source of regional instability was Israel. And now even when half a dozen cities are burning, Western diplomats wrangle over a few Israeli towns and villages as if they were the real threat to peace. European leaders like Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron may be proclaiming the failure of multiculturalism, but they are still unable to stop pandering to it anyway.



Ceding towns and cities to the Islam has not worked out for Israel or for Europe. And while many Americans may not be aware of the Little Mogadishus and the Dearbornistans in their own country, the fruited plain and the purple mountain majesties set from sea to shining sea, are bringing forth mosques and terrorists out of the ground like thorns. The secular republicanism of France has faltered in the face of millions of angry Algerians and Moroccans. And Albion's bid for a multicultural New Britain has been overwhelmed by Pakistanis and Egyptians. Germany grits its teeth at the Turks and it is not the cold that sends shivers up Sweden's spine.

Israel is a convenient whipping boy for European leaders who know this can't go on, but also believe that it must. Their assents to denunciations of Israel by such solid UN citizens as Libya, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are acts of moral cowardice by men and women who would rather collaborate than lead. It is easier to condemn the settlements of Israel, than the settlements of Europe. Barking about the Jews of Judea and Samaria requires no courage, standing up to the Muslims of Birmingham, Goutte-d'Or or Essen does. Jews may write angry letters to newspapers, but Muslims lop off the heads of newspaper cartoonists.

And what goes for the millions of Muslims scattered across Europe, goes double for the billion or so Muslims of the globe. Western leaders have no clue what to do about the rush of events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. But they still know how to push the automatic 'condemn' button when it comes to Israel. These events have shown the impotence of the post-colonial Western order when it comes to dealing with the Muslim world. And faced with that impotence, the gaggle of politicians, diplomats, foreign policy experts and journalists who in a space of a month have proven that they know less about the region than any child, revert to the known. To the proven and failed methods that are safe, because they are useless.

As the Camp David accords, the original treaty that paved the way for all the others, is being disowned by Egypt's liberals, the push for a settlement goes on. A settlement with Mahmoud Abbas, who refuses to stand for elections, gets most of his money from America and is about as popular as Mubarak was in Egypt. That Abbas looks exactly like all the tyrants who are being overthrown across the region has yet to come up, because it's another of those inconvenient observations. The last time Condoleezza Rice pushed for democracy, Abbas nearly lost his head to Hamas. No one will be making that mistake this time. Instead Israel is expected to turn over half its capital and large portions of its country to a flimsy dictator who remains in power only by the grace of American assault rifles and an Israeli blockade of Gaza.

With the Egyptian peace treaty possibly going down in flames, Israeli leaders would have to be out of their minds to stake half their country on a deal with Abbas, an unpopular terrorist group's office boy. Signing an agreement with an Arab leader is like buying stock in a bankrupt company. And Abbas' stock is that of a telegraph company after the invention of the telephone. The only thing left to do is lay down the law, but a leader with the brass to do that is as hard to find in Israel, as in Europe. They exist, but are invariably treated as dangerous warmongering pariahs on every continent, when the real dangerous warmongers can be found shouting the Koran from the floor of every mosque. For the full article, see http://tinyurl.com/6zqjmqf