Mideast's Christians Losing Numbers and Sway

On the wane

A couple of days ago the New York Times published this sobering piece on the decline of Christianity in the Middle East due to the ravages of Islamic infidel-hatred in the region. It contains a number of sad demographic figures that deserve greater attention among the mainstream media and policy-making elites:

"A region [the Middle East] that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping."

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"A century ago there were millions of Christians in what is today Turkey; now there are 150,000."

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"The story has been similar in Iraq. Of the 1.4 million Christians there at the time of the American invasion in 2003, nearly half have fled, according to American government reports and local Iraqi Christians."

In almost every Islamic country, we can see regular examples of the persecution of Christians by Muslims. For example: Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

The source of this persecution is the sacralised hate enshrined in the Qur'an and related Islamic texts.

The NY Times article also contains some other telling nuggets of information.

"There is a house in Turkey where the Virgin Mary is believed to have spent her last days, yet the country’s National Assembly and military have no Christian members or officers except temporary recruits doing mandatory service."

According to traditional Islamic law, non-Muslims cannot hold authority above Muslims. On occasions that unbelievers have been given positions of authority, this has led to Muslim outrage and even mass slaughter. For example, in "tolerant" medieval Muslim Spain, 4000 Jews were killed in Muslim riots in protest against the appointment of a Jew, Joseph b. Samuel Naghrela, to the position of vizier.

"Many left early in the war when they were attacked for working with the Americans, but the exodus gained speed when Christians became targets in Iraq’s raging sectarian war. Churches were bombed, and priests as well as lay Christians were murdered. As recently as March 2008, an archbishop was kidnapped and killed outside the northern city of Mosul."

This article doesn't mention it, but Iraqi Christians have also been forced to make jizya payments on pain of death.

"In Saudi Arabia, churches are illegal."

According to Umdat al-Salik, a popular manual of Islamic law which has been endorsed as an accurate guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Egypt's Al Azhar University, Christians living in Muslim lands are "forbidden to build new churches."

The treatment of Christians - and non-Muslims in general, is one of the greatest human rights outrages in the world today. And yet, mainstream human rights organisations have said and done almost nothing about it.

What's also telling is that there is very little outrage from Muslims around the world over the hateful atrocities committed against other religious groups by their co-religionists in the name of their supposedly "tolerant" faith. They're too busy protesting imaginary Israeli "apartheid" and "Islamophobic" Danish cartoons.