President Obama loudly proclaims his enthusiasm for democracy in the Middle East as he did in his second inaugural address:
“We will support democracy from Asia to Africa, from the Americas to
the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to
act on behalf of those who long for freedom.” But those lofty words ring
hollow when one surveys the plight of minority Christian communities in
the Middle East, which in the aftermath of 9/11 and the “Arab Spring,”
are increasingly besieged under the watchful eyes of so-called
democracies. President Obama is turning a blind-eye to the Christian
plight, perhaps due to a combination of arrogance and embarrassment at
how events turn out the opposite of his rhetoric.
The American enterprises to establish democracies with the use of
military force in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been blessings for
Christian communities in either country. Iraq has seen open warfare
initiated against the Iraqi Christian community leading to a mass exodus
of Christians from the country. Incidents like the bloody suicide
bombing in 2010 of Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, which killed
50 Christians and two priests, have terrified Iraq’s ever decreasing
Christian population. Iraqi Christians have been embattled by both
Sunni extremists linked to al Qaeda as well as discriminated against by
Iraq’s Shia majority, largely in control of the Iraqi government.
Iraq’s Christian population before the 2003 war was about 800,000 to 1.4
million has been reduced by the climate of fear to less than 500,000 today.
The Christian community in Afghanistan in comparison to that of Iraq
is miniscule. Afghanistan’s constitution, which was adopted in 2004,
“guarantees” freedom of religion. Alas, such is not the case. As reported by the New York Times,
Christians in Afghanistan today are compelled to worship in secret
least they be accused of apostasy for converting to Christianity from
Islam, a charge punishable by death. If Christians in Afghanistan suffer
so while the American military is still in country, the persecution is
poised to get even worse after 2014 when American soldiers are largely
gone.
The so-called Arab spring that began in 2011 has further tightened
the sieges against Christians in the Middle East. These are happening
in countries like Egypt and Libya that have had revolutions and profound
changes in government in the Arab spring, as well as in countries
swirling with the fallout of the Arab spring but have still managed to
hold on to their polities even in the face of violent domestic unrest
such as in Lebanon and the Gulf states.
The Muslim Brotherhood-dominated regime in Cairo is less willing and
able to protect Egypt’s sizable Christian Copt community than its
authoritarian predecessor Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian Coptic church in
Cairo was set ablaze by Islamists in 2011 and many Copts—an estimated
ten percent of Egypt’s 85 million people—live in fear that Egypt is on the path to an Islamic regime governed by Sharia or Islamic law.
The fallout from the Arab spring is still taking shape, but prospects
for increased violence against Christian communities elsewhere in the
region such as in Libya, Tunisia, and Syria are growing. Some observers
judge that the uprising in Syria has become dominated by Islamists,
who—should they gain power—would set out to persecute Syria’s Christian
community. About 300,000 Christian Syrians have already fled Syria and are now refugees.
Meanwhile, chaos has reined in Libya since the uprising against and
murder of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya’s small Christian
community—primarily Copts from neighboring Egypt—was horrified by the late December 2012 bombing of a church in Misrata.
The bombing killed two Egyptian Copts and raised alarm bells that the
Islamists were growing in power and influence in Libya and preparing a
wider campaign against Christians.
On the sidelines of the Arab spring, Christian communities also are
under siege. Some in Lebanon’s Christian community have put expediency
over religious beliefs and politically cooperate with the Shia Islamist
group Hezbollah, the most disciplined and well-armed militia in the
country and even more powerful than Lebanon’s national army. While
other Lebanese Christians are fleeing because they foresee the time
coming when Hezbollah fully controls the government in Beirut and makes
its dream of turning Lebanon into an Islamic state a reality.
Christians are now less than forty percent of Lebanon’s population
and Christians fear that their declining community will encourage
Muslim demands for increased political representation in Lebanon’s
government.
Christian Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continue to be
squeezed out of Palestinian society, economy, and land. The Christian
Palestinian community has been reduced to almost insignificance and lost
in the fray between the Israelis and the secular Palestinian Authority
and the Islamist Hamas Palestinians. The Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem worries
that the Holy Land is fast becoming a “spiritual Disneyland” with holy
sites as theme park attractions but empty of local Christians to
worship.
Over in the Gulf, Christians face a mixed bag of challenges.
Christian communities, especially among immigrate workers mostly coming
from Asia, are quietly able to practice their faith in the small, rich
Arab Gulf states. Qatar, for example, has allowed the construction of a
Catholic church—Our Lady of the Rosary—in the country’s capital Doha
that serves the 150,000 Catholics, mainly expatriates from Asia working
in Qatar. And in Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates,
churches are quietly seen as a way to encourage more expatriate labor to the countries.
The small Arab Gulf states, especially in Bahrain, have brutally
suppressed domestic unrest sparked by the Arab spring revolts in Tunisia
and Egypt for now. But should they succumb to street protests, the
successor so-called democratic regimes assuredly would not be as
protective of Christian communities in their midst.
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia still does not allow the construction
of a church in the kingdom to support its large foreign expatriate
communities. The Saudi regime bans open worship of faiths other than Islam
even though the number of Catholics in the country hoovers around
800,000 people, most immigrant workers from the likes of the Philippines
and India. Saudi talks with the Vatican for the establishment of a
church are nothing more than a grand diplomatic stall dressed-up to look
like serious negotiations. The Saudi royal family is unlikely to
confront the country’s Wahhabi religious establishment on which it
depends for political and religious legitimacy. The militant Wahhabis
would create a political-religious firestorm should the royal family
allow the construction of a church in the kingdom, which they believe
would desecrate the lands that spawned Islam.
The tightening siege of Christian communities in the Arab Middle East
comes on top of longstanding, and more recently intensifying, pressure
against Christian communities elsewhere in the greater Middle East.
These countries include Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. Iran since its 1979
Islamic revolution, for example, has steadily besieged its Christian
community. The Assyrian Christian population in Iran has decreased from about 100,000 in the mid-1970s to about 15,000 today. More than 300 Christians have been arrested by Iran’s Islamic regime
since mid-2010, churches operate in fear, and Christian converts face
persecution. Iran violently put down popular uprisings in the so-called
“Green Revolution” in 2009, but should the movement reawaken and
someday oust the Islamic republic, it remains to be seen how tolerant
Iranian society would be of Christian or other minorities in the
country.
Turkey, to take another example, often is hailed in the West as a
democratic success story in the Muslim world, and the government in
Ankara is routinely described in the western media as “moderately
Islamic.” But look more closely and one sees a steady erosion of
democratic rights of free speech in Turkey as evidenced by the
increasing imprisonment of journalists. Turkey’s regime too has seen
violent attacks against Christians. A Catholic bishop was stabbed to
death in southern Turkey in 2010, and several years earlier a Catholic
priest was murdered in a Turkish town along the Black Sea. Attacks like these raise concerns about the security of roughly 100,000 Christians living in a country of seventy-one million Muslim Turks.
Farther to the east in the greater Middle East, Pakistan competes
neck-and-neck with Saudi Arabia as one of the least tolerant countries
in the world for religious freedom. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws
increasingly are wielded more broadly and deeply against Christians.
Pakistani officials who have spoken against the imprisonment of
Christians under blasphemy laws have themselves been assassinated.
Christians only make up some two percent of Pakistan’s 180 million
people and that Christian minority is under growing fear of persecution and economic discrimination.
President Obama is fond of saying that Islam is a tolerant religion. As he said in his famous Cairo speech in 2009
that “…throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and
deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”
Obama has often repeated this assertion, and other American politicians
and world leaders have followed suit and made similar claims. The
repetition and echoing of a claim, however, does not make it a fact. As
we often teach our children, listen to what people say, but even more
importantly, watch what they do. A steely-eyed look at the greater
Middle East where countries have predominately Muslim
populations—whether they be Sunni or Shia Islam, be in north Africa, the
Levant, the Gulf, or South Asia—shows that Christian communities are
under unofficial societal, if not official government, sieges.
President Obama ought to look over his teleprompter to see that the
realities on the ground in the greater Middle East today bear little
resemblance to the words in his well-rehearsed speeches.
