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We Abandon Mideast Christians: They Fall Prey To Putin's Charms

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  • We Abandon Mideast Christians: They Fall Prey To Putin's Charms

    WE ABANDON MIDEAST CHRISTIANS: THEY FALL PREY TO PUTIN'S CHARMS

    Forbes
    May 9 2014

    Melik Kaylan, Contributor

    A chorus of deafening silence has greeted the May 7 public declaration
    of solidarity by American churches for Christians in the Middle East.

    Except for this item in Fox Fox News
    (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/05/07/american-christians-pledge-solidarity-with-persecuted-christians-in-egypt-iraq/)
    the grand gesture seems not to have caught the media's attention in the
    US or elsewhere. Why is there so little sustained concern for Eastern
    Christians, especially considering the horrors they've endured in
    their ancient homelands in recent years? Conversions at gunpoint,
    rape, murder, church-burnings, forcible marriages to Jihadists,
    abductions, torture, massive intimidation and expulsion. Why so little
    response? The answers are buried deep in the historical tangle of
    east-west geopolitics.

    The eternal polarities between East and West Christianity have
    suddenly become strategically relevant again. They endure,
    after all these centuries. They've been exacerbated anew. They
    explain why Mideast Christians are suffering without our help. The
    situation gives the West's opponents huge advantages in today's
    revived great power struggles. Earlier this year Syria's Christians
    called on President Obama to end his support for anti-Assad rebels
    (http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/30/syrian-christian-leaders-call-on-us-to-end-support-for-anti-assad-rebels/)
    . If you triangulate Putin's rise as champion of Orthodox Christianity
    and the plight of Christians in the Mideast and the role of the US
    in the mix, you get a startlingly fresh focus on recent geostrategic
    events.

    This is a hugely sensitive topic area, which might explain why it gets
    so little coverage - and will likely get me into all sorts of trouble.

    But no one else is going near it. It's a signal weakness of American
    media that it tends to look away from painful truths which might
    confuse the allegiance of its readers. The age-old Mideastern feuds now
    back in play between sects and faiths will seem remote to Americans
    but not to anyone else in a region where now again geography equals
    destiny. To some degree, the last century's 'isms'cloaked a lot of
    ancient divisions but they're back and our new millenium's 'ism' -
    namely globalism - seems paradoxically to make it worse.

    One should first note the scandalous mystery of why minimal attention
    gets paid to the Armenian tragedy unfolding in Syria. For a century,
    the city of Aleppo flourished as a haven for Christian-Armenian
    communities. Now, it has become a total warzone. You can imagine:
    caught between pressure from the Assad regime to remain loyal and
    pressure from anti-Assad rebels many of whom are extreme Islamists,
    Armenians have been fleeing in thousands to Armenia and Lebanon and
    Iran. The astute reader will instantly discern, from the geography
    just mentioned, why U.S. newsmedia finds the Armenian predicament
    so easy to bypass. Syria, Iran, Lebanon - these are not places that
    America feels comfortable about. Nor are they friendly to Israel. As
    for the country of Armenia itself, it has had to serve as Moscow's
    bulwark in the Caucasus against anti-Moscow pro-West countries like
    Georgia and oil-rich Azerbaijan. That's not something Armenians asked
    for. But the Kremlin's habit of stirring enmities in the region,
    then marching in to pacify them, has repeatedly forced Yerevan into
    Moscow's embrace. The Kremlin plays such imperial gambits in its sleep,
    having done so since Czarist times.

    The recent plight of other Mideast Christian communities largely
    echo the Armenian experience. Greek Orthodox, Syriac, Chaldean,
    Copt and others are suffering unprecedented adversity - maybe the
    worst since the Crusades. Considering the West's irruption into the
    Mideast in the new millennium you'd think the area's Christians would
    be having a golden age. But the fact is, the two poles of Christianity,
    east and west, never much liked each other doctrinally, never trusted
    each other or co-ordinated to any great effect. It seems preposterous
    to say, but the repercussions of the notorious Fourth Crusade by
    Western Christians almost a millennium ago are more than ever with
    us. Western crusaders occupied Greek Byzantium, destroyed its power,
    and helped usher in the Ottomans, ultimately giving Russia the role
    of protector of Eastern Christians. As Ottoman power waned from, say,
    1800 to WW1, Moscow acted as surety to Eastern Orthodoxy while Europe
    and America spent their civil society resources on missionary activity
    aimed at their regional coreligionists. That too did not endear them
    to local church fathers.

    If you think it's all forgotten history, think again. The 1990s
    Bosnia war essentially featured the three post-Byzantine forces in
    the Balkans - Serbia (Russia) vs Balkan Muslims (Ottomans) vs Croatia
    (Western European Christianity). The equation there has changed little
    since medieval times. East-West Christian enmity never went away.

    President Bush's ill-conceived invasion of Iraq quickly led to severe
    Muslim reprisals against Iraqi Christians. He had apparently neglected
    to prioritize their security in his calculations, which didn't seem to
    irk his host of evangelist supporters back home. You can imagine how
    much alienation all that led to once again between the two tributaries
    of the faith. Almost half the population of Iraqi churches emigrated
    from lands they'd occupied since biblical times. America's push
    for freedom in Arab countries ended up leaving Christians lethally
    exposed. In Egypt, the overthrow of long-time ally Mubarak - with the
    consent of the Obama administration - led swiftly to the torching of
    Coptic churches. The Copts are not especially grateful to America.

    English: Hama, Syria - a Greek Orthodox church of the entrance of
    Theotokos to the Temple. Slovenščina: Hama, Sirija - rimsko pravoslavna
    cerkev "Theotokusovega vhoda v tempelj" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Conversely, evangelical America in the modern era never liked the
    political choices of their Eastern cousins. In the main, the antipathy
    revolves around the advent of Israel but the issue has earlier roots.

    Arab nationalism, began as largely a phenomenon driven by Christians
    in rebellion against Ottoman rule. They were the ones who conceived
    of separate Arab national identities as preceding and superseding
    pan-Islam under the Caliphate. They believed in the entity of Syria
    rooted in Alexandrian times, or of ancient Mesopotamia as Iraq or
    of Egyptian identity going back to the Pharaohs. They, with Western
    educations, were the first to embrace the trendy modern secular isms.

    They were the first ideologues of the Arab iteration of socialism,
    fascism, communism and the like, indeed what became Baathism. Arab
    nationalism also fed Palestinian nationalism. Christians were very
    prominent among the earliest international Palestinian terrorists from
    the notorious George Habash to members of Black September who killed
    Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. (The operation was named
    "Ikrit and Biram" after two Palestinian villages brutally purged by
    Israeli forces during the country's birth pangs in the 1940s).

    Israelis have no sympathy for Arab
    Christians (here's an example of what I mean
    (http://www.debbieschlussel.com/43630/hamas-fatahs-christian-terrorists-meet-chris-al-bandak-of-the-shalit-trade/).

    All of which is to explain why American Christians in general,
    and evangelicals devoted to Israel in particular, have had trouble
    identifying with their counterparts in the Mideast.

    And look at the Middle East now. Putin and Assad have maneuvered to
    become the explicit protectors of Eastern Christianity in situ. Moscow
    is back as their shield and Orthodoxy's patron. He didn't sidle up to
    the Russian church in recent years purely for domestic reasons. He
    knew the unforgotten historical alignments just below the surface
    from Moscow out through the Balkans, through the Caucasus, past
    Turkey to the Holy Land. All he needed was a spate of Sunni jihadist
    assaults on Christians for which he could blame the West's chaotic
    freedom-mongering. His Shiite crescent from Tehran through Assad to
    Hezbollah can and do now posture as the champions of local Christians.

    As the US and Europe are too tangled up in ideological confusion and
    contradictory goals to step into the breach, we furnish Moscow with
    easy triumphs in this area as in so many others.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2014/05/09/we-abandon-mideast-christians-they-fall-prey-to-putins-charms/

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