The West has blinded itself
to the suffering of Middle Eastern
Christians.
There is no shortage of protest for Palestinians, but only silence for religious minorities facing great persecution.
Benny Morris
23 March 2025 4:43pm GMT
During the second half of 1915, in a giant outpouring of empathy and generosity, many thousands of Americans, organised by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, donated millions of dollars to aid the survivors of the Muslim Turkish genocide against Asia Minor’s Armenian communities.
By the mid-1920s, more than £1.5 billion in today’s values had been raised to help the surviving Armenians and those still alive after the Turks went on to destroy the other Christian communities of Asia Minor, the Greeks and the Assyrians. Hundreds of American volunteers travelled to the Middle East and the Balkans to distribute food and set up orphanages, vocational schools and hospitals for the remnants of the once thriving Christian communities.
How times change. The slaughter, between 1955 and 2005, of up to two million black African Christians and animists in southern Sudan by Sudan’s Muslim Arab government – bent on Islamising and Arabising the territory’s non-Muslims – generated little interest or coverage in the Western world.
Slightly more attention, though no mass outpouring of aid or empathy in the Christian West, accompanied the slaughter of thousands of non-Muslims in northern Iraq during the 2010s by Islamic State, most of the victims Yazidi “infidels” as well as not a few Christian Arabs.
Perhaps the starkest indication of the disappearance of the Middle East’s Christians is the demographic evolution of Bethlehem, the city in Palestine (or the West Bank) where Jesus was born. The British Mandate census of 1922 registered 5,800 Christians and 818 Muslims (and two Jews) in the town.
In 1948 Bethlehem was still 85 per cent Christian. In 2016 only 16 per cent of the town’s residents were Christians, the rest Muslims. The town’s Christian population is today probably smaller still, given continued Christian emigration (and higher Muslim birth rates).
The steep decline in Christian numbers in the Middle East began with the Ottoman imperial and republican Turkish anti-Christian genocide, though what was to come was already augured in the large-scale massacres of Christians in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 by their Muslim and Druze neighbours and Ottoman troops.
Before 1894, the year the Ottoman government-ordered anti-Armenian massacres began, Christians represented 20-25 per cent of Turkey’s population. Today they represent less than 2 per cent.
The depletion in Christian numbers and the steady ejection of Christians from the Middle East was driven by the emergence of the anti-Western Arab nationalist movements and their conjunction with Islamic revivalism.
Islamist nationalists viewed the Christian imperial powers, mainly Britain and France, as mortal enemies and regarded the local Christian Arab communities as their potential or actual allies. In British Mandate Palestine, for example, the Palestinian “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939 against British rule and the Zionist enterprise was accompanied by the slogan “First Saturday (Sabbath), then Sunday,” meaning first we will smash the Jews, then the Christians.
Many Muslims suspected their Christian neighbours of harbouring pro-British sympathies. Later in Palestinian history, individual Christian Arabs, as if to compensate or allay suspicions, were prominent in the vanguard of nationalist militancy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a world innovator in airplane hijackings, was led by two Christian Arabs, George Habash and Wadie Haddad.
Such terrorist organisations were lauded by Leftists and even “liberals” in the West, who viewed them as ideological brothers in the struggle against Western imperialism and colonialism – and, more generally, regarded the Arabs as perpetual victims of the West. This mindset translated into indifference to the suffering of Christian Arabs.
These Leftists and “liberals” looked at Christian Arabs with suspicion, viewing them as projections of the Christian West and its values and possible abettors of Western political and military power.
Perhaps the root of the widespread Western indifference to the suffering and fate of Christians in the Middle East lies beyond the restrictive purview of religion or its absence. Perhaps ideas and ideologies, of any sort, no longer play a significant role in the lives of most people in the West.
Perhaps in the Age of Ideology, when socialism and communism flourished, the reality of an encompassing collective present and the prospect of a collective future, and a sense of class or national or racial brotherhood, were common coin. But in today’s West these are relics of a long-gone past.
And, of course, domestic political and economic calculations also come to bear when considering voicing a protest or calling for political or military intervention to save Christians in the Arab lands. Anger in your own country or neighbourhood may well lead to violence. The economic clout of Arab countries, significant in our age of oil and petrodollars, must also be taken into consideration when contemplating acts that may be painted as anti-Muslim or anti-Arab.
So Western Christians keep their peace in the face of oppression or even genocide in the Middle East – unless, of course, the victims happen to be Arabs, in which case the Western Christian conscience is quickly stirred to righteous protest and rhetoric, and even action.
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