I understand that some Christians in the Muslim East have faced great problems.
First, they no longer have the protection once afforded them by the Great Powers of Europe, the same powers that pressured the Ottoman government to officially do away with — unofficially the system often remained in place — the Shari’a-sanctioned mistreatment, because it was unequal treatment, of its non-Muslim minorities.
Secondly, in order to survive they often had to take on, voluntarily, for protective coloration, the views of their threatening Muslim neighbors. Thus, when it came to Israel, many did not see the similarity in the treatment of Jews and Christians as dhimmis. Some did, such as Bishop Moubarac of Beirut, who spoke about the rightness and necessity for Christians in the Middle East to support the Jews, to support Zionism. His speech can be found in an appendix to Bat Ye’or’s Islam and Dhimmitude and it may also be retrievable online (I may have put it up myself — just can’t remember).
Thirdly, there are those Christian Arabs, especially among those who live among and consider themselves to be so-called “Palestinian” Arabs, for whom the pressure, explicit and implied, of Muslims watching their every move compels them to make themselves as useful to the Lesser Jihad as possible. They feel that their identity as Arabs, the Arabness or ‘Uruba of their being, requires them to support, and defend, and protect Islam — for Islam and Arabness reinforce one another. Islam, after all, is a vehicle for Arab cultural, linguistic, and other forms of imperialism.
Yet in the free and still non-Muslim West, Christians, including “Palestinian” Christians, should try to think through — if they can — the real nature of the war on Israel, and the real nature of the war on them, the Christian Arabs. They may consider why, despite all that Naim Ateek and Hanan Ashrawi and assorted “Palestinian” Christians have done, the only future for those Christians in the Middle East is in Israel, protected by and guarded by, the Jewish state. And in Lebanon, if Lebanon could once again achieve a Christian majority — if the Christians could leave Iraq en masse and re-settle in Lebanon as a Christian Zion.
And meanwhile, the Alawite military caste in Syria might be persuaded by the Western powers to stop trying to curry favor with Sunni Arabs by letting them travel freely to Iraq to conduct Jihad against the “Rafidite dogs” of the Shi’a as well as against the Infidel American troops. They might also persuade them to stop trying to curry favor with the Shi’a by allowing the transfer of Iranian weaponry and money to Hizballah in Lebanon.
There are all kinds of islamochristians. Archbishiop Cappucci, who stole icons from churches in order to help buy guns for the PLO, was Catholic — and was subsequently freed in a deal with the Vatican, which deal was not observed, for Cappucci continued to make political statements. Also Catholic is Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. He’s one more shill for the Muslim Arabs and the “Palestinian” cause that disguises the Lesser Jihad. Naim Ateek may be a Protestant, and so may Hanan Ashrawi. In this country, among the Presbyterians, a “Palestinian” islamochristian who has obtained American citizenship and is now a minister has risen high in the bureaucracy. He helped to push that anti-Israel declaration that was issued a year or two ago by that same bureaucracy. That bureaucracy is full of those who appear to have much more interest and sympathy in the “Palestinian” cause of Jihad than they do in the mistreatment of Arabic-speaking Christians.
Maronites, on the whole, and Copts, if they are safely in the West, tend not to exhibit this “islamochristian” behavior. And more and more Arabic-speaking Christians when they get to the West are less inclined than they would have been a few years ago to exhibit this behavior. This may be because now their mistreatment by Muslims is obvious, and known in the West, and connects to the larger Muslim threat. It is much more difficult to keep up the pretense that the PLO, that the Muslims, are just swell, and it is the Israelis who have come along to spoil everything.
At this point, those Christian Arab refugees who flee Islam for the freedom of Bilad al-kufr, but who nonetheless continue to harbor and express islamochristian sentiments, are not deserving of sympathy. They should be regarded with the same wariness that one should regard all collaborators of and supporters of any part of the Muslim agenda anywhere in the world. It is up to them, the Arabic-speaking Christians, to decide whether they wish to continue to be part of the support system for the very people who made their lives so difficult, and to weaken the Western world so that Muslims may expand their beachhead here — which merely means that there will be no further place for those Arabic-speaking Christians to go, and they will be in the same boat as all other infidels — or whether they will reintegrate fully into the Infidel world that has rescued them, and even offer, as a kind of recompense to their rescuers, aid in limiting the power and influence of Muslims by instructing the public in their own unhappy experiences and in what Islam is all about.