Fillon is quite right, but by the time most Western leaders wake up to that, it is likely to be far too late. In fact, it is unlikely that they don’t know it now. They just have other priorities and goals.
“Former French PM: ‘The fate of (Middle) Eastern Christians is the prelude to our own fate.’” Capstone Report, December 19, 2019:
Former French Prime Minister François Fillon warns that persecution of Christians in Middle East is a prelude to ‘our own fate.’ Fillon was Prime Minister under former French President Nicholas Sarkozy (2007-2012) and was the Republican Party (France)’s nominee for president in the last election (2017).
“Together we know that the future of the West and the future of the East are intimately linked, and that the fate of Eastern Christians and other minorities is the prelude to our own fate,” Fillon said in a speech to a conference held in the French Senate chamber on the protection of religious minorities in the Middle East. (“Le sort des chrétiens d’Orient est le prélude de notre propre sort.”)…
“Among the many causes which are worthy of being defended—that of the Christians of the East has always touched me. No doubt because this cause has long been defenseless. It cannot be said enough how silent and cowardly the European states and their elites were in the face of the gradual disappearance of one of the oldest and most brilliant communities in the Middle East. Why again this cause? Because I am convinced that the decline of fundamentalism and peace for all requires freedom of belief and freedom of conscience.”
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“In the midst of all these errors, at the heart of all these storms, the Christians of the East were the hostages and sometimes the necessary accomplices of the harshest regimes, then the victims of the Islamists who promised them the coffin or the suitcase.”…