THAT THERE IS A ‘HOLY WAR’ in the name of ‘God’ raging in the Middle East, the birthplace of Christianity, will not surprise most readers of this paper.
But a war needs two or more parties to fight against each other, whereas in this ‘war’, fanatics of one religion, Islam, are attempting to follow their holy book’s instructions by
religiously ‘cleansing’ Christians and Jews, starting in the Middle East.
Thousands of Christians have been erased from the statistics, suffering the same fate as Jewish communities in the Arab world. Political activist David Horowitz points out that Jewish communities in Arab lands which just half a century ago numbered in the millions have all been driven to the brink of extinction. “Communities that had survived for thousands of years have vanished from history. If not for the existence of Israel, the Jews who once lived there would have vanished, too.”
Christians are now suffering the same fate as the Jews, bearing out the truth of the Islamists’ slogan, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” to describe how they will first kill the Saturday worshippers, the Jews, then the Sunday worshippers, the Christians.
Since the state of Israel was born again in 1948, Jews have not been allowed to live in most Islamic nations. But Christian minorities remained – until recently.
David Horowitz says, “The global conquest envisioned by radical Islam depends on their disappearance. Now Christian communities’ suffering in the Muslim world is worse than ever before. Scholars estimate that every three minutes a Christian is being tortured there. In 2009 more than 165,000 Christians were killed in Muslim countries because of their faith.”
Figures show that numbers of Christians in Muslim lands have dropped by around three quarters. Speaking to Christians in Katowice, Poland, at the evangelistic campaign organised by David Hathaway’s Eurovision ministry this September, Eli Nacht, Advisor to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, brought sobering statistics.
“In 2010 in Egypt there were 4.1 million Christians; now there are only 93,000. In Syria there were 1,750,000 Christians – today only about 450,000. Iraq had 1,000, 500 Christians in 2010, but only 250,000 are left right now. They have been forced to convert to Islam, emigrate, or have just been killed.
“In the Middle East in the beginning of the 20th century, 26 per cent of the population were Christian; today it is less than 10 per cent. The only place in the Middle East where there has been a growth of the Christian population in the last 60 years is Israel! In 1948 there were 34,000 Christians in Israel – now there are 120,000. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where there is freedom of religion, with full civil and democratic rights for all its citizens.”
Melanie Symonds