Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians

[ellens]

Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, Disappointing Bishops
Oct 25, 2010
David P. Goldman
“Catholic Church: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews,” reads the headline on the Israel Today website. That is not quite true: At the just-concluded Synod of Middle East Bishops, a cleric from the tiny group of Melkite Greeks, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, made such a statement on behalf of the Melkites, not the Catholic Church.

The head of the same church, the Syrian-based Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, also attacked priestly celibacy before the Synod. He wasn’t speaking for Rome, either. Clerical marriage hasn’t helped the Melkites; they claim just 1.3 million members worldwide, fewer than the Korean Methodist Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea. Their actual numbers are much smaller.

The concerns of Greek Christians will fade before long, for in two or three generations there will be no Greek Christians in the Middle East, nor indeed Christians of any sort in the Middle East. Nor, for that matter, will there be many Greeks; with a fertility rate of only 1.37 children per female, one of the world’s lowest, Greece by mid-century will have a population two-thirds of which exceeds the age of sixty, and very little population at all by the end of the century. In a hundred years, modern Greek will be a dying language.

Israeli Jews, by contrast, have the highest fertility of any first-world population, and not only because of the fecund ultra-Orthodox; fertility among secular Israelis is far above replacement. By 2100, eighteen centuries after Constantine founded the Greek empire, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek....
______________________________

We had a very interesting discussion on this subject over at "On the Square." I thought it would be nice to bring this discussion over here for a more extended treatment, if there is sufficient interest.

There are many ways to approach this issue, but here is one question to contemplate. Given the current anguish in various Christian circles about the fate of the disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, and their - in my view - irrational attempt to blame Israel for their predicament, is there anything that THEY could have done in the past 100 years to change their apparent fate? Is Christianity going to disappear in the Middle East as a viable religious presence? Is the die cast and their fate written, as David Goldman claims? Could this fate have been avoided had key Christian communities, like the Palestinian Christians and Lebanese Maronites, allied themselves with Israel post-1948, rather than the Arab Muslim world, which now seems committed to their expulsion and extinction?

I have my own views, but would be happy to hear from others. I think the Christians in Palestine and Lebanon could have and should have aligned themselves with Israel, certainly after the 1967 War, when the decay of the Arabs was already very visible. This would have required an extreme degree of courage from their leaders (a rarity almost everywhere) and would have, even more so, required a drastic break with their past view of Jews. They were unable to accomplish either of these things, and have suffered seemingly irreversible decline with the pro-Arab accommodationist stand that they have actually taken. I know many Lebanese Christians in America who lament the path their leaders chose, but they are not living there and have no intention of going back. Were the Christians in the MidEast forced to align themselves with their Arab Muslim neighbors? Or did they do so mainly out of malice toward Jews and geostrategic blindness?

[charleston]

well, reading the comments at that On The Square site gives one a clue


ewwwwwwwwwww

[Frodo]

How could Arab Christians ally with Zionism? Arab Christians are Arabs rather than Jews so the Zionists don't want them in the land that they claim.

All this gloating from Zionists about how Christianity is disappearing in the Holy Land makes their feelings about Arab Christians quite clear.

[ellens]

"Arab Christians" - so-called, for the most part are not Arabs. This shows you how a dominant culture can brainwash a group of people reduced to dhimmitude into forgetting their own antecedents. To the credit of the Maronites and the Copts in Egypt, they will often privately emphasize how they predate Islam by centuries, if not millennia. The Chaldean Christians are not Arabs, neither were the Greek Orthodox originally. By way of contrast, the Jews of the Arab world never considered themselves Arabs. They viewed themselves as Arabic-speaking Jews. The Armenians of the Middle East view themselves as Arabic- or Persian-speaking Armenians, so it's quite clear who they think they are.

When you lose your cultural identity, you lose your ability to be independent. Once the Christians of the MidEast were convinced to call themselves Arab Christians in public, it was a sign they were resigning themselves forever to the status of dhimmis. Under the Ottomans, they didn't have a choice, perhaps. But in the 20th century they did, and they simply miscalculated.

Pierre Gemayel, the founder of the Maronite Phalange Party, explained way back in the 1950's, that the Maronites, while sympathetic in some ways to Israel, could not align themselves with it, because their economic future lay with the Arab states and the emerging oil powers. The Lebanese Christians were merchants, he reasoned, and in order to function as a bridge between the oil wealth of the Gulf and the wealth and technology of Europe/America, they had to keep good ties with Arab Muslims who had a pathological hatred of Israel. This view did seem reasonable at that time, and up through the 1990's. At that point, it ceased to be reasonable because the Arab states did not use their oil wealth to develop. They became corrupt, despotic, murderous, very unhappy societies in the perpetual throes of subversive activity by their own citizens. The Islamic counterreaction to secular Arab failure has made Christian survival in most of these countries difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, who needs Lebanese Christian merchants, these days? There are more than enough Muslim families now in the merchant business.

They would have been better off partitioning Lebanon into a smaller Christian state aligned with America (and France) and Israel, and protected by this alliance, while developing their economic capacities in other ways. The lure of great oil wealth was the siren song for virtually all the Muslims and Christians in this region, leading them to their current nonproductive state, where they live parasitically off of oil revenue, unable to produce anything other than that. Thank goodness that Israel didn't have oil or access to business with those societies. Instead it was forced to develop a high-tech economy that exports everywhere in the world today, except to the Arab oil states that are its neighbors. The Christians would have been better off pursuing this model and had the talent to make it work, but were too short-sighted to see the long-term dead end of Arab statehood.

[Michael]

I have known some Egyptian Coptic Christians, who have told me that, especially back in Nasser's time, many hoped that national unity would overcome confessional differences. No one believes that, now.

[ellens]

The situations of the Egyptian Copts and the Lebanese Maronites are particularly tragic because those two groups truly are the original populations that go back to the glory days of both Egypt and Lebanon. The Copts are mostly likely the direct descendents of the Pharoahs and Egyptians of that period, who later became Christians, which is what they claim. The Arabization of Egypt began only in the 7th century with the Islamic conquest, which also brought in later a lot of African slaves leading to a change in the physical appearance of Egyptians. Notice how the Copts have a Mediterranean European look, while many Muslims look partly African.

The Maronites descend from the original Phoenicians, most likely (as they claim) who were one of the earliest civilized peoples in the Middle East, known as traders and as having an alphabet. It was they who created the Lebanon mentioned in the Bible as the source of beautiful cedars and trading outposts. After the Arab conquest, Lebanon became a backwater, and only achieved some prominence starting in the 19th century as the result of Christian entrepeurialism and cultural creativity. The most well-known Lebanese person is Khalil Gibran, who was a Christian from Mount Lebanon.

Without the Christians, there is no hope for a cultural revival in the Arab world, as these church leaders vainly wish for. But, the insecure, shrunken Christian communities, terrified for their communal and individual survival, are no longer in any shape themselves to stimulate a revival. All the best Lebanese Christian writers now live in the West. Even Adonis, the Syrian Muslim poet who lived in Beirut for years and wrote all this Arab nationalist poetry that became standard fare in the schools, abandoned the Arab world years ago for Paris. He now writes scathing things about the condition of Arab/Muslim culture, as Spengler has cited on several occasions. He was their standard bearer. Imagine if Shakespeare left England to live in France and then wrote how horrible the condition of English culture was. It would be a real sign of something.

It is fair to say that the success of Israel created this gaping wound in the Arab psyche that has nothing to do with the reality of Israeli influence on their societies, which for the most part is zero (excepting the Palestinians and southern Lebanese). Most Arabs never meet Israelis or Jews in an entire lifetime. It is a sign of their decay, decline, impotence, etc that has disabled them psychologically. But, this doesn't elicit sympathy from many people these days (other than the crocodile tears of oil company executives trying to make money off of the Arabs). Great societies produce great leaders and find ways of reviving themselves. That is the definition of greatness, or even of adequacy. In WWII, England produced a Churchill. In the 1950's, after their defeat at the hands of 600,000 Jews in Palestine, who did the 18 states of the Arab world produce as leaders? Nasser, Arafat, later Khadafy, Saddam Hussein, Hafez el Assad, the Saudi Royal family, etc. No culture that produces that sort of leadership is going to go anywhere anytime soon.

[Michael]

Another Christian community, always small, but very ancient, are the Assyrian Christians, who include some of the last Syriac speakers. It is a dialect of Western Aramaic and of immemorial antiquity, spoken now in only a handful of villages. It is still used liturgically.

They split off from both Rome and the Eastern Ortodox in the fifth century. Both John Paul II and the present pope have taken a particular interest in them.

[Uche Africanus]

ellen wrote:

The situations of the Egyptian Copts and the Lebanese Maronites are particularly tragic because those two groups truly are the original populations that go back to the glory days of both Egypt and Lebanon. The Copts are mostly likely the direct descendents of the Pharoahs and Egyptians of that period, who later became Christians, which is what they claim. The Arabization of Egypt began only in the 7th century with the Islamic conquest, which also brought in later a lot of African slaves leading to a change in the physical appearance of Egyptians. Notice how the Copts have a Mediterranean European look, while many Muslims look partly African.

Dear ellen,

I do not mean to quibble but your statement above is not true. It is not supported by the historical records nor by any historian worthy of being called such. The black presence in Egypt was always there right at the beginning of that kingdom. Egypt is and was originally a black civilization that arose from the civilization that Ethiopians and Somalians - who are the precusors of Egypt's original population - created in Thebes.
http://www.varchive.org/tac/saktheb.htm

Thebes was the most important single city in the entire history of the black people. The history of black Africa might well begin at Thebes. For this was truly the ''Eternal City of the Blacks''...The foundation of Thebes, like the black state of which it was the center, goes back so far in pre-history that not even a general stone age period can be suggested...The blacks were also called Thebans, and all Upper Egypt [ie southern Egypt] was for centuries called the Thebald after its greatest city, Thebes, and its people, the black Thebans. The ''Thebald'' also referred to the city itself as the intellectual center of Black Africa, the chief seat of learning, of science, religion, engineering and the arts. Let us never forget the central fact about Thebes, not even for a moment. For if the Blacks had never written a single word of their past greatness, that record would still stand, defying time, in the deathless stones of Thebes, of her fallen columns from temples, monuments, and her pyramids; a city more eternal than Rome because its foundation was laid before the dawn of history, and its plan was that copied by other cities of the world. If the Blacks of today want to measure the distance to the heights from which they've fallen, they need go no further than Nowe (Thebes).

- The Destruction of Black Civilization - Great Issues of a race from 4500BC to 200 AD by Dr Chancellor Williams

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bits ... 010_MA.pdf

[Uche Africanus]

Ancient Egypt is the first major civilisation in Africa for which records are abundant. It was not, however, Africa's first kingdom. On 1 March 1979, The New York Times carried an article on its front page, written by Boyce Rensberger, with the headline: Nubian Monarchy called Oldest. In the article, Rensberger told the world that: "Evidence of the oldest recognisable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in artifacts from ancient Nubia... The discovery is expected to stimulate a new appraisal of the origins of civilisations in Africa, raising the question of 'to what extent later Egyptian culture derived its advanced political structure from the Nubians?'."
This ancient kingdom, generally called Ta-Seti, encompassed the territory of the northern Sudan and the southern portion of Egypt. It has sometimes been referred to as Ancient Ethiopia in some of the literature, and as Cush (or Kush) in other literature. The first kings of Ta-Seti may well have ruled about 5900 BC. During the time of the fifth generation of their rulers, Upper (ie, southern) Egypt may have united and became a greater threat to Ta-Seti.
In Kush (or Ta-Seti), a number of women had the title Kentake, which means Queen Mother, and was recorded in Roman sources as Candace. Some of the women were heads of state. Kentake Qalhata (c.639 BC) had her own pyramid built at Al Kurru, as other Kushite kings did (above photo). Pseudo-Callisthenes mentions that Alexander the Great visited "Candace, the black Queen of Meroe" in the 4th century. She was apparently a "wondrous beauty".

Copyright International Communications Oct 2006
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... n21399712/

[Richard Greene]

Caroline Glick's take on this issue> http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1110/glick110210.php3

[charleston]

Caroline Glick's take on this issue> http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1110/glick110210.php3

excellent and distressing

[Richard Greene]

According to the Center for the Study of Political Islam, A Self-Study Course on Political Islam, in the chapter entitled "Smyrna", Islam attacked the Christians of Smyrna (Turkey) in 1922. They annihilated the Christian community while the Americans and Europeans stood aside. Some things never change:

The war [WWI] had brought about new technology and a fusion between industry and government. A concept called Dollar Diplomacy was practiced. Trade and diplomacy became two ends of the same stick. To show how far this concept went, the American ambassador took the funds that had been raised by Christians to help the Armenians persecuted in northern Turkey and gave it to the Turks. When the Christians protested to the media, the media would not report it because of State Department pressure.

—CSPI, A Self Study Course on Political Islam, p. 2-76

The book asserts 190,000 Armenians were never accounted for...

[Michael]

According to the Center for the Study of Political Islam, A Self-Study Course on Political Islam, in the chapter entitled "Smyrna", Islam attacked the Christians of Smyrna (Turkey) in 1922. They annihilated the Christian community while the Americans and Europeans stood aside. Some things never change:

The war [WWI] had brought about new technology and a fusion between industry and government. A concept called Dollar Diplomacy was practiced. Trade and diplomacy became two ends of the same stick. To show how far this concept went, the American ambassador took the funds that had been raised by Christians to help the Armenians persecuted in northern Turkey and gave it to the Turks. When the Christians protested to the media, the media would not report it because of State Department pressure.

—CSPI, A Self Study Course on Political Islam, p. 2-76

The book asserts 190,000 Armenians were never accounted for...

That is true.

Moreover, in the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the only criterion used was religion, quite regardless of language or ethnicity - If you were Christian, you were Greek

[hoosiernorm]

I was hoping for a follow up "Putin for Pope!" essay, oh well.

[charleston]

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2010/1 ... itude.html

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010

Dhimmitude

Sandro Magister has drawn attention to the L'Osservatore Romano's publication on Friday of an eviscerated Italian version of the summary of the speech of Bishop Raboula Antoine Beylouni during the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops. (Rorate reproduced that speech two days ago.) According to Magister this speech's published form was heavily censored on the order of the Vatican Secretariat of State.

Below is the full text of the speech in English, with the equivalent portions removed by the Secretariat of State in bold:


For several years in Lebanon we have had a national committee for Islamic-Christian dialogue. There was also an episcopal commission from the Assembly of Catholic Patriarchs and Bishops of Lebanon entrusted with Islamic-Christian dialogue. It was recently suppressed to give more importance to the other committee, also because because it had not produced any results.

Sometimes dialogue occurs here and there, in the Arab countries, such as in Qatar, where the Emir himself invites, at his expense, personalities from different countries and from the three religions: Christian, Muslim and Jewish. In Lebanon the Télélumiere and Noursat networks, and other television networks, sometimes broadcast programs on Islamic-Christian dialogue. Often a topic is chosen, and each side explains or interprets according to their religion. These programs are usually very instructive.

With my intervention, I wished to draw attention on the points that make these encounters difficult and often ineffective. It should be clear that we are not discussing dogma. But even the subjects of a practical and social order are difficult to discuss when the Koran or the Sunna discusses them. Here are some difficulties which we have faced:

- The Koran inculcates in the Muslim pride in being the only true and complete religion, taught by the greatest prophet, because he was the last one. The Muslim is part of the privileged nation, and speaks the language of God, the language of Paradise, the Arabic language. This is why, he comes to dialogue with a sense of superiority, and with the certitude of being victorious.

The Koran, supposedly written by God Himself, from beginning to end, gives the same value to all that is written: dogma that supercedes all law or practice.

In the Koran, men and women are not equal, not even in marriage itself where the man takes several wives and can divorce at his pleasure; nor in the heritage where man takes double; nor in the testifying before judges where the voice of one man is equal to the voice of two women, etc...

The Koran allows the Muslim to hide the truth from the Christian, and to speak and act contrary to how he thinks and believes.

In the Koran, there are contradictory verses which annul others, which gives the Muslim the possibility of using one or the other to his advantage, and therefore he can tell the Christian that he is humble and pious and believes in God, just as he can treat him as impious, apostate and idolatrous.

The Koran gives the Muslim the right to judge Christians and to kill them for the Jihad (the holy war). It commands the imposition of religion through force, with the sword. The history of invasions bears witness to this. This is why the Muslims do not recognize religious freedom, for themselves or for others. And it isn’t surprising to see all the Arab countries and Muslims refusing the whole of the “Human Rights” instituted by the United Nations.

Faced with all these interdictions and other similar attitudes should one suppress dialogue? Of course not. But the themes that can be discussed should be chosen carefully, and capable and well-trained Christians chosen as well, as well as those who are courageous and pious, wise and prudent... who tell the truth with clarity and conviction...

We sometimes deplore certain dialogues on TV, where the Christian speaker isn’t up to the task, and does not give the Christian religion all its beauty and spirituality, which scandalizes the viewers. Worse yet, when sometimes there are clergyman speakers who, in dialogue to win over Muslims call Mohammed the prophet and add the Muslim invocation, known and constantly repeated: “Salla lahou alayhi was sallam”. (In ordering this sentence to be censored, is the Vatican Secretariat of State implying that it is acceptable for Christian representatives to call Mohammed the prophet and to use the aforesaid invocation -- which invokes peace and blessings upon Mohammed? Just asking. CAP)

Finally I would like to suggest the following:

Like the Koran spoke well of the Virgin Mary, insisting on her perpetual virginity and miraculous and unique conception in giving us Christ; just as Muslims take her greatly into consideration and ask for her intercession, we should turn to her for all dialogue and all encounters with the Muslims. Being the Mother of us all, she will guide us in our relations with the Muslims to show them the true face of Her Son Jesus, the Redeemer of mankind.

If it pleased God that the Feast of the Annunciation was declared a national feast day in Lebanon for Christians and Muslims, may it also become a national feast day in other Arab countries.
(H/t: Messa in Latino)