ICC Note: As the world fights poverty and global warming Christians face existential threat in the Middle East. There has been little mobilization on behalf of Christians facing immense persecution in the birthplace of Christianity itself. Christians in the Middle East now number at only 4 percent of the population. It is perhaps the responsibility of Christians living in the free west to advocate on their behalf.

07-30-2015 Middle East (Washington Times): The mainline Protestant churches in the United States, joined by Pope Francis, have shown great concern for many fashionable secular causes, such as eliminating poverty, promoting peace and promoting fear of global warming, but for Christians around the world under threat of persecution and annihilation, not so much.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Middle East, the birthplace of religious faith where some of the oldest Christian minorities and its faithful are savaged and forced to immigrate at the risk of their lives.

In its zeal to avoid accusations of Islamophobia, the U.S. State Department is not only content to leave Christians to twist, slowly in the wind, but in several instances to bar foreign Christian activists to come to the United States to bear witness to their faith. Sister Diana, an influential leader of Christians in Iraq, was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department though she had visited the United States on other occasions, the most recent trip only two years ago.

Christians in the Middle East — prominently including Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan — now number only 4 percent of the population, down from 14 percent immediately after World War II. More than a third of the 600,000 Syrian Christians have fled to friendlier places, some to the United States. Only a third of Iraqi Christians, 1.5 million of them in 2003, remain in their native homeland today. Many of Iran’s estimated half million Christians have been imprisoned, though Armenian and Assyrian Orthodox Christianity is technically tolerated under strict Shariah rules of subordination. In Pakistan, the tiny Christian minority is under siege from a new blasphemy law from Muslims who fear their religion cannot withstand competing faiths. Many government officials of moderate views have been assassinated; others have been imprisoned, some to languish there under neither charge nor conviction.

If this continues there will soon be no Christians in the region, except in Israel, where Christians are free to worship as they please.

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