But sometimes a footnote can help illuminate a tragedy's unhappy whole.

For decades, the Middle East's increasingly beleaguered Christian communities have suffered from a fatal invisibility in the Western world.

And their plight has been particularly invisible in the United States, which as a majority-Christian superpower might have been expected to provide particular support.

There are three reasons for this invisibility.

The political left in the West associates Christian faith with dead white male imperialism and does not come naturally to the recognition that Christianity is now the globe's most persecuted religion.

And in the Middle East the Israel-Palestine question, with its colonial overtones, has been the left's great obsession, whereas the less ideologically convenient plight of Christians under Islamic rule is often left untouched.

To America's strategic class, meanwhile, the Middle East's Christians simply don't have the kind of influence required to matter.

A minority like the Kurds, geographically concentrated and well-armed, can be a player in the great game, a potential United States ally.

But except in Lebanon, the region's Christians are too scattered and impotent to offer much quid for the superpower's quo.

So whether we're pursuing stability by backing the anti-Christian Saudis or pursuing transformation by toppling Saddam Hussein (and unleashing the furies on Iraq's religious minorities), our policy makers have rarely given Christian interests any kind of due.

Then, finally, there is the American right, where one would expect those interests to find a greater hearing.

But the ancient churches of the Middle East (Eastern Orthodox, Chaldean, Maronites, Copt, Assyrian) are theologically and culturally alien to many American Catholics and evangelicals.

And the great cause of many conservative Christians in the United States is the state of Israel, toward which many Arab Christians harbor feelings that range from the complicated to the hostile. Continue reading

Source

• Ross Douthat in The New York Times

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009.

Their action was reported by the Russian news agency Interfax, which also carried a Russian Orthodox statement that it "vividly indicates Russia's high authority in the Middle East, especially among the Christian minorities living there".

"It is for the first time since the Nativity of Christ that we Christians of Qalamoun living in the villages of Saidnaya, Maara Saidnaya, Maaloula and Maaroun are under threat of banishment from our land," said a letter from the residents to the Russian leadership and the Russian Orthodox Church.

"We prefer death to exile and life in refugee camps, and so we will defend our land, honour and faith, and will not leave the land on which Christ walked.

"The Christians of Qalamoun believe that the purpose of the Western-backed terrorists is to eliminate our presence in what is our native land, and with some of the most revolting methods as well, including savage murders of ordinary people," they added.

"We see the Russian Federation as a powerful factor of global peace and stability. Russia pursues a firm line in the defense of Syria, its people and its territorial integrity."

The letter adds: "None of the about 50,000 people — physicians, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs — who are willing to sign this application want to leave their homes. We possess all that we need, we are not asking for money."

Archpriest Nikolay Balashov, an official of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, said the granting of citizenship was "hardly possible from a judicial standpoint".

He said he believed the residents' action was guided by the intention to stress that "the Christians of the East have known for centuries that no other country would take care of their interests better than Russia".

Meanwhile, the leader of the Melkite Catholic Church, Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, has said more than 450,000 Christians have fled during Syria's civil war, out of a total Christian population of about 1.75 million.

Sources:

Interfax

Interfax

BBC

Image: Beliefnet

Now that women are having to cover up with the abaya, or at least keep a veil handy when they venture out, just in case (something previously inconceivable in Syria), now the press is reporting the establishment of sharia courts which, according to the Washington Post, pass sentences "daily and indiscriminately" on Christians and anyone else who violates precepts of Wahhabi Islam.

Now that the economy has been brought to its knees by the widespread destruction and looting of stores and workshops; now that famine is at hand in the city of Aleppo, and foodstuffs are to be had only at enormous prices; now that the terrorists have reached Homs and Aleppo and the mountains above Damascus—now at last the press seems to have stopped describing the rebels' fight as a high-minded struggle for "freedom."

Syrian culture used to be distinctive among the lands of the Middle East for a coexistence between Christians and Muslims which went beyond mere tolerant forbearance, a reality of which Syrians were proud. Under the iron fist of the ruling Alawite dictators, who kept fundamentalists at bay, a good degree of religious freedom was preserved. Christians fleeing persecution in other Middle East countries found refuge in Assad's Syria, including Iraqi Catholics fleeing post-Saddam persecution. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: Future Challenges