MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By George Weigel – “… The Hoover Institution Press at Stanford University recently published a short booklet by Dr. Malik [of the Lebanese American University] that should be required reading for anyone concerned with the fate of ancient Christian communities throughout the Levant, including the Holy Land. Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle East can be read in one sitting. Its brevity is an advantage: a concise mind and an accomplished pen distilling a vast amount of knowledge and experience into 68 pages. Let me try, with far greater brevity, to highlight several of the book’s key points.

1) Middle East Christians today have had two distinct historical experiences. One is an experience of freedom. The other is an experience of being a dhimmi, a second-class citizen existing on the sufferance of the Muslim majority in an Islamic state.

2) 90 percent of Christian Arabs live in conditions of dhimmitude today, including the Copts in Egypt, the Chaldeans and Assyrians in Iraq, and the Greek Orthodox and Melkites in Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. These are the Christians at greatest risk from Islamism and jihadism.

3) Christians who have been subjugated for generations have, over time, ‘lost all sense of what it meant to experience a life of true liberty.’ Thus they have developed a variety of survival strategies which, having been thoroughly internalized, now seem natural: kowtowing to authority; accepting benefactions from dictators like Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Assad dynasty in Syria; remaining silent in the face of atrocities committed against Christians by Islamists and other Muslims; blaming the current problems of Christians in the Middle East on that great bugbear, the State of Israel.”  Read more.