Iraq's War on Christianity

Tim Rutten with the Los Angeles Times recently wrote “Iraq’s War on Christians,” and it’s a bit of an expose on the lack of response by the West to help those being persecuted in the East.

Here is an excerpt:

Putting aside America's particular culpability in Iraq, the West as a community of nations has long turned a blind eye to the intolerance of the Middle East's Muslim states—an intolerance that has intensified with the spread of Salafism, Islam's brand of militant fundamentalism. Our ally Saudi Arabia is the great financial and ideological backer of this hatred. In fact, when it comes to religion, the kingdom and North Korea are the most criminally intolerant countries in the world.

Additionally, Mr. Rutten discusses how churches established in Christ’s name are being pushed to the brink of oblivion in the very region where their faith was born.

Another excerpt:

Paradoxically, the one country in the Middle East whose Christian population has grown in recent years is Israel, where more than 150,000 Christians enjoy religious freedom. That lends a particular pathos to the way in which the current persecution of Christians mirrors that which destroyed most of the region's ancient Jewish communities following Israel's establishment in 1948. Iraq, for example, was home to one of the Mideast's largest and most vibrant Jewish populations, one that predated Christianity by many centuries. It was in the great Jewish academies along the Euphrates that the more authoritative of the two Talmuds was argued out and compiled after the Second Temple's destruction. All that was swept away in a wave of hatred, as were all but vestiges of the equally ancient Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and, more recently, Iran.

As one of the recent Christian refugees from Baghdad told the New York Times this week, "It's exactly what happened to the Jews."

I recommend taking a few minutes to read the full op-ed.