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Are Christian Arabs an endangered species?

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National Times, 22 October 2013

Are Christian Arabs an endangered species?

From the onset of the Arab Spring in Syria, I was advocating a third way: unarmed dialogue, rather than the status quo advocated by the pro-Assad rallies or the forced regime change advocated by the armed rebels.

The more I listened to stories from those living in Syria, the more I suspected that the Arab Spring foliage was hiding some foreign seeds and foreign weeds. There was a disconnect between the factual testimonies and the fictitious tale. Many minorities, especially Christians, feared that a crude form of democracy would prevail: majority rules with no constitutional protection for the most vulnerable citizens.

But it was an uphill battle for me to find media space to question the Arab Spring goodies and baddies. “Sorry, we have no space” became shorthand for “sorry, we have no space for counter narratives”. If the Christians were declared an “endangered species” of animal, rather than the indigenous people, there would have been greater global outrage.

After all, the fishing bait that I was feeding to the media may have been bitter to swallow and my fishing hook was upside down in the shape of a question mark.

More than a decade after George W Bush’s divisive ultimatum, “Either you are with us with us, or you are with the terrorists”, it appeared that some still chose to watch a colour television in black and white.

Then I happened to be grounded at the airport. My plane had “something missing from its checklist” and could not take off. As I gazed out of the plane’s window, I had an epiphany that something else was grounded – me. After more than 20 years with more than 500 published opinion pieces, why was I still grounded at the same intersection?

A former editor once sniggered: “When will you stop beating the same racism drum?”
I replied: “When you stop beating the racist drum. When you stop, I stop.”

I looked at the wings of the plane and thought about the wings of my advocacy. Those who walked with me in the 1991 Gulf War had moved on. Those who walked with me in the 2001 War on Terror had moved on.

Many became disillusioned with this unpaid work. Some were fed up with being “fire extinguishers” that were rolled out every time Arabs behaved badly. Others became armchair advocates for the advocates, tweeting and emailing from their “clearing house” of articles by advocates. Many pursued creative paths by writing plays, writing poetry, writing musicals, writing PhDs or writing speeches.

I understood them, but still stood there. The perils of criticising fellow Christians when they are “Islamophobic” and criticising fellow Arabs when they are “anti-Semitic” come at a personal price.

But with the rise of so-called “Christianophobia” in Muslim majority countries, as warned by peace-activist Mother Agnes Mariam and British historian Rupert Shortt, it will be inspiring to see the rise of Muslim advocates defending the Christian “endangered species”. Just as many of those speaking out against Islamophobia were fellow Christians.

For too long, some sections of our media treated Arabs as a wild species to be contained and scrutinised in a test tube. But the irony was that some of us advocates were treating media editors like a school of fish without realising it. I wanted to inhabit their habitat and understand their feeding patterns so I could offer the right bait to catch the coveted “column”. But their feeding habits kept changing.

In the shadows of the Arab revolutions, there was an advocacy evolution. In the main streams of yesteryear, the bait had to be a proven “head” of a proven organisation with proven representation. But with global warming, the media mountains were melting and little islands were breaking away and sinking. The fish were migrating. They were more interested in immediacy than legitimacy.

Their food was literally “online” and they could feed from anywhere. As a free floater, my catch could no longer be fetched by casting one rod to one fish at a time. I needed to cast my net out wide.

After staring at each other through the barrel of the test tube for too long, editors and writers learnt that we swam the same turbulent ocean like little dots on a global page. We never said something so simple. “Let’s have a coffee” was code for let’s have a conversation. After all, coffee and conversation start with C which is an open circle, while Other starts with O which is a ‘closed circle.’

Joseph Wakim is the founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former multicultural affairs commissioner. This is an edited excerpt from his forthcoming book Sorry we have no space to be released this month.

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Christian Minorities an endangered species

http://bit.ly/12UGBmd

9 July 2013
ABC The Drum
CHRISTIAN MINORITIES AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Emerging democracies in the ‘Arab Spring’ may have claimed an innocent casualty: Christian minorities.

If the crudest consequence of elections is ‘majority rules’, then minorities need protection. Westerners who laud the ‘Arab Spring’ cannot have it both ways, waving the carrot of democracy with one hand while waving a big stick with the other hand if Islamic values prevail. While a constitution may enshrine safeguards, this depends on who constitutes the majority.

As protestor Dalia Youssef declared from Tahrir Square after the recent en masse toppling of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, “the voice of the majority of people in any country is democracy.”

The consequences of ‘majority rules’ haunts the original Middle East Christians since the crucifixion itself. When Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked the assembled masses to choose between two prisoners, the majority ruled that Barabbas be released and Jesus be crucified. Despite the injustice and the manipulations, the man on the throne merely washed his hands and turned away. The besieged Christians of the Middle East fear that this history may be repeating itself.

Those who live in majority Muslim nations are facing unprecedented fear and exodus as their churches and clergy are attacked. As a Maronite Catholic who was born in Lebanon, it astounds me that the birthplace of Christianity and the indigenous descendants of the first Christians are not afforded better protection, compared with Saudi Arabia and Israel. I have even been asked “are there still Christians in the Middle East?” It would be a tragedy if this was no longer an ignorant question but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The statistics are staggering: A century ago, one in five Arabs were Christian, whereas now they number one in 20.

The sectarian war in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion has halved the Christian population to less than 400,000.

In October 2006, Orthodox priest Fr Boulos Iskander was kidnapped, held to ransom, then beheaded in Mosul. Another 17 priests and 2 bishops have been kidnapped since then. The terror has culminated in the Al Qaeda-linked attack of Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean Catholic Church in Karrada in November 2010, killing more than 50 parishioners and two priests during a Sunday sermon. Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael declared that this attack was “an attempt to force Iraqi Christians to leave Iraq and to empty Iraq of Christians.”

In Egypt, Al Qiddissine (Two Saints) Coptic Church in Alexandria was attacked by suicide bombers as parishioners were leaving the midnight mass on January 1, 2011, killing 23 people. Another 13 Copts were killed in violent clashes after Shahedin Church was burnt south of Cairo in March 2011.
On September 30, 2011, the dome and bell of St George Coptic Church in Edfu were burnt to the ground. Hence, the 8 million Coptic Christians in Egypt have a litany of reasons to feel more vulnerable than ever in their own homeland.

The anti-Christian embers spread across the border to Libya, where a Coptic church was bombed near Misrata on December 30, 2012. Another Coptic church was attacked by armed Muslim militants in Benghazi on 28 February 2013.

In Syria, over 300,000 Christians have already fled in fear as foreign jihadists terrorise the ‘infidels’ in pursuit of a Salafist state. Saudi sheiks subsidise these salafists even though this US-ally has no churches to bomb as they are prohibited.

On April 22, 2013, two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped by armed men from Kafr Dael, a rebel-controlled area in Syria. Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church and Bishop Boulos Yazigi, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, remain missing. During her first visit to Australia last October, peace activist Mother Agnes Mariam declared that that the foreign infiltration of Syria harbors a “a hidden will to empty the Middle East of its Christian presence.” The sectarian strife is now spilling over from Syria into Lebanon, where Christians are already a shrinking minority of about 34 per cent compared with the last census in 1932 when they constituted half the population.

In his timely book ‘Christianophobia’, British journalist Rupert Shortt highlighted the plight of Christian minorities in seven Muslim-majority countries. He warns that the eradication of Christians from their biblical heartland may be a ‘blind spot’ for those who are distracted by the ‘Arab Spring.’ He posits that their persecution is magnified by anti-Americanism and the false belief that Christianity is a ‘Western creed’

Indeed, Christian minorities may have become scapegoats and held to ransom for the ‘crusade’ declared by US president George W Bush during the ‘war on terror.’ Many of the anti-Christian attacks in Arab lands have been ‘justified’ as revenge for anti-Muslim attacks by Christians in the West, such as Florida pastor Terry Jones who burnt the Koran in 2011.

It is the height of arrogance to laud Arab societies for ‘importing’ western ideologies of democracy, when in fact the new generation of Arabs have their own aspirations and ideologies. Ironically, it is the importing of ideologies of theocracy from US-allied Gulf states that has hijacked the pro-democracy uprisings, but rarely registered on the Western radar. Indeed, it is these ideologies of sectarian supremacy, rather than Islam or Muslims per se, that pose the biggest threat of extinction to the indigenous Christians.

If the Christian Arabs were an endangered species of whales, there would be collective outrage, rescue efforts and intervention by the International Court of Justice.

Joseph established the Streetwork Project for exploited children in Adelaide in 1986, was appointed Victorian Multicultural Affairs Commissioner in 1991, and founded the Australian Arabic Council in 1992.