Please, don't mention the Christians

These are trying times to be a religious minority in the Middle East, or along the fault line separating Muslim and Christian populations in Africa and the Far East. And things are getting worse. The Open Doors organisation estimates that 245 million Christians are at risk of violence and persecution, compared to 15 million in 2018. Last year, North Korea was called out for its mistreatment of Christians – today Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, China and (northern) Nigeria have joined its ranks.

Easter is a favourite time for Islamist jihadist groups to attack Christians. A pattern emerges of brutal anti-Christian violence: the Easter Sunday massacre by Boko Haram in 2012, the Peshawar church massacre in 2013, the massacre of Pakistani Christians in a Lahore park in 2016 by the Taliban.

The media don’t bother to join the dots. And while the 2019 Christchurch massacre of 51 Muslims by a far-right Australian hogged the headlines for days, the Sri Lanka massacres of over 200 Christians gleaned a fraction of the media attention.

Some Christians get none at all. Everyone has heard of the persecuted Muslim Rohingya, but, in the north of Myanmar, in the state of Kachin, Christians are being persecuted by the Buddhist majority.

As soon as the atrocities happen, a veil of silence descends, especially if the perpetrators are Muslim. Who can forget Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s tweets condemning the massacre of ‘Easter worshippers’? Please, don’t mention the Christians.

Why is this? Metropolitan elites in the West are discomfited by religion. Christianity is decidedly uncool. It was the religion of state of western colonialists and imperialists. Identity politics place Christians among the white and the privileged. Matthew Rees of Open Doors says that Christianity needs re-branding: most of its adherents are neither white, nor privileged, nor rich.

The Jews, too, have been pigeon-holed as rich, white and privileged, and they too are now facing unprecedented racism in western Europe. Liberal bien-pensants consider Israel a white settler colonial state. They seem to forget that half of Israel’s Jewish citizens were ‘ethnically cleansed’ from communities in Arab and Muslim countries which predated Islam. And now it’s the turn of the Middle East Christians. ‘After Saturday comes Sunday’ is an expression commonly heard in the Arab world, or scrawled as graffiti.

The Christians of the Middle East are widely misunderstood as agents of colonialism. It is erroneously assumed that Christianity was brought in to the Middle East by 19th-century missionaries.

It is true that the Western powers did champion Christian minorities in the Ottoman empire. But the Copts are the original inhabitants of Egypt and the Assyrian Christians of Iraq go back 2,000 years or more, and still speak the language of Jesus.

Chaldean and Syriac Christians have suffered grievously at the hands of Isis, and their population declined from a million and a half to 150,000. With Isis defeated, some Christians have returned to the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq. But a new menace looms: the Iranian-backed Shi’a are intimidating local Christians, grabbing their land and threatening their churches.

Those Christians who have applied to come to the West have found it exceedingly difficult to obtain visas. Canada and Australia have taken in some refugees. It seems that the UK has not accepted one Syrian Christian. Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian finally released after years of being held under sentence of death for blasphemy, was refused UK asylum as it was feared she was a security risk. Incredibly, belonging to a vulnerable faith is not grounds for obtaining asylum in the UK. The asylum record of the Trump administration is not much better, although to its credit it has poured money into rebuilding the traditionally Christian areas of northern Iraq.

Why do we not hear western Christians speaking up for their persecuted brethren? Apart from sporadic declarations by bishops, there are no mass demonstrations or expressions of popular interest. To speak up, some say, might make the situation of Christians worse, since they are treated as spies and western agents. This is a familiar argument to Jewish ears: when in the 1990s, the remaining Jews in the Middle East were scapegoated as spies for Israel, Jewish organisations in the West thought it wiser to say nothing, for fear it would jeopardise their chances of rescue.

So what can be done for persecuted Christians? Red Wednesday – November 27 – has been designated as a day to draw attention to their plight. In foreign policy negotiations, the West can still exert leverage over countries like Pakistan, which receives one of the highest sums in foreign aid. Trade talks with serial offenders can be tied to human rights.

There might still be room for morality in politics.