Christian winter

William Dalrymple has an insightful essay on the increasing repression of Christians in the Middle East.
 
Excerpt:

Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter. 

The past few years have been catastrophic for the region's beleaguered 14-million strong Christian minority. 

In Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has been accompanied by anti-Coptic riots and intermittent bouts of church-burning. On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Christians are emigrating fast as they find themselves caught between Benjamin Netanyahu's pro-settler government and their increasingly radicalised and pro-Hamas Sunni Muslim neighbours. Most catastrophically, in Iraq, two thirds of the Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam. 

It was Syria that took in many of the 250,000 Christians driven out of Iraq. Anyone who visited Damascus in recent years could see lounging in every park and sitting in every teahouse the unshaven Iraqi Christian refugees driven from their homes by the sectarian mayhem that followed the end of the Baathist state. They were bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and businessmen - all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings and assisted by the charity of the different churches.

"Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim," I was told on a recent visit by Shamun Daawd, a liquor-store owner who fled Baghdad after he received Islamist death threats. I met him at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus, where he had come to collect the rent money the Patriarchate provided for the refugees. "Under Saddam no one asked you your religion and we used to attend each other's religious services," he said. "Now at least 75 per cent of my Christian friends have fled."

Whatever leeway Christians in the Middle East had under the boot of the Religion of Peace is slipping away. The Islamist revolutions are drawing the curtain of Islamic totalitarianism over beleaguered religious minorities. Jews are already nothing but targets as far as Islamists are concerned, and Christians are heading into that category.

I think that our invasion of Iraq was a serious mistake, although I supported it at the time. We tipped that balance of power to the radical Islamists-- as evil as Saddam was, he was no Islamist. I believe that the "Arab Spring" is just a ridiculous idiot liberal phrase for an Islamic totalitarian awakening.

Islam is not the threat to mankind that Communism was, but it is a threat, and it must be confronted. I don't believe that military confrontation is generally the best choice, although Islamic military prowess is a joke. They are no match for the West in military conflict, and have not been since Vienna and Lepanto.

Islam, in conjunction with the boot-licking secular left, is an enormous cultural, political and demographic threat to the West.  I believe that a full-throated political, economic, and cultural confrontation of Islam by Christians is needed.

Christian culture is far superior in every way to secular and Islamic culture, and we need to say so unabashedly. And we need to fight for Christian culture with every peaceful means at our disposal.

Please pray for our Christian (and Jewish) brethren in the Middle East, in this time of great peril.