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Christian numbers dwindling in Mideast
By Phil Webb
On March 9, some 40 people from the Catholic Jewish Action Committee, Colorado Council of Churches and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gathered at Denver’s Temple Emmanuel to hear Aryeh Green, director of MediaCentral, discuss the current plight of Christians living in the Middle East.
The event was sponsored by the Colorado chapter of the American Jewish Committee. MediaCentral is a Jerusalem-based organization that provides support for journalists based in or visiting Israel, the Palestinian territories and the region. MediaCentral seeks to promote fair, comprehensive news coverage of events in the Middle East.
MediaCentral’s mission is vital, Green said, because journalists have a challenging job researching and reporting the region’s news accurately.
To give scant attention to Christians in the Middle East, Green said, is a “dangerous” media approach. He noted that the Iraqi Church has declined to a few hundred thousand members from about 1.5 million before the war. Christians make up 40 percent of Iraqi refugees, a hugely disproportionate figure.
In Lebanon, Green said, decades of war and subsequent emigration have diminished the former majority Christian community to a minority. In the Palestinian territories, the Islamization of the Palestinian national movement, the Fatah-Hamas rivalry, and occasional anti-Christian attacks have provoked waves of Christian emigration.
Christians comprised 60 percent of Bethlehem’s population in 1992, he said. Today, they make up a mere 15 percent, with only a 2 percent Christian presence in all the Palestinian territories.
The ancient Coptic Christian community of Egypt, historically the largest in the Middle East, has also been reduced to a politically and socially weak minority, Green said.
Destabilizing factors in the Middle East run far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Green said. A widespread lack of basic human rights dominates much of the Middle East, he said, with widespread violations of freedom of speech, the right to assemble for a lawful purpose, education and literacy, a free press, the right to vote in free elections, the rights of women, and the right to freedom of religion.
Political coercion, intellectual repression and gender discrimination continue to shape a regressive environment that feeds extremism, Green said. Democratization and basic human rights are the antidote, he asserted.
Green was a policy adviser to Natan Sharansky, former deputy prime minister of Israel, for more than a decade and served as a senior member of Sharansky’s staff, where he was responsible for engaging civil society activists in the Palestinian territories and wider Arab and Muslim world.
Phil Webb is ecumenical and interfaith officer for the Denver Archdiocese.
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