Carta OpinionGlobal, 04.06.2017 Riad Saade, ingeniero agrónomo libanés, empresario y cónsul honorario de Chile en Beirut
The fate of the Christian Communities attesting the presence of Christianity in its Middle East birthplace, is almost never considered when analyzing its 20th century history and its latest 21st century dramatic wars. It is as if this issue does not figure on the political and war agenda of “Christian West”. When 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Turks starting 1915, none of the Christian European powers reacted to stop their genocide. Nor did any react to the Assyrian genocide where hundreds of thousands of Christians were killed or displaced by the Turks.
French and British colonial powers gave a break to such atrocities, until the Zionist movement executed its plan of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948. Most of the Christians of Palestine were thrown out and Chile was the major Western country to receive them. With the late forties, the oil rich kingdoms of the Gulf, mainly Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, started investing billions of petrodollars in propagating fanatic Islam around the world. The Middle East Christians were the first to be hit.
But the anti-Mid-Eastern Christians campaign culminated with the seventies’ campaign to remodel the Middle East. Since Black September in Jordan in 1970, through the dreadful war in Lebanon (1975-1990) the Iran Iraq war (1980-1988), the various wars on Iraq till 2003 invasion by a coalition lead by the USA, and through all wars initiated after 2011 Arab Spring destroying Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, the Christians of the Middle East, original inhabitants of this region, have been pushed out of it. The little who stay are admirable descent of the martyrs who died for their faith, but this will not bring much to what remains of the Christian West.
As an agronomist, I firmly believe that a tree that is cut from its roots, bears little fruits. Western Christianity is been cut of its birthplace roots with little caring. The Holy Land where Jesus lived will become a touristic museum with no more local Christians living there.
Christians have been the yeast that allowed Islam to flourish in Syria (Omayyad dynasty) and explode in Mesopotamia (Abbasside dynasty). Christians have through centuries, been the intellectual and economic development factor of this region. Whoever is eradicating them out of the Middle East has a clear agenda to weaken it, subjugate and tame it. The agenda of Israel has been clearly published since the eighties. The agenda of oil rich monarchies of the Gulf has been uncovered lately through their intervention in Syria supporting islamist terrorists.
Is the Christian West aware? For sure yes! Has the Christian West estimated the danger of losing the Mid-Eastern Christians? For sure no! The West is still to discover the wrong face of Islam, a wrong face that only Mid-Eastern Christians had lived, contained and would have been able to avoid acting the way we live it nowadays in London, Manchester, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and other places. And still the worse is to come even if PM Lady Teresa May has shouted today, “enough is enough”
Above are some food for thought while the following analysis I am sharing with you might shed some more light on the drama of the Mid-Eastern Christians
