Written by Robert Nicholson: ...What did you do on Saturday, July 19th? Catch a movie? Visit the beach? Host a barbecue?
Whatever you did, half a world away beneath that same summer sun thousands of Iraqi Christians were being purged from the city of Mosul and told never to return on pain of death. Carrying only the clothes on their backs, they fled from homes in which they and their families had dwelt since the times of the apostles.
Unfortunately this exodus is just one episode in a much larger tale of Christian depopulation in the Middle East. But it’s not the first, and it’s certainly not the last.
Things weren’t always this way. Contrary to popular myth, the Middle East has never been an “Islamic sea” stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a full twenty percent of the region was comprised of indigenous Christians – a community that had already been around for six hundred years when Muhammad’s warriors stormed out of Arabia and subjugated the African, Asian, Berber, and Semitic peoples who lived here.
Today, more than a thousand years later, Christians make up a mere five percent of the population and falling. The expansion of political Islam and its corollary, religious intolerance, has forced hundreds of thousands of Arabic-, Aramaic- and Syriac-speaking Christians to abandon their native lands just like a million Jews before them. Along the way, tens of thousands have been raped, maimed, and murdered under a naked desert sky — heartbreaking stories of injustice that will likely never be told...Continue reading...
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