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Newsweek - Last Rites In The Holy Land?

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  • Newsweek - Last Rites In The Holy Land?

    LAST RITES IN THE HOLY LAND?

    Rod Nordland

    Newsweek

    The world's most ancient Christian communities are fleeing their
    birthplace.

    He refused to leave Baghdad, even after the day last year when
    masked Sunni gunmen forced him and eight co-workers to line up
    against a wall and said, "Say your prayers." An Assyrian Christian,
    Rayid Albert closed his eyes and prayed to Jesus as the killers
    opened fire. He alone survived, shot seven times. But a month ago a
    note was left at his front door, warning, "You have three choices:
    change your religion, leave or pay the jeziya"--a tax on Christians
    levied by ancient Islamic rulers. It was signed "The Islamic Emirate
    of Iraq," a Qaeda pseudonym. That was the day Albert decided to get
    out immediately. He and the other 10 members of his household are
    now living as refugees in Kurdistan.

    Across the lands of the Bible, Christians like Albert and his
    family are abandoning their homes. According to the World Council
    of Churches, the region's Christian population has plunged from 12
    million to 2 million in the past 10 years. Lebanon, until recently a
    majority Christian country--the only one in the Mideast--has become
    two-thirds Muslim. The Greek Orthodox archbishop in Jerusalem, where
    only 12,000 Christians remain, is pleading with his followers not to
    leave. "We have to persevere," says Theodosios Atallah Hanna. "How can
    the land of Jesus Christ stay without Christians?" The proportion of
    Christians in Bethlehem, once 85 percent, is now 20 percent. Egypt's
    Coptic Christians, who trace the roots of their faith back to Saint
    Mark's preaching in the first century, used to account for 10 percent
    of their country's population. Now they've dwindled to an estimated
    6 percent. "The flight of Christians out of these areas is similar
    to the hunt for Jews," says Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian author
    and expert on Islam, himself a Muslim. "There is no better example
    of what will happen if this human tragedy in the Arab-Muslim world
    is allowed to continue."

    Nowhere is the exodus more extreme than in Iraq. Before the war,
    members of the Assyrian and Chaldean rites, along with smaller
    numbers of Armenians and others, constituted roughly 1.2 million of
    the country's 25 million people. Most sources agree that well over
    half of those Christians have fled the country now, and many or most
    of the rest have been internally displaced, but some estimates are
    far more drastic. According to the Roman Catholic relief organization
    Caritas, the number of Christians in Iraq had plummeted to 25,000
    by last year. Of the 1.7 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria,
    half are Christians, says Father Raymond Moussalli, a Chaldean vicar
    who now says mass every night in a basement in Amman. "The government
    of Saddam used to protect us," he says. "Mr. Bush doesn't protect
    us. The Shia don't protect us. No Christian was persecuted under
    Saddam for being Christian."

    Over the centuries, the region's Christians have frequently made
    common cause with their Muslim neighbors. Leaders of some Christian
    factions even backed Hizbullah during last summer's Lebanon war,
    and Arabic-speaking Christians in the Palestinian territories
    have regularly sided with the Muslim majority against the Israeli
    occupation. Five years ago Palestinian militants found sanctuary from
    Israel's tanks inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. Nevertheless,
    old relationships are crumbling now. When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a
    medieval scholar's critical comments on the Prophet Muhammad, last
    September, furious Palestinians reacted by torching at least half
    a dozen churches on the West Bank. About 3,000 Christians remain in
    Gaza--many of them seeking new homes somewhere else. "We're living
    in a state of anxiety," says Hanady Missak, deputy principal of the
    Rosary Sisters School in Gaza City. Militants ransacked the school's
    chapel during the battle between Hamas and Fatah last month. Crosses
    were broken and prayer books burned.

    At least a few moderate imams are speaking out against attacks on
    Christians. "I ask the culprits to return to the Holy Qur'an and reread
    it," said Sheik Muhammed Faieq in a recent sermon at the Mussab Mosque
    in the Baghdad suburb of Dora, where jihadists have waged a cleansing
    campaign against Christians. "Forcing people to leave their religion or
    properties is contradicting Islam's traditions and instructions." For
    many in the Middle East, the admonition comes too late. "There is no
    future for Christians in Iraq for the next thousand years," says Rayid
    Paulus Tuma, a Chaldean Christian who fled his home in Mosul after
    two of his brothers were gunned down gangland style. His pessimism
    is shared by Srood Mattei, an Assyrian Christian now in Kurdistan:
    "We can see the end of the tunnel--and it is dark."

    With Kevin Peraino in Jerusalem, Salih Mehdi in Baghdad, Barbie Nadeau
    in Rome and Mandi Fahmy in Alexandria
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