Lights Out for the Middle East’s Christians?

[Geee]

National Review:


Hosni Mubarak can count on at least one loyal supporter. Coptic Christian leader Pope Shenouda wants the anti-Mubarak protesters to stand down. He has two inarguable reasons to stick with the dictator: fear and experience.

Even if the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t take over, there is every reason to believe that a democratically elected Egyptian government will become more Islamist and more hostile to the country’s roughly 8 million Christians, who are overwhelmingly Copts. As a horrifying premonition, the Copts need look no farther than democratic Iraq, where the ethnic cleansing of Christians is still unspooling, slowly but inexorably.

It’s an irony almost too bitter to bear that George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian fired by a vision of freedom with religious overtones, waged a war of liberation in Iraq that led to the uprooting of the country’s Christians. And did almost nothing to prevent it, or even remark upon it. Iraq’s Christians are the collateral damage of the country’s post-Saddam revolution.

In a civil war, a small, defenseless minority hated by fanatics of both warring sides will not fare well. But even after the surge tamped down Sunni–Shiite violence, the war on Christians continued. One convent in Hamdaniyah in the north has been attacked 20 times since the start of the war, and as recently as last spring; according to USA Today, it was down to four nuns last year out of an original 55.