Exodus

[Valin]

Dispatches:

Michael J Totten

8/14/13

 

* My latest is a review of Samel Tadros' book Motherland Lost in the Wall Street Journal.

 

The Middle East is tough on minorities. After millennia of Jewish presence throughout the Arab and Persian lands, almost every country in the regionsave for Israel, of coursewas emptied of Jews in the last century.

 

Today it's the Middle East's Christians who are streaming out. In Lebanon, Christians made up a slight majority a couple of decades ago, but today they're down to barely a third of the population. Hundreds of thousands of Christians fled sectarian fighting in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and they're a minority now in the Palestinian city of Bethlehemthe birthplace of Jesus. But the most dramatic Christian exodus is out of Egypt. Since the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, the rise of Islamists and mob attacks have driven more than 100,000 Christian Copts out of the country.

 

(Snip)

 

Mr. Tadros, an Egyptian Copt who immigrated to the U.S. in 2009, makes it clear that the story of Egypt's Christians isn't one of relentless abuse. Copts have received both good and bad treatment at the hands of the region's succession of reigning powers. But mostly it's been bad. They were persecuted by the Roman and Byzantine empires long before the Islamic conquest in A.D. 639, after which they were cast as second-class citizens subject to additional regulations and taxes. Isolation from Christendom and survival in the face of adversity are etched into their soul. "Coptic history has been an endless story of decline and despair," Mr. Tadros writes, "but it has also been a story of survival."

 

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