A Christmas of Fear

"We love Christmas but this year it feels bitter. You sit somewhere and you're afraid; you go shopping and you're afraid; you go for a walk and you're afraid. Iraq has become a hell."

Christians, needless to say in the Middle East, long pre-dated the introduction of Islam. Yet within the Middle East, Christians have become an endangered species. Like Jews before them, Christians have lived in various countries of the Middle East for millennia. And Jews and Christians lived among Muslims, albeit as second-class residents, for an additional thousand years.

There are now scant few Jews living anywhere in Muslim-dominated countries of the Middle East, despite a heritage of Jewish life in Arab countries. With the creation of the State of Israel, Arab states disenfranchised their Jewish populations, and exiled them, first taking possession of their worldly goods.

A roughly equivalent number of oriental Jews were forcibly removed from Arab countries furious with the establishment of a Jewish state in their geographic midst, to those Palestinians who were convinced they should voluntarily and briefly leave 'Palestine', until the combined Arab armies vanquished the new state and returned the land to Arab Palestinians.

The culturally rich presence of Jews in Arab countries with their long histories and heritage was extinguished in a paroxysm of rage at the presence of a majority-Jewish state. Now, Christians within Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East have gradually been pushed to the edge of non-existence. They have been viciously targeted as 'infidels' for whom death is appropriate.

In Iraq death threats and violence and death itself has been visited calamitously on the half-million Orthodox Christian communities. Which represents half the number of Christians that existed there a decade earlier. Church congregations have suffered violent invasions by bomb-wielding Islamists who have splattered the walls of their churches with blood and gore, murdering priests, women, children and helpless men.

The Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Kirkuk, in view of al-Qaeda-inspired threats against the country's Christian minority has stated: "The Christians of Kirkuk will not celebrate the feast of Christmas this year, except for masses, which will not be held at night but at 10 a.m., after myself and 20 other Christian personages received threats from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq."

The Christian Church in Iraq did not come to the defence of Iraqi Jews in their time of need. For those who could speak out and did not also viewed Jews as their enemies despite having lived alongside the Jews for thousands of years. Those who might have used their moral outrage did not because they felt no moral outrage.

Now the fate that transpired to overtake the destiny of Arab Jews in Iraq has turned in the direction of Arab Christians in Iraq. The lesson, however, is lost in the ephemeral shadows of history and humankind's inability to recognize its moral duty to one another.