by FRANKLIN LAMB
Iraqi Christians moving Church icons to presumed safety near Mosul. PHOTO/M. Jalloum
Malloula Village, Syria
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” are reputedly among Jesus’ last words on the Cross at Calvary. Today Christ’s words can be said to apply to all Christians in the Middle East who in this birthplace of Christianity are increasingly facing the most intense persecutions since the Roman Empire and the Bolshevik revolution.
As is widely known, Christians are being targeted in this region and pushed out of Christianity’s birth place of 2000 thousand years ago and there is no Richard the Lion Hearted on the horizon to protect them. According to some analysts in approximately twenty years Christians will be virtually extinct in the Middle East.
Today, Christians number fewer than four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people. They have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist ideology, and increasingly the victims of widespread institutional discrimination spreading today in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern governments.
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