Mick Hartley

This last week from historian Benny Morris in the Telegraph – The West has blinded itself to the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians:

During the second half of 1915, in a giant outpouring of empathy and generosity, many thousands of Americans, organised by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, donated millions of dollars to aid the survivors of the Muslim Turkish genocide against Asia Minor’s Armenian communities.

By the mid-1920s, more than £1.5 billion in today’s values had been raised to help the surviving Armenians and those still alive after the Turks went on to destroy the other Christian communities of Asia Minor, the Greeks and the Assyrians. Hundreds of American volunteers travelled to the Middle East and the Balkans to distribute food and set up orphanages, vocational schools and hospitals for the remnants of the once thriving Christian communities.

How times change. The slaughter, between 1955 and 2005, of up to two million black African Christians and animists in southern Sudan by Sudan’s Muslim Arab government – bent on Islamising and Arabising the territory’s non-Muslims – generated little interest or coverage in the Western world….

The steep decline in Christian numbers in the Middle East began with the Ottoman imperial and republican Turkish anti-Christian genocide, though what was to come was already augured in the large-scale massacres of Christians in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 by their Muslim and Druze neighbours and Ottoman troops.

Before 1894, the year the Ottoman government-ordered anti-Armenian massacres began, Christians represented 20-25 per cent of Turkey’s population. Today they represent less than 2 per cent.

The depletion in Christian numbers and the steady ejection of Christians from the Middle East was driven by the emergence of the anti-Western Arab nationalist movements and their conjunction with Islamic revivalism….

So Western Christians keep their peace in the face of oppression or even genocide in the Middle East – unless, of course, the victims happen to be Arabs, in which case the Western Christian conscience is quickly stirred to righteous protest and rhetoric, and even action.

Unless the victims happen to be Arabs, and the perpetrators are Jews.

As I've said before….

Whoever's doing the PR for Arabs is doing one hell of a job. One of the darkest imperial expansions – across northern Africa as Islam was spread by the sword: ignored or downplayed, as only Western imperialism counts. Look at all those lovely mosques they built! The brutal history of centuries of slavery – black Africans dragged, chained, in camel trains across the deserts to Arabia, and the Barbary Coast raids on northern Europe: only the Atlantic slave trade counts.

And now, largely Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest. It's genocide, they cry.

Nice work if you can get it.