<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Christian Arabs&#8217; Plight: Foreign &#8220;Protection&#8221; Counterproductive]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><img loading="lazy" data-attachment-id="8684" data-permalink="https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/christian-arabs-plight-foreign-protection-counterproductive/pnnbanner/" data-orig-file="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg" data-orig-size="600,96" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}" data-image-title="PNNBANNER" data-image-description="" data-medium-file="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg?w=588" data-large-file="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg?w=588" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-8684" title="PNNBANNER" src="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg?w=600&#038;h=96" alt="" width="600" height="96" srcset="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg 600w, https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/pnnbanner.jpg?w=588&amp;h=94 588w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></p>
<p>PNN &#8211; Palestine News Network &#8211; 12.01.11 &#8211; 15:21</p>
<p>By Nicola Nasser &#8211; Suddenly, the U. S. &#8211; European  alliance is acting to protect the “existence” of the Christian Arab  minority against the Muslim Arab majority whose very existence is  besieged and threatened by this same alliance, drawing on a wide spread  Islamophobia while at the same time exacerbating Islamophobia among  western audiences whom the international financial crisis is now  crushing to the extent that it does not spare them time or resources to  question the real political motives of their governments, which have  been preoccupied for decades now with restructuring the Arab world  geographically, demographically, politically and culturally against the  will of its peoples with  a pronounced aim of creating a “new Middle  East.”</p>
<p>Ironically this sudden western awakening to the plight  of Christian Arabs comes at a time when all Arabs, both Muslims and  Christians, are crushed by U.S. and Israeli military occupation or  foreign political hegemony, but worse still when they are in the grip of  a social upheaval in the very states that are by will or by coercion  loyal to this alliance, where unbalanced development and an unemployment  rate more than double the world average are pushing masses onto the  streets to challenge the legitimacy of their own pro – west governments.  Exactly at this time, when Arab masses need their “social” unity for  national liberation, sovereignty, liberty and freedom, a European  campaign is being waged to divide them along religious and sectarian  lines.</p>
<p>French President Nicolas Sarkozy &#8212; who on  Dec. 9, 2009 wrote in Le Monde defending a Switzerland vote banning  Muslim mosques from building minarets and made a national fuss on  banning less than two thousand French citizens from wearing Niqab &#8212;  said on Jan. 6 that he “cannot accept” what he described as “religious  cleansing” of Arab Christians. His Foreign Minister, Michele  Alliot-Marie, wrote to the EU&#8217;s foreign affairs baroness, Catherine  Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response.  France took the initiative to call a meeting of the UN Security Council  last Nov. 9 to discuss international protection of Iraqi Christians. On  Dec. 22, Italy’s foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country was  presenting a resolution to the UN to condemn their “persecution.”  Together with his French, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, Frattini  wrote a joint letter to Ashton asking her to table the issue at the  foreign ministers meeting on January 31 a<br />
nd to consider taking  “concrete measures” to protect them. On Dec. 17, the German Bundestag  passed a resolution defending the freedom of religion around tee world,  but viewed with “great concern” the resolution of the UN Human Rights  Council on March 25 last year against the “defamation of religions”  because it “undermines the existing human rights understanding.”</p>
<p>The  European political reaction sounds excessively selective in its concern  over an allegedly missing right of the freedom of religion of the  Christian minority in a region where civil and human rights for the  Muslim majority are missing thanks in the first place for the support  the regional governing regimes, which confiscate these same rights,  receive from the U.S. – European alliance, and the European selectivity  allegedly in defense of the “threatened” existence of the Christian Arab  minorities speaks louder when it is compared with the deafening  European silence over the threatened existence of the Arab and Islamic  cultural identities of the majority, let alone the European incitement  against both identities, a double standard that explicitly invokes  suspicious questions about the credibility and sincerity of the European  “rights” concerns and about the real political goals behind these  pronounced concerns. For example, more than 300 mosques were attacked,  some of them of a UNESCO World Heritage Center standards, hundreds of  Muslim clerics were murdered, millions of Muslims were forced either to  migrate internally or immigrate externally in the U.S. – occupied Iraq,  and the plight of Iraqi Christians has been and still is merely a side  show of the overall destruction of the whole state there, but the  European rights consciousness did not and still does not find it worth a  similar call for defense and protection.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately,  this traditional European divide – and – rule policy in the Arab world,  as it was the case for centuries, is today finding ample papal blessing  from the Vatican to justify itself, not in the eyes of Arabs, but in  the eyes of its own audiences. President Sarkozy’s whistle blower cry  this January 6 that Christians in the Arab – Islamic world are victims  of a planned ‘religious cleansing,” came on the backdrop of the  Vatican’s Pope Benedict XVI repeated call on the world leaders to rise  up for the protection and “defense of the Christians in the Middle  East.” It is a cry fraught with the connotations of the historical  precedent of the Vatican – blessed Fourth Crusade, which consisted  mainly of a crusading army originating from areas within France and  which was diverted from invading Egypt by sea to the sacking of  Constantinople, the capital of the political and spiritual rival, the  Orthodox Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Christia<br />
ns in the Arab – Muslim world belong, instead of “liberating” Jerusalem from Muslims.</p>
<p>Pope  Benedict XVI’s wilful or careless indifference towards exploiting his  church concerns by “secular” politicians like Sarkozy to serve their  down to earth goals, or towards exacerbating Islamophobia, which in turn  fuels Christianphobia, is reminiscent of how the older Sarkozy –type  “Christ – abiding” and non – secular politicians concealed from the bulk  of the crusading army a letter from Pope Innocent III, who made the new  Fourth Crusade the goal of his pontificate, warning against the  diversion of the crusade, forbidding any atrocities against “Christian  neighbors” and threatening excommunication. In as much as the  indifference of the crusader pope to carry out his threat had led to the  demise of the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople in the hands  of the Muslims less than three hundred years later and turning the  crusades into a war against the rival church more than against the  Muslims, the indifference of the present day Pope Benedict XVI<br />
is  threatening to counterproductively achieve the demise of Christian  existence in the “East,” which he has made, it seems, the goal of his  pontificate.</p>
<p>Ever since the Fourth Crusade sacked  Constantinople in 1204, Arab Christians in the Muslim world have been  wary of the messages and emissaries of Rome as a cultural spearhead of  foreign invasion and hegemony. Even a Catholic loyal to the Vatican like  the incumbent Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, had this to  tell the Israeli Haaretz exclusively four days before Benedict XVI’s  “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land in September 2009: “The thing that worries  me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here. One word for the  Muslims and I&#8217;m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I&#8217;m in trouble.  At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with  the consequences.” Patriarch Twal’s fears were vindicated last week when  Egypt recalled its Vatican envoy for consultations over the Pope’s  remarks on Egyptian Copts: The “new statements from the Vatican” are  “unacceptable interference” in Egypt’s “internal affairs,” the Egyptian  foreig<br />
n ministry said in a statement. Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed  recently wrote that similar papal remarks were to the “fundamentalists  .. a blessing in disguise.”</p>
<p>Pope Benedict XVI since  he occupied the papacy seat seems totally insensitive to the worries of  his representative in Jerusalem; he doesn’t seem short of words and  seems careful not to miss an opportunity to utter provocative  anti-Muslim pronouncements that place both his church clergy and  followers on the defensive among both their Christian as well as Muslim  compatriots. However, he places them in a more critical position by his  helplessness to find any words or an opportunity in his latest  torrential rhetoric about the protection of Christians and their plight  in Holy Land itself, where they have been victims of actual ethnic and  religious cleansing for more than sixty years now since the Palestinian  Nakba in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared independent on the  ruins of their homes.</p>
<p>From a regional perspective,  both Christian and Muslim, the very existence of Christians is  threatened, besieged and gradually cleansed by the Israeli military  occupation in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity &#8211; &#8211; where Christ  was born, spread the word of God, love and peace and crucified. The  papal silence on this simple fact of life is much louder in the region  than Pope’s pronounced appeals for the defense and protection of  Christians on the peripheries of the birthplace of Christianity, in  Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon for example, because when the center of Christian  gravity crumbles in Jerusalem, the periphery supports would not hold  for long and even the important St, Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican  would be a pale substitute, and the center of Christian gravity in  Jerusalem is almost totally Judaized, and is off limits to the  Christians both in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity as well as to  their brethren on the Arab and Muslim periphery, unless they are granted<br />
an Israeli military permit to visit, which is rare and very tightly selective.</p>
<p>Viewed  from Christian regional perspective, the papal appeals for their  protection could hardly be described other than contradictory, if not  hypocrite, particularly in view of a Vatican’s document in July 2007,  approved by Benedict XVI, which declared Catholicism as “the only true  church of Christ” and “other Christian communities are either defective  or not true churches.”  So, “what” Christians Pope Benedict is appealing  to defend and protect? A year earlier, Coptic Pope Shenouda III denied  there was any dialogue or contacts with the Vatican although thirty  three years before both sides agreed to form joint committees for  bilateral dialogue. With the exception of Armenian church as a late  newcomer but nonetheless an independent church, the Coptic, Orthodox,  Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac, Melkite and other Eastern communions have  existed and coexisted among and with Arabs since the earliest days of  Christianity, because they are Arabs either by ethnicity or by cu<br />
lture and they are the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Middle East and an integral part of the Arab society.</p>
<p>Islamophobia  is warning that Muslims are “returning” to Islam, but is it not top on  the agenda of Pope Benedict XVI to return Europe to Christianity? “We  must reject both secularism and fundamentalism,” the Pope said in his  annual address on Christmas Day, but is it not secularism that the Pope,  Europe and the U.S. are preaching now to de-Arabise and de-Islamise  Arabs? This double standard ironical western contradiction deprives  their calls for the protection of Arab Christians of whatever  credibility it might still have in the Arab eyes. Their “protection”  will prove counterproductive sooner or later. Christianphobia that fuels  anti – Christian blind terror is an already active byproduct.</p>
<p>The ‘Church of Islam’</p>
<p>Commenting  on the Synod of Middle East Christian leaders that convened in the  Vatican last October, the spiritual leader of the Melkite “Catholics,”  Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, Gregorios III, had this to say,  quoted by the Lebanese Daily Star last December: “The Synod for the  Middle East is a Synod for Arab countries, for Arabs, a Synod for Arab  Christians in symbiosis with their Arab society. It is a Synod for the  ‘Church of the Arabs’ and ‘Church of Islam’.” The adviser to the Muslim  Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, Dr. Mohammad Al – Sammak, who was invited to the  Synod, recognized the Arab identity of Christians in the Middle East:  “I cannot live my being Arabic without the Middle Eastern Christian Arab  .. They are an integral part of the .. formation of Islamic  civilization,” he told the Synod.</p>
<p>Politically and  religiously these Christians have been on the other side of the Vatican –  blessed old or modern western conquests, and politically and  religiously they have been all along protected by Arabs and Muslims,  otherwise they would not have survived. Their existence is now under  threat because the existence of their Arab – Islamic incubator is on the  line, besieged either by direct military occupation in Palestine, Iraq  and Afghanistan or by economic sanctions and political hegemony; their  existence was not threatened when the Arab – Islamic state was an empire  and a world power, nor was it threatened during the crusades despite  the atrocities committed by their western co-religious crusaders, which  would have invited a reprisal had it not been for the teachings of Islam  itself.</p>
<p>The U.S. – led world war on terror targeting  mainly Arabs and Muslims is perplexing western pro – law, peace and  human rights audiences by smoke –screening their governments’ military  adventures and modern crusades, which is the real action that created  terrorism as the only possible reaction expected by the overpowered  nations. However the invading creator and the created terrorists in  their bloody divide are smoke – screening also any possible resurface of  the forgotten Islamic covenants that protected the indigenous two  thousand – year old Arab Christians since the advent of Islam in the  seventh century. In the year 628 AD, a Christian delegation from St.  Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt’s Sinai, met Prophet Mohammad and  requested his protection. The Prophet granted them a protection charter.</p>
<p>Dr.  Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of  Delaware and a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and  Understanding, wrote this about the charter: “The document is not a  modern human rights treaty but even though it was penned in 628 A.D., it  clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of  work, and security of the person. A remarkable aspect of the charter is  that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its  privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required  to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they  do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any  duties! The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical.  They make the promise eternal and universal. By ordering Muslims to obey  it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future  attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable.” In the  year 631, Pro<br />
phet Muhammad received a delegation of sixty  Christians from Najran in the Prophet’s mosque in Medinah, allowed them  to pray in the mosque, and concluded the “covenant to the Christians of  Najran” treaty which granted them religious and administrative autonomy  as citizens of the Islamic State. In 637, Islamic Caliph Omar ibn al –  Khattab granted the similar “Covenant of Omar” to the Patriarch of  Jerusalem Sophronius.</p>
<p>However, neither Islamophobians  nor their terrorist Islamists have any interest but to dump these  Islamic ideological covenants for the protection of Arab Christians. No  Arab Christian fears for his life form his Muslim neighbor or his  government, but he or she definitely fears these two protagonists, who  are both foreign to his history and culture. No foreign protection of  Arab Christians could match the protection and solidarity they received  from their Muslim compatriots both in Iraq and Egypt following the  bombings of a church in Baghdad on October 31 and a church in Alexandria  on New Year Eve. In the latter case there were reports of Muslim human  shields to protect the Christmas religious celebrations of Egyptian  Christians, let alone the solidarity statements by both outlawed  Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya and the Muslim Brotherhood and the thousands of  police deployed for the same purpose, in a remarkable show of national  unity and historic coexistence.</p>
<p>The Organization of  the Islamic Conference (OIC), scheduled to meet in the UAE on January  19, will discuss the situation of Christians in member states, according  to Lebanon parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri. On this background, there  are also reports that Egypt will ask the Arab League economic summit  this month, to discuss foreign, and in particular western, interference  in Arab Affairs. European offers of protection are already backlashing.</p>
<p>The  only real threat to the existence of Arab Christians showed for the  first time when the European colonialism first, then the U.S.  imperialism, self – appointed western powers as their protectors. It is  noteworthy that in both the Iraqi and Egyptian cases the native  Christian Arabs are now paying the heavy price of the U.S. anti – Pan  –Arabism of both late Jamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Their  plight started with the forcing of pro – U.S. regimes in both countries.</p>
<p>To  describe the latest attacks against Christians as a plan of “religious  cleansing,” as President Sarkozy has done, suggests a persecution that  doesn’t exist; this is “not the case in the Middle East at the moment,”  it is “not supported by the wider community,” said Fiona McCallum of the  University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who is a specialist on the  Christian communities in the Middle East, adding: “It’s important to  also note that immigration takes place from the region from both  Christians and Muslims as well.”</p>
<p>* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.</p>
<p><a href="http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=9384&amp;Itemid=58">PNN &#8211; Palestine News Network &#8211; Christian Arabs&#8217; Plight: Foreign &#8220;Protection&#8221; Counterproductive</a>.</p>
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