Medio Oriente Cristãos

hey have paid a high price for hanging on. Christian Arabs constituted 20 per cent of the region’s population a century ago; today, they represent about 5 per cent, and falling.The remnant of the 2,000-year-old Christian population is being decanted from the Arab world.

It should be noted that since the establishment of Israel — the only state in the region to guarantee freedom of worship to all faiths and the only state to have outlawed racism — the Arab Christian population has increased by an estimated 2,000 per cent.

Never mind the ‘Israeli apartheid’ myths that flourish on Britain’s university campuses. What intrigues me is why Britain’s political and media classes, normally so sensitive to humanitarian issues, turn away in the face of the very real apartheid-style oppression that persists in the Arab world; why they remain silent as Christians are persecuted and the UN Human Rights Council, which last month endorsed the human rights record of Libya’s late Muammar Gaddafi, peddles its bizarre nonsense.

At least part of the answer can be found in the tendency of the British cognoscenti, in thrall to their colonial guilt no less than their need for oil, to infantilise Arab regimes. Arabs are not held accountable for their behaviour or responsible for their actions because this would contradict the script.

I once asked the Israel correspondent of the Times why he devoted so much space to Israel’s misdeeds and so little to those of the Palestinians. His response was succinct: ‘We expect more of Israel.’

There is a problem with that answer. To hold Arabs to an inferior standard, overlooking cruel excesses against a particular section of their own population and turning a blind eye to the antics of the UN Human Rights Council, carries the unpleasant whiff of racism.
Sectator