by Benny Morris, Telegraph
There is no shortage of protest for Palestinians, but only silence for religious minorities facing great persecution
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.
Slightly more attention, though no mass outpouring of aid or empathy in the Christian West, accompanied the slaughter of thousands of non-Muslims in northern Iraq during the 2010s by Islamic State, most of the victims Yazidi “infidels” as well as not a few Christian Arabs.
Perhaps the starkest indication of the disappearance of the Middle East’s Christians is the demographic evolution of Bethlehem, the city in Palestine (or the West Bank) where Jesus was born. The British Mandate census of 1922 registered 5,800 Christians and 818 Muslims (and two Jews) in the town.