Get religion or get lost
by David Landrum, Artillery Row:
In the early 20th century, the numbers of Christians in the Middle-East were reduced greatly by the “unremembered” Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides. At that time, roughly 10 per cent of people living in the territory called Palestine were Christian, including about 25 per cent of Jerusalem. Today, through a combination of Islamist violence and Israeli discrimination, Christians comprise about one per cent of the population of the Palestinian Territories. This persecution continues to receive little media attention. Often eclipsed by the periodic intifadas and border wars, it is occasionally profiled by a specific act of brutality such as kidnapping or a murder. My first encounter with the beleaguered Palestinian Christian community came in 2007, when I visited with a group of MPs following the execution in Gaza of the Bible Society bookstore manager Rami Ayyad. A trip which disconcertingly involved a missile attack while at the Erez checkpoint.
Following the savagery of “Operation al-Aqsa Flood” on 7 October and Israel’s bloody response, the attention of the world is once again on the Gaza strip. With Hamas atrocities excused and defended by angry mobs in Western cities, and with universities resounding to chants of “death to Israel” and “gas the Jews”, scenes of hitherto unthinkable antisemitism have surprised and appalled many. But not me. During my advocacy work for persecuted Christian minorities, I had long been aware of the “red-green alliance” of leftists and Islamists. Neatly dividing the world into oppressed and oppressors, both groups are characterised by the paradox of claiming victimhood while seeking domination.
As this intersectional confluence rolls on with evermore nasty protests, the prospects for peace via a two-state solution are slimming. With belligerent Iranian, Yemeni and Syrian proxies now being targeted by Israel, the prospects for regional peace and stability are also fading. Critically, although the spreading conflict has obvious political, economic, cultural and ethnic dimensions, in both source and nature – in both the “why” and the “how” it is being fought – it is religious. A fact which presents serious challenges for a secularly conditioned Western commentariat. With a few exceptions, journalists today are deeply religiously illiterate. Resenting the idea that religion still matters, or denying that the world is becoming more not less religious, their reporting is generally restricted to an atheistic worldview or motivated by fear of being violently attacked. For most mainstream media platforms and publications, this cognitive dissonance of reporting on things that are (often willingly) incomprehensible is well illustrated by the one-dimensional coverage of the evil perpetrated by Hamas.
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