For Once ROSS DOUTHAT Writes the Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Last updated on: March 12, 2015 at 5:39 pm by Frank Schaeffer

For Once ROSS DOUTHAT Writes the Truth and Nothing But the Truth 2015-03-12T17:39:54-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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WHEN the long, grim history of Christianity’s disappearance from the Middle East is written, Ted Cruz’s performance last week at a conference organized to highlight the persecution of his co-religionists will merit at most a footnote.

ROSS DOUTHAT

The Middle East’s Friendless Christians

Senator Ted Cruz’s stunt at a conference on religious persecution has only increased his co-religionists’ isolation.

SUNDAYREVIEW | OP-ED COLUMNIST New York Times
The Middle East’s Friendless Christians
SEPT. 13, 2014
Ross Douthat

WHEN the long, grim history of Christianity’s disappearance from the
Middle East is written, Ted Cruz’s performance last week at a conference
organized to highlight the persecution of his co-religionists will merit at
most a footnote. But sometimes a footnote can help illuminate a tragedy’s
unhappy whole.

For decades, the Middle East’s increasingly beleaguered Christian
communities have suffered from a fatal invisibility in the Western world.
And their plight has been particularly invisible in the United States, which as
a majority-Christian superpower might have been expected to provide
particular support.

There are three reasons for this invisibility. The political left in the West
associates Christian faith with dead white male imperialism and does not
come naturally to the recognition that Christianity is now the globe’s most
persecuted religion. And in the Middle East the Israel-Palestine question,
with its colonial overtones, has been the left’s great obsession, whereas the
less ideologically convenient plight of Christians under Islamic rule is often
left untouched.

To America’s strategic class, meanwhile, the Middle East’s Christians
simply don’t have the kind of influence required to matter. A minority like
the Kurds, geographically concentrated and well-armed, can be a player in
the great game, a potential United States ally. But except in Lebanon, the..

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