Great waves of heat but little light emerged from the controversies surrounding Pope Francis’ recent actions and statements about the Middle East. Each story followed the standard pattern of reporting about Pope Francis:

(a) Pope Francis does or says something.

(b) Secular reporters spin it to the greatest possible benefit of the nearest leftist cause.

(c) Conservatives react to (b) instead of (a) — and who can blame them? They mostly don’t read Italian or obsess about Vatican news.

(d) The Vatican issues a belated and confusing explanation, which appears only in the Catholic press, for a tiny readership.

(e) Some conservative publications accept (d), write about it and reprimand the media. Others don’t.

(f) The nearest leftist cause benefits from the perception of papal support, the whiff of infallibility, and the world moves on. Rinse and repeat.

Pope Francis is not entirely blameless. His sympathies do lean left on many issues, and conservatives have reason to disagree with some of his statements. That being said, two recent stories about Pope Francis and the Middle East are examples of the media pattern above. Pope Francis did not call Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas an “angel of peace.” He called on Abbas to become an angel of peace. That’s starkly different.

Yes, Pope Francis did finalize a process launched by previous popes, which culminated in a document that recognized the PLO entity as a “state.” This is a bad idea, but it’s the fruit of a complex history which one can’t understand without knowing a series of hard truths about the region. These are truths I’ve learned from years of study and from speaking to Arab Christians personally — during almost five years of attending a wonderful Melkite Catholic church in New Hampshire. I will simply list these hard truths, resisting the urge to moralize about them:

1. Christians in the Middle East are mostly hostages of intolerant regimes, dependent on the good will of their Muslim masters. Christians there are unarmed, divided and periodically persecuted as scapegoats for whatever is going wrong at the moment. This has been true for most of their history since AD 800 or so, with a brief respite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when European powers interfered with the Middle East, setting up colonies and fitfully protecting Christians. That all ended after World War II.

2. With the disappearance of their French and British protectors, many Arab Christians were suspect as agents of foreign influence, so they tried to fit in with their societies by promoting secular Arab nationalism, in the hope that this movement would replace intolerant Islam. The nationalist and socialist Ba’ath party, which once ruled Iraq and still rules Syria, was invented by a Lebanese Christian.

3. At the beating heart of Arab nationalism was opposition to Israel. Christians who signed on to nationalist movements hoped that by fervently fighting the “Zionist enemy” they could prove their patriotism, and win a space where they could survive. Some of the founding members of the PLO were Christians. Ironically, the genocidal, anti-Christian jihadists of Hamas were aided at first by the Israeli secret service, which hoped to divide its Palestinian enemy into warring factions. Oops.

4. Secular Arab nationalism was never very effective, and it began to collapse in the 1970s, to be replaced by Islamist sharia movements. Without the Soviet Union to back them, regimes like Hussein’s Iraq and Assad’s Syria became more brittle and fragile. These regimes tried to shore up their own shaky legitimacy by becoming more fervent in their support for terrorism against Israel. Saddam Hussein, for instance, while he mostly protected Christians, paid bounties for suicide bombers who targeted Jewish civilians.

5. The viciousness of such terrorist attacks hardened Israeli public opinion, and rallied American Christians to support more right-wing governments in Israel. These attacks also fed support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the proposed overthrow of Bashar al-Assad today. Of course, the collapse of such secular regimes would be terrible news for local Christians, since the only plausible replacement for them would be intolerant Islamist governments. We see that more than a million Christians were driven out of Iraq after the U.S. invaded. The U.S. did little to protect them.

6. Many American Christians don’t know and don’t care about the plight of Middle Eastern Christians. They are more concerned about American security and the defense of Israel.

7. Israelis don’t care much about the fate of Middle Eastern Christians, whom they see (with much justice) as just another bunch of Arabs who hate them. If they thought that American Christian support for Israel depended on its intervening to protect Christians, Israelis might do something in that direction. But it doesn’t, so they don’t.

8. Pope Francis sees protecting Middle Eastern Christians as his primary task in the region. Someone, somewhere, has to take an interest in them. If not him, then who? Pope Francis believes that championing a Palestinian state will buy goodwill from Muslims toward Christian minorities, and perhaps diminish the number killed or ethnically cleansed.

Pope Francis is probably mistaken, as David Goldman has pointed out. The only hope for Christians in the region is for American conservatives to put pressure on Israel to protect them, and on Middle Eastern Christians to give up on their support for dying Arab nationalism. But whether because they have succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, or for some other reason, too many Arab Christians actually prefer Muslims to Israelis. So they are unlikely to cooperate — as we saw from the event where an American Jewish philanthropist, Ronald Lauder, brought together the leaders of persecuted Middle Eastern Christians. Ted Cruz addressed them and in rather tactless language called on them to drop their Ba’athist strategy and support the state of Israel. They booed him off the stage. To his credit, Lauder has continued his humanitarian efforts to help persecuted Christians anyway.
The only short-term hope for Middle Eastern Christians is the survival of secular dictatorships like Assad’s in Syria and el Sisi’s in Egypt. The long-term future of Middle Eastern Christians is probably in the United States of America — if and when we revise our refugee policy to start accepting persecuted Christians instead of their Muslim persecutors. That won’t happen under a Democratic president — and unless we Christians wake up and defend our brothers, it won’t happen under a Republican president, either. Remember that the greatest catastrophe for Christians in the region since the Armenian genocide was while George W. Bush was president and Christian men like Chris Kyle were patrolling the cities of Iraq. (See “10 Hard Truths About Pope Francis, Mid-East Christians and the Palestinians”, originally posted HERE)

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