By Nicola Nasser*
Suddenly, the U. S. - European alliance is acting to protect the "existence" of the Christian Arab minority against the Muslim Arab majority whose very existence is besieged and threatened by this same alliance, drawing on a wide spread Islamophobia while at the same time exacerbating Islamophobia among western audiences whom the international financial crisis is now crushing to the extent that it does not spare them time or resources to question the real political motives of their governments, which have been preoccupied for decades now with restructuring the Arab world geographically, demographically, politically and culturally against the will of its peoples with a pronounced aim of creating a "new Middle East."
Ironically this sudden western awakening to the plight of Christian Arabs comes at a time when all Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, are crushed by U.S. and Israeli military occupation or foreign political hegemony, but worse still when they are in the grip of a social upheaval in the very states that are by will or by coercion loyal to this alliance, where unbalanced development and an unemployment rate more than double the world average are pushing masses onto the streets to challenge the legitimacy of their own pro -" west governments. Exactly at this time, when Arab masses need their "social" unity for national liberation, sovereignty, liberty and freedom, a European campaign is being waged to divide them along religious and sectarian lines.
F rench President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who on Dec. 9, 2009 wrote in Le Monde defending a Switzerland vote banning Muslim mosques from building minarets and made a national fuss on banning less than two thousand French citizens from wearing Niqab -- said on Jan. 6 that he "cannot accept" what he described as "religious cleansing" of Arab Christians. His Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, wrote to the EU's foreign affairs baroness, Catherine Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response. France took the initiative to call a meeting of the UN Security Council last Nov. 9 to discuss international protection of Iraqi Christians. On Dec. 22, Italy's foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country was presenting a resolution to the UN to condemn their "persecution." Together with his French, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, Frattini wrote a joint letter to Ashton asking her to table the issue at the foreign ministers meeting on January 31 and to consider taking "concrete measures" to protect them. On Dec. 17, the German Bundestag passed a resolution defending the freedom of religion around tee world, but viewed with "great concern" the resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on March 25 last year against the "defamation of religions" because it "undermines the existing human rights understanding."
The European political reaction sounds excessively selective in its concern over an allegedly missing right of the freedom of religion of the Christian minority in a region where civil and human rights for the Muslim majority are missing thanks in the first place for the support the regional governing regimes, which confiscate these same rights, receive from the U.S. -" European alliance, and the European selectivity allegedly in defense of the "threatened" existence of the Christian Arab minorities speaks louder when it is compared with the deafening European silence over the threatened existence of the Arab and Islamic cultural identities of the majority, let alone the European incitement against both identities, a double standard that explicitly invokes suspicious questions about the credibility and sincerity of the European "rights" concerns and about the real political goals behind these pronounced concerns. For example, more than 300 mosques were attacked, some of them of a UNESCO World Heritage Center standards, hundreds of Muslim clerics were murdered, millions of Muslims were forced either to migrate internally or immigrate externally in the U.S. -" occupied Iraq, and the plight of Iraqi Christians has been and still is merely a side show of the overall destruction of the whole state there, but the European rights consciousness did not and still does not find it worth a similar call for defense and protection.
Unfortunately, this traditional European divide -" and -" rule policy in the Arab world, as it was the case for centuries, is today finding ample papal blessing from the Vatican to justify itself, not in the eyes of Arabs, but in the eyes of its own audiences. President Sarkozy's whistle blower cry this January 6 that Christians in the Arab -" Islamic world are victims of a planned "religious cleansing," came on the backdrop of the Vatican's Pope Benedict XVI repeated call on the world leaders to rise up for the protection and "defense of the Christians in the Middle East." It is a cry fraught with the connotations of the historical precedent of the Vatican -" blessed Fourth Crusade, which consisted mainly of a crusading army originating from areas within France and which was diverted from invading Egypt by sea to the sacking of Constantinople, the capital of the political and spiritual rival, the Orthodox Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Arab -" Muslim world belong, instead of "liberating" Jerusalem from Muslims.
Pope Benedict XVI's wilful or careless indifference towards exploiting his church concerns by "secular" politicians like Sarkozy to serve their down to earth goals, or towards exacerbating Islamophobia, which in turn fuels Christianphobia, is reminiscent of how the older Sarkozy -"type "Christ -" abiding" and non -" secular politicians concealed from the bulk of the crusading army a letter from Pope Innocent III, who made the new Fourth Crusade the goal of his pontificate, warning against the diversion of the crusade, forbidding any atrocities against "Christian neighbors" and threatening excommunication. In as much as the indifference of the crusader pope to carry out his threat had led to the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Muslims less than three hundred years later and turning the crusades into a war against the rival church more than against the Muslims, the indifference of the present day Pope Benedict XVI is threatening to counterproductively achieve the demise of Christian existence in the "East," which he has made, it seems, the goal of his pontificate.
Ever since the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, Arab Christians in the Muslim world have been wary of the messages and emissaries of Rome as a cultural spearhead of foreign invasion and hegemony. Even a Catholic loyal to the Vatican like the incumbent Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, had this to tell the Israeli Haaretz exclusively four days before Benedict XVI's "pilgrimage" to the Holy Land in September 2009: "The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here. One word for the Muslims and I'm in trouble; one word for the Jews and I'm in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences." Patriarch Twal's fears were vindicated last week when Egypt recalled its Vatican envoy for consultations over the Pope's remarks on Egyptian Copts: The "new statements from the Vatican" are "unacceptable interference" in Egypt's "internal affairs," the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement. Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed recently wrote that similar papal remarks were to the "fundamentalists .. a blessing in disguise."
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