I was recently told by my aunt in Baghdad that there was a widespread belief
among Iraqis that some external force was behind the protests and uprisings
across the Middle East. What outside conspiracy, I wondered, could be
responsible for the Arab Spring? Not to worry, however; George Saliba – the
Syriac Orthodox Church’s bishop in Lebanon – offers us a simple answer. In an
interview with Al-Dunya TV on July 24, Saliba declared that “the source...
behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils” in the
Arab world is nothing other than Zionism, “deeply rooted in Judaism.” The Jews,
he says, are responsible for financing and inciting the turmoil in accordance
with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These remarks are not an
isolated case among Middle Eastern Christians. The anti-Semitic trend has become
especially apparent in the aftermath of Iraq’s assault last October on the
Syriac Catholic Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, leaving 58 dead and 67
wounded in the worst attack on the Iraqi Christian community since
2003.
Two months after the atrocity, for example, the Melkite Greek
Patriarch Gregory III Laham characterized the terrorist attacks on Iraq’s
Christians as part of “a Zionist conspiracy against Islam.”
He further
affirmed, “All this behavior has nothing to do with Islam... but it is actually
a conspiracy planned by Zionism...
and it aims at undermining and giving
a bad image of Islam.”
He then said the massacre “is also a conspiracy
against Arabs and the predominantly Muslim Arab world that aims at depicting
Arabs and Muslims in Arab countries as terrorist and fundamentalist murderers in
order to deny them their rights, and especially those of the
Palestinians.”
While the patriarch has warned of the dangers of Christian
emigration and the formation of a “society uniquely Muslim,” he attributed the
risk of “demographic extinction” solely to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Similarly, in an interview with NBN TV on November 9, 2010,
Iraqi priest Father Suheil Qasha claimed that the Jews consider all gentiles to
be beasts, and asserted that the “real danger” to Middle Eastern Christians came
from Zionism. He went on to state that those who perpetrated the attack on the
church in Baghdad were certainly not Muslims, but probably those trained and
supervised “by global Zionism.”
Anti-Semitism extends to the Coptic
Orthodox Church, which, serving around 10 percent of Egypt’s population, is the
largest single church in the Middle East and North Africa. As liberal Egyptian
blogger Samuel Tadros points out, a certain Father Marcos Aziz Khalil wrote in
the newspaper Nahdet Masr: “The Jews saw that the Church is their No. 1 enemy,
and that without [the] priesthood the Church loses its most important component
. Thus the Masonic movement was the secret Zionist hand to create revolution
against the clergy.”
AT THIS point, many would no doubt be inclined to
explain away this anti-Semitism by pointing to the anti- Jewish sentiments that
are mainstream among the Muslim populations of the region. Living in such an
environment – the reasoning goes – Christians would naturally be careful not to
denounce deeply held convictions among their Muslim neighbors for fear of
provoking persecution.
However, the cancer of hostility toward Jews among
Middle Eastern Christians goes much deeper than that.
Indeed, it is
telling that other non-Muslim minorities that have suffered discrimination and
violence at the hands of Islamists – including the Yezidis, Mandeans and
Bahá’íshave never blamed Jews or Zionism for their persecution; their religions
have not featured anti-Semitic doctrines.
The case of the Bahá’í
community is especially important because, with the religion’s global center
located in Haifa, charges of collaboration with Israel can easily be leveled
against Bahá’ís. Yet the Universal House of Justice has never complained of a
Jewish/Zionist conspiracy against the Bahá’í communities in Iran and the wider
region. Rather, it has always rightly identified the problem as enforcement of
traditional Islamic law on the treatment of non-Muslims and apostasy, along with
the supremacist attitudes fostered by the promotion of
Shari’a.
Ultimately the malaise of anti-Semitism among Middle Eastern
Christians is entrenched in charges of deicide (i.e., of killing Jesus) against
the Jewish people as a whole. As Saliba put it, Jewish conspiracies are “only
natural” because the Jews repaid Christ for his miracles by crucifying him. In
particular, Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church lambasted the
Western churches for exonerating Jews for Christ’s death, in a televised
interview on April 8, 2007. He argued that Jews were “Christ-killers” because
“the New Testament says they are.”
It is clear that in general, the
Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs
repudiated by the Vatican in its Nostra Aetate declaration issued in 1965, after
the Second Vatican Council. If anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa
is to be eradicated, the burden of theological reform will evidently not be a
task for Muslims alone.
The writer is an intern at the Middle East Forum
and a student at Oxford University. His website is www.aymennjawad.org.