Christ First Forum

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As the various Arab revolutions have increasingly taken on an Islamic flair and become discriminatory against their Christian populations, some Israelis have tried to more closely identify with their fellow Bible-believers.

But an Arab Christian commentator warned in an article republished by The Jerusalem Post that the Middle East Arab Church is as much an enemy of the Jews as the Muslim fundamentalists.

Aymenn Jawad, a student at Oxford University with family in Baghdad, wrote that Arab Christians across the region are blaming the troubles brought on by the so-called "Arab Spring" not on the Muslims hijacking the pro-democracy uprisings, but rather on a "Jewish conspiracy."

Arab Christians in general view the current regional turmoil as just another chapter in the ongoing Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

In fact, according to Jawad, Middle East Christians (again, in general) believe that all of the deadly attacks on their own communities over the past decade were perpetrated by "Zionist forces" intent on sowing discord, and not by Muslim fundamentalists, even if all the evidence points to Islamic terror.

These are not just fringe accusations, warns Jawad, pointing out that major Christian figures in the Middle East have been repeating ancient blood libels against the Jews.

Contrasting the Arab Church's behavior to that of other religious minorities that have never blamed their own persecution on the Jews or Zionism, Jawad concludes that most Middle East Christians simply have not moved beyond the dark ages of Christianity, when the words of the Bible were twisted to demonize the Jews and turn them into the enemies of God.

"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," concludes Jawad. "It is clear that in general, the Eastern churches have yet to move beyond the noxious anti-Semitic motifs [previously] repudiated by the Vatican..."