Britannia Radio

The Forgotten Faithful.

I have been covering the Middle East for more than 40 years as a columnist and have written often about the plight of the region's Christian communities. 

I was therefore disturbed by the distorted cover story on the tragedy. Christian difficulties in the Arab world did not commence with the Crusades but rather  with the birth of Islam itself. Muhammed's faith has always rejected other faiths. 

The Prophet's  followers  preached that 'people of the book'-Jews and Christians- could be tolerated as second-classs, subjugated dhimmis. 

But they were never granted equality under Islamic  rule and over the centuries that preceded the Crusades communities of Jews and Christians were periodically forced into conversion.

Second,while the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to overheat the regional atmosphere,the  real pressure on Palestinian hristian Arabs as well as Lebanon ,Syria, and Iraq -stems from the heightened power and pressure of radical Isllamic groups, not from Israeli or American  policy.

In  Palestine Islamist thugs regularly force Christians to sell them their land and businesses- or simply seize them.No one doubts that  Israel's security fence/wall causes  hardships for both Christian  and Muslim. 

But nowhere  does Don Belt explain  that the divider exists as the direct result of Palestian terrorism. 

Nor does he point out another fact: While Christian  communities in the Arab world continue to disappear[the Christian population of Bethlehem has gone  from 90 percent to less than  25 percent; of Lebanon, from 60 percent to27 percent]  the  only place in the Middle East where Christian communitiesx are expanding is in the Jewish state of Israel, where since 1949, the number of Israeli Arab Christians has grown by an astonishing 345 per  cent.   

Richard Z.Chesnoff    

New York, New York