Jews and the Persecution of Christians

In a 
recent interview regarding America, Israel, and the wider Middle East, Malcolm Hoenlein, the
long-serving head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, spoke out unequivocally against the persecution of Christians
around the world and the West’s shameful acquiescence in the face of these
horrible crimes. Holding what is arguably the most senior leadership position
within American Jewry, for Hoenlein to have spoken out in this way is a
welcomed move on a much-neglected subject.

Given the Jewish experience
of persecution it is right and important that Jews should lend their voice to a
coalition calling for action to protect Christian minorities in those places where
they face attack. This is particularly pertinent when it comes to the Middle
East, once home to countless thriving Jewish communities, only for them to have
been decimated in the mid-twentieth century. With the rise of hardline Islam
and growing turmoil in many of these countries, Christians risk sharing a
similar fate.

During the course of his interview with the
Times of Israel,
Hoenlein touched on a wide range of foreign policy subjects raising the matter
of anti-Christian persecution during discussions of human rights in Iran. In
Iran, Hoenlein protested, “a Christian who is accused of proselytizing, which, in most cases, just
means practicing their religion, will be hung—and they hang them from cranes!”

Hoenlein’s remarks in the
course of the interview suggest that this was not simply another exercise in
hand-wringing over atrocities in far off parts of the world. Rather, it appears
that the chairman was making a heartfelt call for action by declaring:

The
White House—the whole Western community—ought to be taking action, as we would
against any country that engages in this kind of action. Look, overall the West
is muted in their response to the killings of Christians by the thousands, from
Indonesia to Nigeria to Tehran to Damascus. Where is the outcry? Christians and
Copts [are being killed] in Egypt, other countries—and hardly any response to
it.

When Hoenlein was pressed on precisely what kind of action
he is expecting he firmly insisted that “It has
to be an outcry, and sanctions, and there can be all sorts of actions taken to
demand that this be reversed. Where are the [United Nations] Security Council
resolutions? Why aren’t the condemnations coming from them? Even if it’s just a
message to them that people care.”

If trends continue in their current direction then the
ancient Christian communities of Iraq and Syria will soon be entirely
extinguished. A century ago, Christians constituted 20 percent of the
population of the Middle East; today, that number stands at just 4 percent. The
monitoring group Open Doors found that the murder of Christians around the
world doubled last year with 1,213 such killings in Syria alone, while in
recent years bombings and shootings at churches in Iraq and Egypt have become
ever more prevalent.

Malcolm Hoenlein specifically addressed why it is that the
U.S. and Europe have been relatively muted on this subject, and why these
events must particularly concern Jews: “This
really requires a concerted response. It cannot be tolerated. And, frankly, the
Jews seem to be the ones most outraged by it. . . . It’s shades of the past
that a world that is indifferent to such brutal actions becomes indifferent to
anybody’s suffering.”

No doubt it is in part that past which has
made Jews perceptively sensitive to recognizing when the predicament a minority
group is moving into dangerous territory. Of course, the deep Jewish interest
regarding events in the Middle East also contributes to this concern with
trends in that part of the world. As early as 1976, the Jewish scholar Bernard
Lewis, in his uncannily predictive essay “The Return of Islam,” sounds
the alarm about the future of the Arab world’s Christian minority.

There are, however, far more profound reasons
for why Jews and Christians should care about one another’s fate. Speaking at
the
First Things’ annual Erasmus lecture in October, former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained this point
eloquently. Having highlighted the plight of Jews facing rising anti-Semitism
in Europe, Rabbi Sacks moved to the matter of the assault on Christians
throughout the world. Sacks forcefully declared:

This is the crime against humanity
of our time. It is the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing. It is
deliberate, it is brutal, and it is systematic. And I, as a Jew, want to say
that I stand solidly with Christians throughout the world in protest against
this crime. And I am appalled that the world is silent.

The wider point that Sacks went on to make, is
that it is not simply the case that there is a Jewish minority facing
intimidation in Europe and a Christian minority in the Middle East facing
violent persecution, but that in a kind of synthesis of these two phenomena,
Judeo-Christian values and practices are under attack throughout the West,
including in America.

For the head of America’s Jewish community to
have come out advocating concrete action to defend the world’s Christian
minorities is no small thing. This call is right, not only because it seeks to
address the genuine humanitarian need of those at risk, nor simply because it
is expedient for Jews and Christians to cooperate in confronting shared enemies
and challenges. More importantly, Jews and Christians have enough shared
beliefs, texts, and values that they should know that when one of them is being
threatened, it is actually those principles that they both stand for in the
world that are really being put under assault.

Tom Wilson is a British-born writer and political analyst. He is currently a fellow at the Tikvah Fund in New York. 

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