There’s been a lot of commentary about the Pope’s upcoming visit to the Middle East. The Pope has refused to be used for Palestinian propaganda. And the NY Times reports that while he’s in the Middle East he’ll be talking about an issue that concerns him.
There, Benedict is expected to make a speech calling attention to a pressing concern of the Catholic Church: the rapidly declining number of Christians in the Middle East. Although Christians have remained about 2 percent of Israel’s population since its founding, their presence in places like Bethlehem has decreased radically in past decades.
Left unsaid here is why the Christian population has been declining. Sure, implicitly, Israel gets some credit.
But if the Times is circumspect, the AP is not.
There were around 140,000 Arab Christians in the Holy Land in 1945, according to Palestinian sociologist Bernard Sabella. Today, there are around 160,000, compared to 7.4 million people who live in Israel and 3.8 million in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Christian population inside Israel has actually tripled since the country was founded in 1948, thanks to the relative stability and prosperity of Israelis overall, said Sabella, while noting Arabs still suffer discrimination in government employment and budgets.
But in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, where Palestinians are subject to an Israeli military occupation, the Christian community continues to hemorrhage people, he said.
AP just takes the claim that Christians are leaving because of the “Israeli military occupation” uncritically.
But that’s just not so. It isn’t just in areas where the Palestinian Authority or Hamas rule, that Christians are fleeing – it is all across the Middle East. In fact, in the Middle East there is only one country where the Christian population is increasing.
In fact, the Christian population throughout the Middle East has been in rapid decline. In 1900, Christians comprised 20 percent of the population of the Middle East; now, they are less than 2 percent. While the Muslim population has expanded rapidly in Europe and the U.S., Christians in the Middle East have experienced a negative population-growth rate. The only country noting a positive growth rate for Christians is Israel.
In Israel proper, the Christian population in 1948 was 34,000. Christians now number 146,000, or 2.1 percent of the total population. Projections are that by 2010 the Christian population in Israel will reach 163,000, reflecting an average yearly growth-rate of 1.9 percent. Among non-Jewish students in Israel, the rate of high school graduation is highest for Christians. Employment rates for Israeli Christians remain much higher than for their fellow believers in the Palestinian territories.
The New York Times didn’t have the courage to explain the reason for the Christian exodus from the Middle East. (The Times also makes a point of noting that Pope Benedict outraged Muslims a few years ago when he called Islam “evil and inhuman.” Failing to explain that Islamic intolerance was what was driving Christians out of the Middle East, fails to provide the requisite background for the Pope’s statement.) The AP was worse, outrageously blaming Israel for chasing away the Christians who are victims of religious persecution at the hands of Muslims.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
