nlike the majority of Christians in the United States, Middle Eastern Christians are not going to live relatively peaceful lives. It’s true that our culture hates us, scorns Christian morality, and desires to usher in an age of the anti-good. After all, we are not greater than our master; we should expect the hatred of the world. Yet, the Christians of the Middle East have lived, and continue to live, in acute suffering, enduring hard and soft persecutions that we Americans cannot comprehend.
My Syrian friend, of whom I wrote a few years ago in these pages and who fled to the U.S. with her family, still can’t return to Damascus. Following the recent wave of violence, our Syrian extended family reported that members of the Islamist terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have given at least one Christian village the following message: “You have two choices: Either we move Muslims down from Idlib to take over the houses in the village owned by rich Christian expats who live primarily overseas, or you pay Jizya to help the homeland and ask the American government to lift sanctions against Syria.” Jizya is an Islamic tax that historically was levied on non-Muslims—but of course, what’s really going on here is extortion.
The population of these villages is entirely Christian—Syriac and Aramaic—and they have existed for generations before there was such a thing as the Syria we know of today. These people are part of the original Christian inhabitants who didn’t convert to Islam when the region was conquered by Muslims in the seventh century. These villages are peaceful, honorable people who only want to live and raise families in the land to which they belong. It’s hard to imagine what these communities are going through right now with HTS threatening to import Muslims to dilute and displace their population. This insatiable desire of Islamists to erase other ethnicities, cultures, religions, and civilizations is unfathomable to us Americans (and others in the West), which is why so many in this country refuse to believe it. Some call it a conspiracy theory or Islamophobia.
Read the full article at First Things