Interesting Report on Christians in Lebanon

The unusual blog Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, has a very interesting article on the plight of Christians in Lebanon entitled The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon.

Consider a few excerpts...

I am not suggesting that all Western involvement in the affairs of the Near and Middle East over the centuries has been detrimental to the region's Christians. Far from it. However, the fact remains that the West's interaction with the Middle East was always designed to serve primarily the West's interests. This includes the Protestant missionary activities of the nineteenth century, which, after failing to make noticeable headway among Muslims, turned their energies to converting the local Christians to the creeds of Europe's great Reformers. Resulting tensions and mutual misunderstandings between the native churches and the newly transplanted Protestants linger to the present.

Meanwhile, the reputed tolerance of Islam, particularly for the "People of the Book," as Jews and Christians are designated, created in reality the dhimmi system of second-class servitude, which, under the guise of toleration, was actually a system of subtle repression and dehumanization leading to gradual liquidation.

...

Back in the 1970s and '80s it became disgracefully fashionable in Western policy and media circles to put down the Lebanese Christians, particularly the Maronites. These attacks often bordered on outright racism. Similarly today it has become fashionable to lay all the blame for the Bosnian conflict on the shoulders of the Serbs. If the priorities of certain Western governments and their policy planners (Washington included) have dictated that such one-sided obfuscations serve as the basis for ethically dubious policies, the priorities of self-aware and morally critical Christians in these same Western countries ought to be markedly different.

...

Western apathy. In the hard-nosed world of realpolitik, petroleum-free Lebanon does not amount to much either strategically or economically for a country like the United States. Injecting other human and value-oriented parameters and ingredients into the policy calculus of Washington that would elevate Lebanon on the scale of foreign-policy priorities is in itself an awesome and daunting undertaking requiring prayer and patient hard work.

Read it all here.