How times have changed.  Today, the war in Iraq is far less justified, morally or strategically, than the Gulf War was; and yet, outside of Chronicles and Pat Buchanan, most “conservative” Catholics have supported the war unquestioningly. 

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And everything I wrote above applies in spades to “conservative” American Catholic support for Israel’s attack on Lebanon last July and August. ~Scott Richert

The title of this post might well be the chilling response one might hear from some American Christians of different confessions when they are confronted with the damage their government’s policies have inflicted on their Near Eastern brethren.  The entire sad, sorry tale of general American Christian indifference to our brethren in the Near East (with a few notable exceptions) reminds me of a remark I once heard in a conversation with an H-SC alumnus, who commented on the Christian Balkan nations: “It’s like they’re not even real Christians.”  (At least he did not preface this remark, as some of the faithful might, with lectures on the justice of fire-bombing civilian populations in WWII.)  The man might be forgiven for having bought into the drumbeat of pro-Bosnian Muslim propaganda that was called “reporting” during the 1990s, since there were very few sources of information that offered a different perspective, but the readiness of American Christians to disown Christians from other parts of the world struck me as particularly depressing.  Why should it be that many of those who claim to desire the Christianisation or re-Christianisation of America so much seem unfazed at the prospect of the de-Christianisation (and consequently still greater Islamicisation) of the Holy Land and the lands where Abraham and St. Paul walked? 

The readiness of more than a few American Christians, particularly conservative Protestants and Catholics, to throw the Christians of Lebanon to the wolves of Hizbullah and the destruction of the IAF (with bombs sent to Israel by the U.S. government) was just as appalling, if rather more predictable by that point.  Obviously, I was deeply moved by the plight of the Lebanese people, especially since Lebanon has represented one of the last redoubts of Christianity in the Near East, now more than ever.  Along with Syrian Christians (who make up roughly 10% of the population), the longsuffering Copts of Egypt and the hard-pressed, shrinking Palestinian Christian population, the Christian communities of Lebanon are virtually all that remain of what was once the fully Christian Orient.  If it has not actually been part of the design of U.S. policy to destroy these communities, the ruin of many of them has been the effect.  The decline of these communities under Islamic rule was obviously very great, but the modern decline has as much to do with our interference in the region.  You might at least have thought that in a country reputed to be among the more “religious” in the world (or so we tell ourselves as a way of pretending that we are much better off than the dying Europeans) and nominally still largely Christian there would be sympathy and concern for the travails of fellow Christians rather than indifference tending towards contempt.  You would be wrong to think that.