Christians are the most persecuted group in the world today, especially in the Middle East where ancient Christian communities are rapidly disappearing as a result of the rise of Islamism.

In countries such as Iraq, Syria and Libya, thousands of Christians have been murdered after being given the option to convert to Islam or be killed.

This is particularly true of Christian minorities in Iraq and Syria where the Islamic State and other Islamist terror groups have shown no mercy for those who refuse to convert.

As a result, two-thirds of the Christians in both countries have fled to Europe or to Christian nations around the globe.

In Iraq, for example, only 500,000 of the 1.5 million Christians who lived in the country in 2003 remain after the start of the Islamist insurgency that begin after the American invasion in March that year and that was followed by the rise of the Islamic State.

In other Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Iran, Christians have been subjected to harassment and kidnapping or have seen their properties damaged or destroyed by Muslim mobs or by representatives of the Islamist regimes.

Israel and Lebanon are the only countries where Christians are free to practice their religion and don’t face persecution, although the Lebanese Christian community is shrinking steadily as a result of Hezbollah’s control of the country.

The only country where the number of Christians is growing is Israel with a 158,000 member strong Christian community. Most Israeli Christians are Arabs and they form the best educated group in the country.

“Christianity (in the Middle East) is under an existential threat,” Democrat member of the U.S. House of Representatives Anna Eshoo, an advocate of Mideast Christians, told the New York Times in July 2015.

The number of Christians has now dropped below three percent of the Middle East population, down from 10 percent in the last decade of the twentieth century, a recent PEW report revealed.

This all begs the question of what can be done to turn the tide in countries with a diminishing Christian population and what Christian communities in the West can do to help their brethren in the Middle East.

Earlier this month, a group of American Christians who gathered in Washington D.C., finally offered a concrete plan to save the Christian Church in the Middle East.

The Philos Project and Defense of Christians concluded that the establishment of a Christian State in the area of the ancient Biblical city of Nineveh in Iraq could be the solution to the problem.

The gathering urged American Christians to end their passiveness in light of the ongoing persecution of Christian communities in the Middle East.

“We all feel the temptation to stay out of it and mind our own business… But minding our business is simply not an option,” Robert Nicholson, president of the Philos Project told the participants in the meeting.

He then addressed the proposed practical solution to the problem: the establishment of a Christian state.

“Christians in the Middle East will only be safe when they have a protected homeland, a foundation on which to build their shattered society,” Nicholson said.

“History has shown us various examples of this concept working in practice, of minority peoples under existential threat surviving and thriving by securing territory: Israel, Armenia, Iraqi Kurdistan, even (to a far less satisfactory degree) Native American reservations in the U.S.,” he added.

Joseph Hakim who heads the International Christian Union, a group that focuses on the survival of the Christians in the Middle East, agrees with Nicholson.

Hakim has repeatedly criticized the Obama Administration for not taking sufficient action to save Middle Eastern Christians.

“Christians need a state of their own and an alliance with the US, and Israel. Otherwise, being leaderless and without a military force, Christians have no chance to survive,” Hakim told Front Page Magazine in 2015.

There has been no official Israeli reaction to the plan but many in Israel would no doubt like to remind Hakim and Nicholson that the Muslims in the Middle East have yet to come to terms with the existence of a non-Muslim state in their midst.

The reason for this rejection by Muslims is actually quite simple.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has never been a dispute about a piece of land but about the existence of a Jewish state in the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, as the Muslim call all territory that has been part of the original Caliphate.

Source: www.aina.org