Catholic World News
Wall Street Journal discovers Iraq's Christians
December 14, 2010
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal calls attention to the suffering of Iraq's Christian minority.
While the alert is welcome, the Journal piece shows a startling ignorance about the Christian presence in Iraq:
- The editorial says that "the small Christian sects pose no conceivable threat to Islamic hegemony." While certainly no challenge to Islam, Christians accounted for about 5% of Iraq's population when the war began, or well over 1 million people. Even today there are probably more than 400,000 Christians remaining: a minority, certainly, but not a much more important presence than "small Christian sects" would suggest.
- The Journal informs readers: "Some of these Christian minorities have coexisted with Islam in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East since the time of Jesus." Since Islam did not exist for the first 600 years after the time of Christ, such coexistence would have been impossible.
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