Wandering Arameans

One of the most important points in last night's Radio Four programme about the plight of Iraqi Christians was that dhimmitude was a forgotten concept in Iraq until Bush and Blair removed the bulwark against the people who still remembered it; those who gave their votes to Bush and who give their money to Blair are now doing immense damage by means of their clod-hopping missionary activity. Christians made up three per cent of the population of Iraq before the invasion. They now account for half of all refugees from the country.

Calling to mind the nuking of Nagasaki, the mind-boggling assumption that there is no indigenous Christianity in, of all places, the Middle East also lies behind the hostility towards a country which reserves her Presidency and half of her parliamentary seats for Christians, another which has predominantly Christian provinces and where Christian festivals are public holidays, and a third in which the reserved parliamentary representation for Armenians and Assyrians stands in the starkest possible contrast to NATO Turkey or to "liberated" Iraq.

And for what? For the sake of the country that occupies, and which subjects to martial law, the Christians of the western part of that viable Palestinian state which was created on both sides of the Jordan at the end of the British Mandate. For the sake of the country that is no less draconian towards her own Christian citizens, including in Nazareth. For the sake of the country that refuses to naturalise ethnic Ashkenazim baptised in infancy, despite the deaths of such Jews in the Holocaust. For the sake of the country that insolently sends the bill for her very existence to the United States while contemptuously dismissing that generous benefactor's opinion and interests, including the need to be seen as capable of standing up to a mere dependency which, despite being very heavily militarised, sent no troops whatever to Korea, Vietnam or the Gulf, and has precisely none in Iraq or Afghanistan.