Whoever wins in Syria, its Christians will lose

David Cameron will almost certainly get his Syrian war. Who will fight it, let alone who will win it, remains unclear. But who will lose it is already known — the Christians.

The relentless persecution of Christ’s followers is foretold in the Gospels. Suffering is portrayed as the pathway to triumph. The global position today conforms quite closely to that picture. Three quarters of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians — the expanding part — now live outside the largely tolerant West. At the same time, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that Christians suffer more persecution than any other religious group.

Within the Middle East, however, the story is not of expansion accompanied by persecution but of persecution leading to elimination. The ‘Sunday’ people are now following the ‘Saturday’ people out of the Middle East. The outgoing Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, who knows that history, has called the suffering of Arab Christians ‘a human tragedy that is going almost unremarked’. He complained that ‘people don’t speak more about it’.

But do not expect the British government to speak about it. In all the deliberation about targets, timetables and media opportunities, as they ratchet up Britain’s creaking war machine, not a moment will be wasted on the consequences of intervention for Syria’s Christian population. Whether in Iraq, or Syria, or Egypt, or in any future hotspot (Lebanon will probably be next) the Christian community somehow is always just too insignificant, and usually on the wrong side of the argument. In Iraq, Christians were thought too close to Saddam. In Syria, they are reckoned too close to Assad. In Egypt, where the Coptic Pope openly backed the military ‘non-coup’ against the Muslim Brotherhood’s President Morsi, the Christians find no sympathy from western policy makers.