The Financial Times pulled off quite a feat in their April 14th editorial on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East: they somehow managed to avoid so much as mentioning the Israeli exception to this disturbing phenomenon.
Their omission of Israel’s unique progressive advantage in this regard was even more glaring in light of the editorial’s opening sentence.
On Palm Sunday, as Christians gathered to commemorate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, jihadi suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a Coptic cathedral in Alexandria, and at the altar of a church in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, killing 47 people.
FT editors failed to contextualise this remarkable contrast – between the sight of thousands of Christians freely gathering in the capital of the Jewish state and Christians again being butchered by jihadists in an Arab capital – by noting that the rights enjoyed by Christians in Israel simply do not exist in the Muslim Middle East.
Israel is in fact one of the few places in the Mid-East where the indigenous population of Christians is growing.
What the Middle East could look like: Jews and Muslims join Ramle Christians in marking Easter. Israel's Christians are safe and growing pic.twitter.com/wJZMEVgnJ0
— Michael Oren (@DrMichaelOren) April 20, 2017
Though the editorial is also notable in all but ignoring the role of radical Islam in the flight of Mid-East Christians, whilst absurdly blaming the West and Christians themselves, its obfuscation of Israel’s achievement in creating a ‘safe space‘ for religious minorities represents another example of the media’s inability to re-evaluate their own narrative framing the state entirely through the prism of the Palestinian conflict.
