" History is a set of agreed-upon lies (Napoleon) A few weeks ago I received by email an article by a Dr. Walid Phares titled "Arab Christians who are they? Initially I brushed it off as rather inconsequential, but it subsequently came to my attention that Dr. Phares is promoting some rather bizarre ideas about Arab Christians on the lecture and TV circuit in the U.S., contesting their Arab ethnicity and claiming their persecution by Moslems. Being an Arab Christian myself, I would like to use some of the views of Dr. Phares as an entry point to highlight the falsities being promulgated by him and a few other 'self-hating Arabs' under the guise of scholarly studies. Arab Christians have always existed in the Middle East, and long before the advent of Islam. In Lebanon today they number about 1.3 million (about one-third of the population) mainly of Maronite denomination. In Syria they number approximately two million (or about 10% of the population) which include a significant community of Maronites. In Egypt, Christians, mostly Copts, are about 4.5 million, or about 6% of the population. There are one million in Iraq of various denominations, or about 4% the population. The Christians of Palestine and Jordan may number 600,000, but so many population shifts had taken place that it is difficult to venture a reliable estimate. The Christians of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine played a pioneering role in reviving Arab culture from the comatose state it was in under the Ottomans. The renaissance of Arab culture owes a great deal to the many Christian Arab scholars who were among the forerunners in shaping Arab national identity. The Maronites role, in particular, was of major cultural importance. In Lebanon they are the backbone of its cultural diversity. A Saudi friend once commented that if the Maronites did not exist we would have to invent them! There have been occasional claims that the Maronites can trace their ancestry to Phoenicians. This is a myth intended to distance the Maronites from their Arab roots. The Maronites were inhabitants of Orontes (Al-Assi) valley in Syria. They are most probably descendants of some Arab tribes who never converted to Islam. The eminent Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (incidentally, a Christian) in his 'A House of Many Mansions' [1988] states (ch. 6): "It is very possible that the Maronites, as a community of Arabian origin, were among the last Arabian Christian tribes to arrive in Syria before Islam.. Certainly, since the 9th century, their language has been Arabic, which indicates that they must have originated as an Arab tribal community.. The fact that Syriac remains the language of their liturgy. is irrelevant. Syriac, which is the Christian literary form of Aramaic, was originally the liturgical language of all the Arab and Arameo-Arab Christian sects, in Arabia as well as in Syria and Iraq. Salibi also notes (in ch. 4), that Patriarch Istifan Duwayhi, a Maronite historian of the 17th century, points out that the Maronites "had to move their seat out of the valley of the Orontes to Mount Lebanon as a result of Byzantine, not Muslim persecution. Salibi further goes on to say: "Between 969 and 1071. the Byzantines were in actual control of the Orontes valley.. They must have subjected the Maronites to enough persecution to force them to abandon the place and join their co-religionists in Mount Lebanon.. In Muslim Aleppo, however, the community survived, as it does to this day. El Hassan Bin Talal (former crown prince of Jordan and a prominent scholar) in his "Christianity in the Arab World [1994] (ch. 7), emphasizes: "It is possible that the Maronite church would not have survived the Byzantine reconquests in Syria between the 10th and 11th centuries. had the Byzantines . succeeded in occupying the whole of Syria, leaving no parts under Muslim rule, where dissident Christian groups could find refuge from Byzantine persecution. I hope we can put to rest the myth of the Maronites as descendants of the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians lived mainly on the coasts of Lebanon and Syria. If one wants to belabor the subject, their descendants are obviously the coast dwellers, mainly the Sunnis. In any case, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th century BC, that the Phoenicians themselves were Arab tribes from the Arabian shores of the Red Sea. Dr. Phares in his article mentions "pogroms of the Copts in Egypt . This is a serious and misleading accusation. The term pogrom means organized and systematic killing of an ethnic group usually sanctioned by the government. There may have been occasional sectarian clashes, but I have yet to come across a historical record to the effect that the Copts, or any other Arab Christian group for that matter, having been the target of pogroms. (The only recorded massacre of Christians was in 1860 in Mount Lebanon, and the origin of that unfortunate event was a social rebellion by Maronite serfs against their Druze overlords). Pogroms were an invention of Christian rulers in Europe, mostly directed against Jews - for which Palestinian Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, have been paying dearly as the Christian West tries to atone for its sins at their expense. This western guilt complex, nurtured continuously by Zionist propaganda, has resulted in a tomblike silence over the atrocities perpetrated by Israel over the past 60 years. It is often mentioned that the Copts of Egypt are descendants of the Pharaohs. But so much history had elapsed between the disappearance of the Pharaohs and the arrival of Islam, that this claim appears questionable, and in any case the Muslims of Egypt have every bit as much right to it, if indeed that claim is anything more than intellectual hair-splitting. The article in question also claims that the Christians remaining in Palestine "are experiencing one of their most severe choices: surrender to Islamization, or join the pan-Middle East Christian boat.. This is a flagrant distortion of reality. Palestinian Christians are not suffering at the hands of the Muslims, but at the hands of the Israelis, and the bullet-scarred statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is a poignant testimony to this fact. We are witnessing before our very eyes the gradual de Christianization and de Islamization of Arab Jerusalem due to persistent Israeli measures aimed at deliberately destroying the Arab character of the city, while the Western world, spearheaded by successive US administrations, displays utter insensitivity, if not outright acquiescence, to this demographic crime. Dr. Phares talks about the Muslims "demonizing those who have formed their national state, Israel. He seems to believe, along with many others, that the Jews of Palestine were a large community dispersed by the Romans and now entitled to return to their 'homeland'. According to Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli archeologist, in his monumental work "The Bible Unearthed [2001], the Hebrews were never a large community, never had a substantial kingdom, never were in Egypt (the exodus from Egypt is just a myth). The number of Jews dispersed by the Romans from Palestine was minimal; most Jews remained in Palestine, some gradually became Christians, and some, further on, Muslims. The bulk of the Jews who have been pouring into Palestine for decades under the so-called 'Right of Return' have no demonstrable kinship to the Hebrew inhabitants of Palestine in Roman times. The fanatical settlers - especially those of East European or Russian origins - who claim to return to their 'ancestral land' are, as advanced by Arthur Koestler (a Hungarian Jew) in his scholarly work "The Thirteenth Tribe [1976], descendants of the Khazars, southern Russian tribes who converted to Judaism about 740 AD (ch.1). Their empire collapsed after their defeat by the Russians late in the 10th century and they dispersed all over Europe. Alfred Lilienthal (an American Jew) in an article written in 1981 titled "Zionism and American Jews confirms: "In The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler, supported overwhelmingly by such anthropologists as Ripley, Weissenberg, Hertz, Boas, Mead and Fishberg, proves that the vast majority of today s Jews are descendants of the Khazars of South Russia.. The Ben-Gurions, the Golda Meirs, and the Begins, who have clamored to go back 'home,' probably never had antecedents in that part of the world. Raja G. Mattaris a former Middle East regional manager of a multinational company and is currently a business consultant living in Beirut. He can be contacted at [email protected] II of this commentary will be printed in tomorrow's issue (April 3, 2008).
