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The Plight of the Middle East's Christians
(Atlantic Monthly) Jeffrey Goldberg - I've been struck by the lackadaisical coverage of the terrible attack on New Year's Day on a Coptic church in Egypt, in which 21 Christians were killed and 79 people, mostly Christian, were injured. The Salafist war on Christians in the Middle East is intensifying rapidly, with profound consequences not only for Christians in the lands of their faith's earliest history, but for the rights of all ethnic and religious minorities in the greater Middle East. One way to think about the Muslim Arab Middle East is as a place historically intolerant of the rights of non-Arab Muslim minorities: The blacks of Sudan, who are trying to break free of Khartoum's hold; the Kurds in Iraq and Syria; Christians in Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq; and the Jews of Israel, among others. In Saudi Arabia, it is illegal even to build a church.