The politics of not defending Middle Eastern Christians
“Why is the world silent while Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa?” asks Ronald S. Lauder. The World Jewish Congress president frames the question in a larger paint-by-numbers argument defending Israel’s assault on Gaza and criticizing the moral instincts of “beautiful celebrities,” reporters, and the U.N. who have not responded adequately to the brutality of Boko Haram and ISIS.
An argument like Lauder's is liable to predictable demands for greater American military involvement in the region. But the silence he names is real. Why has American reaction been so muted?
In part it's a consequence of American politics. Our concern for global atrocities tends to track our geopolitical stances rather closely, and many of the Christian communities of the Middle East have been on the wrong side of our foreign-policy consensus.
