Columnist Luma Simms called Israel the "last hope" for Middle East Christians. Photo: LumaSimms.com.

Columnist Luma Simms called Israel the “last hope” for Middle East Christians. Photo: LumaSimms.com.

Arab Christians must come to understand that Israel represents their “last hope” to be saved from annihilation by jihadists in the region, a Middle Eastern Christian columnist wrote Thursday in an op-ed published by the online news magazine The Federalist.

According to Luma Simms – who grew up in Ba’athist Iraq – Middle Eastern Christians must overcome the Arab indoctrination that instills hatred for Jews and the state of Israel.

“Anyone who claims that the Arab world – Muslim and Christian – is not pathologically antisemitic is delusional. This is the elephant in the room in the Arab Christian subculture; the secret sin no one wants to bring to the light,” she wrote.

It is this “secret sin” – which Simms calls “a blight upon the people of my heritage” – that prevents Arab Christians from reaching out to Israel for help as they suffer at the hands of radical Islamic jihadists.

Antisemitism has deep roots in the Middle East, Simms wrote, recorded as far back as the biblical Book of Esther outlining the genocidal plans of Persian vizier Haman against the Jewish nation. Islamic rulers adopted the idea of Jews as the “scapegoat” for their problems and this antisemitism “trickl[ed] down to minority groups living in Islamic dominated lands.”

Middle Eastern antisemitism in unique, Simms contends, saying it “goes beyond garden-variety envy. It is the belief that Israel is behind every evil in the world and especially the evil that befalls the Arab world. Therefore, it ought to be destroyed!”

The Arab world’s failure to recognize Israel as a Jewish state – with the exceptions of Jordan and Egypt – is a consequence of this unique form of antisemitism, Simms said, adding:

Because for Arab countries to acknowledge a Jewish state would require that they acknowledge Jewish people as people, as human persons. Their antisemitism does not allow them to do this. Antisemitism in the Arab bosom sets the relationship between the Arab and the Jew in what Austrian-German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called the ‘I-It’ relationship, rather than the ‘I-You.’ They cannot recognize the state because they cannot recognize the people; they cannot recognize the people because they have established a relationship with them not as human persons but as an ‘It,’ as object rather than subject.

Simms expressed her hope that Arab Christian culture – which she believes is acting under a type of Stockholm Syndrome – will “break this spell” of antisemitism. “But hope is running out – Christianity may not survive in the Middle East,” she wrote, adding:

Israel is the last hope for Arab Christians; it’s as simple as that…Helping them, doing good to the Christians in the Arab world, would require Israel overcoming her neighbors’ antisemitism, even of those Christians who will not ask for help because of their prejudices. Arab Christians…feel caught between Muslim interests on one side and Israeli interests on the other. They are bitter. They are …read more

Source:: The Algemeiner

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