In yesterday’s piece on Christians in the Middle East (‘Exodus: the changing map of the Middle East’ -http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-exodus-the-changing-map-of-the-middle-east-2116463.html ), Robert Fisk splashes his prejudices across the page for all to see. He covers all the main countries with a Christian population, plays down the role of Islamism in helping expel such large numbers, and studiously refuses to mention Israel, except in a paragraph devoted to the negative situation of the Palestinian Christians, whose plight is blamed on Israel rather than on militias like Hamas.
At one point he writes ‘The Jordanian royal family have always protected their Christian population – at 350,000, it is around 6 per cent of the population – but this is perhaps the only flame of hope in the region.’ The only flame of hope? What utter nonsense. In one country alone has the Christian community grown in numbers, and that is Israel, which has laws for the protection of religious minorities. There were 34,000 Christians in Israel in 1949 and there are now 154,000. The rate of increase is roughly the same as it is for Israeli Jews. Islamic law, by contrast, discriminates against Jews and Christians. Mr Fisk knows the Middle East too well for me to assume he has left this out in error. Not for the first time, his bias against the Jewish state is visible.
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