Middle East genocide. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 1, 2013. Also here.
The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013.
The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, January 1, 2013.
Lose the Bible, Lose Your Cultural Heritage. By Ralph Peters. Family Security Matters, May 24, 2012.
The Arab World’s Endless Failures. By Ralph Peters. Family Security Matters, January 26, 2012.
12 Myths of 21st-Century War. By Ralph Peters. The American Legion Magazine, November 2007. Also here.
Ethnic Cleansing Is Better Than Genocide. By Ralph Peters. National Review, August 13, 2007. NJBR, July 9, 2013.
Faith’s civil wars. By Ralph Peters. USA Today, June 24, 2007.
Dream warriors: Our enemies fight for fantasies, not freedom. By Ralph Peters. Armed Forces Journal, May/June 2007. Also here.
Ralph Peters on Gaza. Hannity and Colmes transcript. Real Clear Politics, June 15, 2007. Also here.
In Gaza’s Shadow: Iraq and the Arab Suicide Cult. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 14, 2007. Also here.
What to Give Up . . . and What Land to Hold: Israel’s Toughest Choice. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, May 6, 2007. Also here.
Rebels and religion: How fighters become fanatics. By Ralph Peters. Armed Forces Journal, January 2007.
Arabs’ Last Chance. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, August 24, 2006. Also here.
Living, and dying, with suicide bombers. By Ralph Peters. USA Today, January 3, 2006.
New Glory. Ralph Peters interviewed by Jamie Glazov. FrontPageMag, September 7, 2005.
After Words with Ralph Peters. Video. Peters discusses New Glory with Anatol Lieven. C-Span, August 18, 2005.
The Frozen Civilization of the Desert. By Ralph Peters. New Glory: Expanding America’s Global
Supremacy, Chapter 15. New York: Sentinel, 2005.
Ralph Peters and John Bolton on the “Middle East genocide” of Christians and Jews. Video. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, June 3, 2013. YouTube. Also here, here, here, here, and here.
Peters:
We are witnesses to murder, and our
governments are accomplices. The relentless destruction of the last remnants of
the Middle East’s Judeo-Christian civilization is well under way. And we are
silent.
Captives
of political correctness, our governments cater to radical immigrant tantrums
as our leaders contort the truth to deny the existence of Islamist terrorism.
Meanwhile, our Middle Eastern “allies” and foes alike eradicate thousands of
years of Jewish and Christian heritage. Our diplomats treat the persecution as
a minor embarrassment, best ignored.
The
banishments and butchery aren’t new, but the breakdown of the last rotting
order in the wake of the “Arab Spring” has empowered psychotic fanatics who do
not even value the lives of the faithful, let alone the lives of unbelievers.
This is the end-game, the final persecution of Christians clinging to lands
they’ve called home for 2,000 years. Except for Israel and the rarest
exceptions elsewhere, Jews are already gone from the realms that nurtured them
since the early years of their faith.
A
thousand years ago, there were more Christians in the Middle East than in
Europe, and Jewish communities prospered from the Nile to the Tigris. Even a
century ago, more than 20% of the region’s population was Christian, and Jews
still adorned Arab cities with their talents.
Today,
estimates put the Christian population of the region at under 5% and sinking
rapidly — and only that high because of the 9 million Copts who remain, for
now, in Egypt.
The
birthplace of Christianity, Bethlehem, now has a Muslim majority of as much as
80% — a reversal that coincided with the West’s decision to embrace Palestinian
terrorists as “partners for peace.” A few decades ago, Lebanon had a Christian
majority. Now, with Christian numbers fading, it’s tugged between Shia
Hezbollah and Sunni fanatics.
Slighted
by the US occupation — as our government pandered to Muslim hardliners — the
Christian population of Iraq has fallen by two-thirds over 10 years. And the
most ferocious elements in the Syrian insurgency see no place for Christians in
Syria’s future. Even Jordan, struggling to appease its own Islamists, has
cracked down on Christian activities.
The
Jews, of course, are already long gone.
But the
stones of ruined churches cry out, and vanished synagogues haunt decayed Arab
neighborhoods.
If you
read the New Testament or study the formative centuries of Christianity, there
are few references to western cities other than Rome. The names that dot the
Epistles of St. Paul and histories of the church are now in Muslim hands:
Alexandria, Damascus, Tarsus, Carthage, Ephesus, Nicaea, Constantinople and so
many others. Even Mecca and Medina had thriving Christian and Jewish quarters
before the first jihads.
But all
they possess does not suffice for Islamist fanatics. Israel must be blotted
from the earth, and the last Christians must be driven out.
This is
an old, old story, nearing its end. We shroud it in lies to excuse ourselves
from taking a stand, even accepting the preposterous Arab claim that Muslim
failures today are the fault of the Crusades, a brief interlude when Christians
occupied a coastal strip hardly larger than Israel. In fact, it was the
Mongols, then the Muslim Turks, who shattered Arab civilization. And as for
conquests, Muslims occupied Spain in all or part for 800 years — and brutalized
the Balkans for half a millennium. The Crusades were hardly a burp.
We also
accept extravagant claims that “civilized” Arabs rescued the classical texts that
formed our civilization. That’s utter nonsense. The Arab hordes that burst out
of barren Arabia in the 7th century were composed of illiterates. Conquering at
a time when the warring Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted themselves,
the new rulers found that tribal practices didn’t suffice to run provinces. So
they took over the existing bureaucracies, staffed by Greek-speaking Christians
and Jews. It was those officials who saved the Greek classics for Europe’s
future Renaissance — and their descendants designed Islam’s greatest monuments.
Yes,
some Arab rulers came to value learning — but the Arab world never produced a
Homer, Plato, Sophocles or Thucydides whose appeal transcended their culture.
Islam
was a religion spread by war. It was only a “religion of peace” where it had
conquered. True, Islam sometimes proved more tolerant of minorities than
Europeans, but that was at the zenith of the faith’s power.
There’s
yet another illusion of ours — that Islam is gaining strength. Islam is on the
ropes. What we’ve seen in the pogroms and outright genocides over the last 150
years has been the spleen of a once-triumphant faith whose practices and values
can’t compete in the modern age.
Consider
today’s Middle East, apart from Israel. Despite the massive influx of oil
wealth, there isn’t one world-class university. Nothing of quality or
technological complexity is manufactured between Morocco and Pakistan. Not even
Saudi Arabia has first-rate health-care. Research is nil. Patent applications
are statistically zero. Women are regarded as lesser beings, wasting half of
the region’s human capital. Not one Arab society’s a meritocracy. And
corruption cripples all.
A
handful of glitzy hotels and shopping centers do not make a civilization
(especially when the merchandise is all imported). Should Islamist fanatics
succeed in driving all minorities from the region, they’d be left with a human
wasteland of comprehensive failure, seething with hatred and uncontainable
violence. The self-segregation of the Islamic heartlands would be a tragedy for
humanity — but, above all, for Muslims.
Birth
rates are a red herring. More mouths to feed are not magic sources of strength
in lands of scarcity and poverty. The Middle East is self-destructive, morally
brittle and falling ever further behind a world that’s charging ahead.
Islamists can’t even get terrorism right — today, we’re terrorizing the
terrorists. So they turn on the weak in their midst, the last minorities.
The
initial wave of destruction and slaughter began almost a millennium ago, when
the Muslim world first felt itself under threat. But, more recently, as the
West shot to power (thanks to science, learning, hard work, religious tolerance
and organization), the creaking Ottoman Empire could not shake off its
centuries-old stupor to keep up.
Enraged
by failure, the Ottomans turned on their most-productive minorities — whose
successes outraged yesteryear’s fanatics. Beginning in the 1880s and
accelerating in the 1890s, pogroms against Armenian Christians stunned Western
witnesses. But European leaders turned a blind eye, just as we do today. So
during the First World War, the Young Turks who had seized power decided to
finish the job.
It was
genocide. At least a million Armenians — perhaps twice that number — were
systematically exterminated . . . although not without being tortured, raped,
starved and death-marched first. The scale of the butchery was such that it
obscured other, concurrent genocides, most notably that of Assyrian Christians
at the hands of Turks and other Muslims. Estimates of Assyrian deaths run from
just under 300,000 to one million.
Nor did
the slaughters stop there. In British-created Iraq, massacres of Christians
recurred from 1933 to 1961.
City
names we know from our recent wars, such as Mosul, Basra or Tikrit (Saddam’s
home town), once were centers of Christian culture, with bishops, cathedrals
and monasteries famous for learning.
Gone.
And the last pale ghosts, those Christians holding on to homes their blood knew
for 20 centuries, are soon to go. Meanwhile, our president assures us that
“Islam’s a religion of peace.”
Mr.
President, go to Iraq and speak those words in the bomb-torn churches amid
desecrated graves.
Mr.
President, go to Egypt and explain to the brutalized Copts why your embrace of
the Muslim Brotherhood government’s good for them.
Then go
to Israel, Mr. President, where Christians worship freely, and tell the Israelis
they should “return Palestinian land” after Muslims seized the homes that
sheltered Jews for 3,000 years.
Explain
to Jews why their temples were profaned and obliterated by the adherents of
that “religion of peace.”
Of
course, the real tragedy for the Arabs in the last century wasn’t the Naqba,
Israel’s close-run struggle to survive attacks by an arc of Arab armies. The
tragedy was that the most-backward, intolerant and indolent Arabs, primitive
tribesmen, got most of the oil wealth and used it to spread their Wahhabi cult
throughout the Islamic world. The intellectuals in the great Arab cities never
had a chance.
My wife
and I spent our honeymoon on a long bus trip through Turkey, a country for
which I have great, if frustrated, affection. All went fine amid splendid
hospitality . . . until we reached the east. Along the roadsides in what had
been Armenia (the first Christian kingdom, by the way) desolate villages, razed
to their foundations, scarred the landscape between drab modern towns. When asked
what those ruins were, a Turk would avert his eyes and mutter, “Abandoned.”
Those
villages weren’t abandoned. They were the site of the last century’s first
great genocide. No one stood up for those inconvenient Christians.
And no
one’s standing up for the Middle East’s tormented Christians now, or for the
last handful of Jews left beyond Israel.
Even
the dust cries for justice, and we look away.
