Source:  www.assistnews.net

Date:  2008-04-17

Archbishop of Canterbury Says Middle East Christian are Victims of British and American Foreign Policy

By Jeremy Reynalds
Correspondent for ASSIST News Service

LONDON (ANS) -- Christians in the Middle East are suffering because of British and American foreign policy, Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

Tom Peterkin reporting in an article for Britain's Telegraph newspaper said Dr. Rowan Williams stated that against rising Islamic extremism, Christian groups are increasingly viewed to be a "foreign and aggressive presence" as a result of Western policies.

Speaking before he addressed an audience in Westminster Cathedral on Thursday, the Telegraph said Williams highlighted the plight of Christians who had been forced to flee the Holy Land.

The Archbishop said that Christians had traditionally played a leading role in social, cultural and intellectual change in the Middle East.

But, the Telegraph reported he said, those historic communities now risk becoming what he called "museum pieces" in a "theme park" region as a result of persecution. This is in part due to an extremist form of Islam filling the void left after the peak of Arab nationalism, he claimed.

Williams warned there is a chance that the Middle East could become a "monochrome" area dominated by an "unfriendly" form of Islam.

But the Telegraph said Williams also blamed Western governments, when he made his remarks at the Christian Presence conference organized by BibleLands, a charity supporting Christian-led projects in the Middle East.

"The indigenous Christian community throughout the region has suffered from being associated with the American global project, and indeed the British global project as part of the American global project," the Telegraph reported Williams said.

He added, "There is an urgent need for people in the UK to wake up to the fact that Christians in the Middle East are living through a time of change more dramatic and more costly than anything that has been seen for a thousand years and more."

The Telegraph said Williams continued, "There is a quiet but numerically huge exodus of Christians, especially but not exclusively educated Christians, from the whole region. The remaining Christian communities are left exposed to violence or extremism in many countries, and the societies they live in are deprived of some of their most creative and resourceful citizens."

Williams also commented that Christian communities in the ancient heartlands of faith often "felt ignored or forgotten by their Western fellow Christians."

The Telegraph reported that Williams recalled a recent visit to Syria in which he met some of the half million refugees who have fled Iraq since 2003, and said they had confirmed the "appalling pressure" on Christian communities that forced them to migrate.

Williams added, "The military policies of the West in the last few years have firmly cemented in a great deal of the Middle East the notion that Christianity is a foreign, aggressive and Western presence."

The Telegraph said he called on both Christians around the world and the government to pay attention to the worsening situation.

Williams also said, "I regret it is a real tragedy that this ongoing crisis has yet to be the focus of policy declarations, or indeed recognized by some of our Western governments."

The Telegraph reported that the Archbishop used his speech to announce a scholarship to study the impact of migration among Iraqi Christians supported by the Archbishop's Mission to the Assyrians, the Philip Usher Fund, and the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association.