His words had added clarity because at that time the Lebanese
Christian army General Michel Aoun – who thought he was the president
and still, today, dreams of this unlikely investiture – was fighting a
hopeless war against Hafez Assad’s Syrian army. Daily, I was visiting
the homes of dead Christians, killed by Syrian shellfire. The Syrians,
in the priest’s narrative, were the same ‘Muslims’ who had stabbed out
the eyes in the ancient picture.
I remember at the time – and
often since – I would say to myself that this was nonsense, that you
cannot graft ancient history onto the present. (The Maronites, by the
way, had supported the earlier Crusaders. The Orthodox of the time stood
with the Muslims.) Christian-Muslim enmity on this scale was a tale to
frighten schoolchildren.

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And
yet only last year, as shells burst above the Syrian town of Yabroud, I
walked into the country’s oldest church and found paintings of the
saints. All had had their eyes gouged out and been torn into strips. I
took one of those strips home to Beirut, the painted eyes of the saints
staring at me even as I write this article. This was not the sacrilege
of antiquity. It was done by ghoulish men, probably from Iraq, only
months ago.
Like 9/11 – long after Hollywood had regularly
demonised Muslims as barbarian killers who wish to destroy America – it
seems that our worst fears turn into reality. The priest in 1990 cannot
have lived long enough to know how the new barbarians would strike at
the saints in Yabroud.

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Note
how I have not mentioned the enslavement of Christian women in Iraq,
the Islamic State’s massacre of Christians and Yazidis, the burning of
Mosul’s ancient churches or the destruction of the great Armenian church
of Deir el-Zour that commemorated the genocide of its people in 1915.
Nor the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Not even the very latest
massacre in Kenya where the numbers of Christian dead and the cruelty of
their sectarian killers is, indeed, of epic, Hollywood proportions. Nor
have I mentioned the ferocious Sunni-Shia wars that now dwarf the
tragedy of the Christians.

But the Christian tragedy in the Middle East today needs to be
re-thought – as it will be, of course, when Armenians around the world
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the genocide of their people by
Ottoman Turkey. Perhaps it is time that we acknowledge not only this act
of genocide but come to regard it not as just the murder of a minority
within the Ottoman Empire, but specifically a Christian minority, killed
because they were Armenian but also because they were Christian (many
of whom, unfortunately, rather liked the Orthodox, anti-Ottoman Tsar).

And
their fate bears some uncommon parallels with the Islamic State
murderers of today. The Armenian men were massacred.  The women were
gang-raped or forced to convert or left to die of hunger. Babies were
burned alive – after being stacked in piles. Islamic State cruelty is
not new, even if the cult’s technology defeats anything its opponents
can achieve.
In Kuwait last week, a good and thoughtful Muslim, an American
university graduate – within the al-Sabah family and prominent in the
government – shook his head with disbelief when he spoke of Islamic
State.  ‘I watched the video of them burning the Jordanian pilot alive,’
he told me. ‘I watched it several times. I had to, because I had to
understand their technology. Do you know they used seven camera angles
to film this atrocity?  We could not compete with this media technology.
We have to learn.’

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