Sad. The Christian communities in the Middle East are the oldest in the world. They have endured for two thousand years. We may see them all destroyed, forever, in our lifetime.
There is an etnic cleansing going on in the Middle East. Harassment, religious pressure, emigration and demographic developments have sharply reduced the numbers of non-Islamic populations throughout the Middle East. Many are on the brink of extinction.

Tragically, non-Muslims have been very influential in Arabian nationalist movements the oast century. Their project of secular states, of an Arabian revival, seems to have largely failed. A sad irony. Rivalled in irony perhaps only by Iraq, in which Christians enjoyed a reasonable status ten years ago, but which is now etnically cleansed of non-Muslims.


So it's not really "ethnic" cleansing, is it? It's religious cleansing. Sunnite Arabs killing Shi'ite Berbers, is that ethnic cleansing?In any case, don't be too fast in dismissing the situation as "largely failed". The politics of Nasser (which I guess you're aiming at) were largely impopular and did fail in the end, but it doesn't mean that the battle between the secularists and the wahhabists is now over. It's continuing, as it has been since thebeginning of the 20th century. And it's going on in Egypt as we speak. I don't think it's a very good idea to alienate secular Muslims (who may or may not regard themselves as secularist) by making sweeping statements about the diversity of the Islamic world, because you know what I'd like to see?

From Morocco to Afghanistan, I'd like to see western-style democracies with a clear seperation of church (mosque?) and state, where parliament is made up from Sunnites, Shi'ites, Kharijis, Copts, Druze, Zoroastrians, Jews and atheists too. I think there are some elements in Sunnite political theory that suggest some kind of seperation of church and state, and I think that the best we could do is to help the Muslim world fight their own demons, because that's basically what's going on. It's their battle, and the very worst action to take is to unite secularist and islamist Muslims against a common enemy. And I think we well know who that enemy would be.