Alberto R. Gonzales served as U.S. attorney general
from 2005 to 2007 in the George W. Bush administration. He is currently the dean of
the Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, Tennessee. He recently traveled to Israel, and wrote in the Washington Post:
Earlier this month I visited Israel as part of a delegation of
Hispanic American leaders, under the auspices of a private educational
organization called The Face of Israel. During our trip I had the
privilege to travel the country, and to meet with one Father Gabriel
Naddaf, a native Arabic-speaking Israeli Greek-Orthodox priest from
Nazareth, the city where Jesus Christ began his own ministry.As
Father Naddaf spoke to us, we began to grasp that his presence in the
Holy Land is more than a symbolic nod to the origins of Christianity.
It is, in fact, one of the world’s most powerful and hopeful testaments
to the continuity and living potential of Christian identity in the
Middle East today. Father Naddaf’s very existence is a statement of
courage and resolve in the face of an increasingly hostile and volatile
region. What he told us has transformed my understanding of the Middle
East, and of my responsibility to it as a Christian—and as an
American—living in the 21st century...
Sitting in Nazareth, our delegation learned that in the past ten years
100,000 Christians have been killed each year because of their faith
many of them in the Middle East. Father Naddaf spoke to us about how
less than a quarter of the millions of Christians who once lived in Iraq
and Syria remain. These people trace their roots back to the inception
of some of the world’s oldest and most storied Christian communities,
but now they are subjected by Islamic extremists to the most heinous of
threats and crimes imaginable. Those who can escape, flee for their
lives, while those who remain face all manner of degradation and
discrimination, including not only financial and political
disenfranchisement, but also forced conversion, rape and even execution.
Within the borders of Israel, however, according to the
country’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the Christian population is
growing. Israel provides Christians with not just security and freedom
of worship, but also excellent education, employment, healthcare, and
other freedoms and opportunities beyond what is available in many parts
of the Muslim world. Father Naddaf and other Christian priests of
various denominations, both within and beyond Israel and the Middle
East, are clear: one of the safest places for Christians in the Middle
East today is Israel.
Read it all here
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