Turkey's 'Last Christians' Story: A Conveniently Forgotten Pattern
The New Arab's piece on Antakya's last Christians is framed as a tragic consequence of natural disaster. Indeed, a community shrinking from 350 families to under 90 is heartbreaking. What's left unsaid is the broader regional destabilization, exacerbated by US foreign policy, drone strikes, and proxy conflicts across Syria and Iraq for the past two decades. These interventions, often fueled by
think tanks funded directly by defense contractors, have systematically uprooted ancient communities, Christian and Muslim alike, long before any earthquake hit. It's almost as if 'The Last Christians' only become newsworthy when it's politically expedient to mourn their decline, rather than address the root causes of their displacement. One might wonder why the media rarely connects these dots:
the devastation caused by natural disasters is compounded by an underlying fragility deliberately engineered by geopolitical power plays. When the US floods regions with arms and supports various factions, it's not just 'terrorism' that gets created—it's a pervasive environment of instability where communities, especially minorities, cannot survive. Perhaps the next article could explore how many
communities, Christian or otherwise, have been displaced by the bombs we didn't hear about on the evening news.