“We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence, war, destruction and killing. This is turning to winter,” Rai told Reuters in Bkirki, seat of the Maronite church in hills overlooking the Mediterranean Sea north of Beirut…
Rai, who attended a memorial service in Iraq last year for Christians killed in an attack on a Baghdad church, drew a parallel between Iraq and the rest of the Arab world, saying Christians could bear a disproportionate share of the suffering.
“How can it be an Arab Spring when people are being killed every day?” he said. “They speak of Iraq and democracy, and one million Christians out of an original 1.5 million have fled Iraq.”
The patriarch said all communities in the Middle East were threatened by “war and violence, economic and security crises,” but Christians were particularly vulnerable because of their relatively small and dwindling numbers.
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