The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land at the Turn of a New Millennium: A Reporter's Journey, by Charles M. Sennott
Reviewer: Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS from Chepachet, RI USA
Imagine a journalist for a major US newspaper, who deems himself an historian of sorts, attempting to highlight the travails of African-Americans in the Southeastern United States. What if this journalists narrative, which covered the period from the 17th century, until prior to the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, essentially omitted any substantive discussion of the institution of slavery, or the post US Civil War repression embodied in Jim Crow Laws and attitudes? Obviously any such narrative with these glaring omissions would be summarily dismissed as both woefully inadequate, and deliberately disingenuous. Disturbingly, Mr. Sennott's "travelogue" history of contemporary Middle Eastern Christians completely ignores the living legacy of Islamic jihad conquests, and the imposition of "dhimmitude" on the vanquished, indigenous pre-Islamic Christian communities. The ongoing plight of Middle Eastern Christians bears a striking resemblance to the plight of African Americans in the US South during slavery and Jim Crow, or European Jews prior to the progressive, philosemitic movements of European Christendom in the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether through sheer ignorance, or by a distorted focus, Mr. Sennott's empty narrative completely misses the mark.
Sennott's fundamental error may have been in the book's conception, i.e., concentrating on the smallest of Christian minorities, the Palestinians, with occasional excursions into Egypt and Lebanon. Highlighting the Palestinian's highly politicized faith, Sennott's misplaced emphasis legitimizes the erroneous view that conflict with Israel is the overriding concern of Middle East Christians. It most assuredly is NOT, as unfortunately, the much larger Middle East Christian communities in Egypt, The Sudan, and Lebanon, for example, focus on a primary existential threat: the brutal living legacy of dhimmitude.
Historically, non-Muslims conquered by jihad wars were governed by the laws of "dhimmitude". As opposed to flimsy notions of "tolerance" and "protection", dhimmitude was the actual sociopolitical, and economic status of these vanquished peoples (dhimmis), including Christians. Unfortunately, this "tolerance" and "protection" was afforded only upon submission to Islamic domination by a "Pact" - or Dhimma - which imposed degrading and discriminatory regulations. The main principles of dhimmitude are : (i) the inequality of rights in all domains between Muslims and dhimmis; (ii) the social and economic discrimination against the dhimmis; (iii) the humiliation and vulnerability of the dhimmis. Under Islamic rule in Palestine for example, from 676 C.E., until the mid 1860s (and then only under pressure from European colonial powers!) NO CROSS could adorn a church in Jerusalem. Numerous documents from both Islamic sources and the dhimmi peoples, establish the origins and aims of these nefarious regulations, including their contemporary incarnations (for example, in Egypt, the Sudan, the charters of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and of course in Saudi Arabia).
Indeed, it is jihad and dhimmitude, in all their manifestations, that transformed vast Christian majority communities throughout the Middle East, into small, threatened, brutally oppressed minorities, within their indigenous homelands. For example, during the first two centuries of Arab Muslim conquests, Muslim chroniclers described the ongoing jihad, involving the destruction of whole towns, the massacre of large numbers of their populations, the enslavement of women and children, and the confiscation of vast regions. Indeed, between 640 and 1240 C.E., jihad conquests lead to the total and definitive destruction of Judaism and Christianity in the Hijaz (modern Saudi Arabia), and the dramatic decline of once flourishing Christian and Jewish communities in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. In the North African Maghreb, Christians had been virtually eliminated by 1240 and the Jews decimated by Almohad persecutions. Mr. Sennot could have witnessed this ugly dynamic in "real time" if he had the moral and intellectual courage to report on the horrific plight of the Southern Sudanese Christians. Two independent United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Human Rights in the Sudan have detailed the countless fatwas calling for jihad war by the Islamist Khartoum government against the indigenous Black Christian (and Animist) Dinka tribes people of the South. These medieval sounding decrees have prompted the slaughter, enslavement, mutilation, and forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Christians, by Muslim agents of the Islamist Government of Sudan.
Mr. Sennott completely misses the profound impact of dhimmitude on the plight of both the Lebanese Maronite Christians, and the Egyptian Copts. Indeed, Sennott's travelogue narrative reaches a low point in his thin, disdainful assessments of the two largest Middle Eastern Christian communities, both struggling gamely to maintain their identities under the oppressive yoke of dhimmitude. However, the author seems to capture "glimpses" of the harsh reality of dhimmitude, in the increasing unease of Palestinian spokeswoman (and Christian), Hanan Ashrawi about the growing Islamist domination of the so-called al-Aqsa intifada. Sennott notes how, privately, Ms. Ashrawi observes that the steady, ongoing disappearance (i.e., flight) of Palestinian Christians would adversely affect the overall status of women in Palestinian society. But, tragically, even here, Sennott remains oblivious to the clear reasons Ms. Ashrawi will not dwell upon her Christian identity, submerging it under a mythical "equality" with Muslims behind the banner of "Palestinian nationalism". This is an expression of a deep-seated, symptomatic dhimmitude.
The only tangible "accomplishment" of Sennott's book is to re-emphasize the obvious demographic decline in the Middle Eastern Christian communities. He has virtually nothing substantive to offer about the real danger afflicting these communities: the persistence, and resurgence of dhimmitude.
This review originally appeared on the Amazon.com website. Reprinted with permission of the author.