On the morning of May 29, 1453, the Emperor Constantine XI took off his imperial regalia, so that he might die as a soldier rather than be recognized as a prince and went down into the fighting near the Blachernae wall. From that moment he disappeared from the record. By nightfall Constantinople had fallen. Mehmed II rode to Hagia Sophia and ordered the call to prayer raised inside the greatest church in Christendom. The last emperor of the East lay dead somewhere in the ruins, and no one has ever found the body.

For eleven centuries Constantinople had been the capital of Eastern Christianity. Its fall closed a chapter that had been written across the five great cities of the early Church, and it left a small mountain people in the Levant carrying a weight far heavier than their numbers should have had to bear. The Maronites.

The ancient Church was governed by five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ratified this arrangement, the pentarchy, as the constitutional order of Christendom. The five sees were the load-bearing pillars of the Christian world.

They fell one by one.

Antioch fell in 636, after the Byzantine army broke at the Yarmouk. Jerusalem was surrendered to the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab in 637, barely five years after the death of Muhammad. Alexandria was taken in the same decade. Three of the five sees were under Muslim rule within a single generation of Islam’s birth.

In the Antiochian lands, what survived of the faithful was driven up into the heights the Arabs called Jabal Lubnan, the mountain of Lebanon. They gathered around the memory of Maron, the fifth-century hermit of the Orontes valley, and they held there with no empire left to protect them.

When the Maronite Church formally renewed its union with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439, fourteen years before Constantinople fell, it brought with it the apostolic succession of Antioch, one of the original sees founded in the first generation of the Church. The Maronite Patriarch has borne the title Patriarch of Antioch and All the East without a single break ever since: through the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, through the Crusader kingdoms, through the Mamluk sultans and four centuries of Ottoman rule, through the massacres of 1860, when more than ten thousand Maronites were killed in one summer, and through the Great Famine of 1915 to 1918, when something close to a third of Mount Lebanon starved to death under Ottoman blockade.

Constantinople was the last pillar. When it fell in 1453, four of the five ancient sees lay under Islam. Only Rome remained free, and Rome was in the West. In the East, one mountain church still held what the others had lost: a patriarchate, a homeland, and a line unbroken since the apostles.

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The Maronites, and the other Eastern Christians the mountain took in, the Greek Orthodox of Koura and Batroun, the Greek Catholics of the Beqaa, the Armenians who came to Beirut with nothing after the genocide, did more than survive. They built.

Universities, hospitals, schools, newspapers, monasteries, political parties, towns that governed themselves. And a way of living together in which the largest sect did not simply rule the rest. Almost nowhere else in the Middle East was that ever built at all.

Lebanon itself came from this. In 1920, the Maronite Patriarch Elias Howayek went to Paris and stood before Clemenceau and Wilson and asked for a country, not a refuge, a Lebanon big enough to live. What he wanted was a place where the old law of the region did not apply, where a faith did not have to be the majority to be safe.

That country is broken now. Corruption ate it, weak men sold it, and Iran’s proxy took what was left. But it was real, and that it was real is the whole point, because the other paths were taken too, and you can see where they led.

The Copts of Egypt are ancient and they endure, but they live by the state’s permission. The Assyrians of Iraq were about 1.4 million in 2003. Now they are counted somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000, most of a people gone in twenty years, and the world hardly turned its head. Syria’s Christians were once a tenth of the country and have lost more than half their number since 2011.

There is a concept in Roman law, and Antioch was a Roman city, called nemo plus iuris transferre potest quam ipse habet. No one can transfer more rights than he himself possesses.

What passed to the Maronite Church, and by extension to Lebanese Christians more broadly, was not only a liturgical tradition and a set of beautiful vestments. It was the guardianship of the Levant, the land where the faith of Israel and then the Church were born, the ground of Abraham and Moses and the Incarnation itself.

An estimated fourteen million people of Lebanese Christian origin live outside Lebanon today, in São Paulo, Abidjan, Detroit, Sydney, Paris, Caracas, and dozens of other cities. Many families left after 1975. Many more are leaving now. But a Christianity kept only in the diaspora, in festivals and folk dances and parishes far from the mountain, is not the Church of Antioch and Chalcedon. It is the museum of it.

Since Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 637, the Eastern Church has lived under Islam, day after day, century after century, in violence, in fragile truce, in ordinary neighborliness, and always under pressure. That witness cannot be reproduced from the outside. It is what John Paul II meant when he said Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message, proof that in the East another arrangement is still possible, that the Christian need not choose only between exile and submission.

Lebanon’s Christians are still a third of the country. They still hold land, schools, churches, votes, and the memory of who they are. By every rule the region runs on, they should be a handful of old families by now, their churches kept as museums. They are not. That did not happen by luck. It happened because people decided, again and again, not to vanish.

The task of Lebanon’s Christians now is to keep that message in the present tense. Not to perform it for Western audiences. Not to sell it to diplomats while the pews empty out behind them. To live it, with enough numbers, enough institutions, and enough nerve that it does not slip into the past tense.

Mario Dayba is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

In Berlin, in May 1934, one hundred and thirty-nine delegates from the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of Germany gathered at the city of Barmen and signed a document. The document, drafted by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, ran to six articles. The articles did not mention Adolf Hitler by name. But every Christian in Germany who read the Barmen Declaration in May 1934 understood that the document was a public, ecclesial, theological repudiation of the regime that had taken power the previous year and of the church faction, the Deutsche Christen, the German Christians, that had supported the regime. Karl Barth mailed the document personally to Adolf Hitler

The signers paid for what they had done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, two weeks before American forces liberated the camp. Martin Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Catholic provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin who had aligned with the Confessing Church and prayed publicly for Jews each evening from the cathedral pulpit, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and died in transit to Dachau in November 1943.

The Confessing Church did not save Germany or prevented the camps, it was a minority within German Christianity, denounced by the majority of German pastors. What it did was speak. It did the thing the German majority church had refused to do and paid the cost the majority church refused to pay, and the majority church, in the long evening after 1945, had to live with the knowledge of what its silence had purchased.

Fence-sitting is not an absence of position, it is a position. It is the position the strong side wants the weak side to take, and the side that has captured the institutions of American cultural authority over the last sixty years has wanted, more than anything, the American church to take exactly that position. American Christianity now offers the culture almost nothing the culture has not already approved.

The German Christians of 1934 were ordinary pastors and ordinary churchgoers who had decided that the institutional survival of the German church mattered more than the prophetic content of the Christian message. They argued that opposing the regime would cost the church its remaining ability to do good in German society. They were not wrong about the cost. They were wrong about the math. The institutional church they were protecting did not survive. It was complicit in the crimes of the regime that was protecting it, and after the war it spent two generations doing penance for what it had failed to say when saying mattered. The American church is making the same calculation the German Christians made. It is going to discover, as the German Christians discovered, that the institutional survival it bought with its silence was a kind of death that had not yet announced itself.

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The prophet Isaiah was not writing to pagans when he warned, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. He was writing to the covenant people, who had decided it was easier to stop calling things what they were than to bear the cost of accurate speech. The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 22, recorded a divine indictment of the people of God: I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. The gap is left empty by the people who should have stood in it. Judgment fell on Jerusalem because righteous men were silent.

The Christ of the Gospels was not a fence-sitter, the Jesus the Gospels describe walked into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers in public, before crowds, with full understanding that the men he was insulting were watching for an opportunity to kill him. He called Herod, the political ruler of Galilee, that fox. When Pilate asserted authority over him, Jesus told the Roman governor to his face that he would have no power at all except that it had been given to him from above. These are not the words of a man committed to staying out of the public square. These are the words of a man who walked directly into it, knowing what it would cost him, and who paid the cost without flinching.

Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus that Christians are to expose the works of darkness, the Greek verb is elenchō, which means to refute, to convict, to bring into the open. It is the verb of a prosecutor in court. When Peter and John were brought before the Sanhedrin and ordered to stop preaching in the name of Jesus, they answered: We must obey God rather than human beings. They did not form a committee. They did not commission a study. They stood.

The Christian tradition’s great moments of public witness have, without exception, been moments of refusal to stay on the fence. William Wilberforce was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1785 at the age of twenty-six, while serving as a Member of the British Parliament. His conversion produced an eighteen-year campaign, conducted against the unanimous opposition of the British political and economic establishment, to abolish the slave trade. He introduced the first abolition bill in 1791. It failed. He introduced it again the next year. It failed. The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, three days before he died. Wilberforce was attacked in the press across his entire career, denounced as a betrayer of British economic interests, he did not care. He could not accept what his society was doing with the bodies of African human beings.

The civil rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. led was a movement of preachers. The mass meetings that sustained it were held in Black churches. The vocabulary of the speeches that defined the movement was the vocabulary of Amos and Isaiah and the Hebrew prophets, deployed by a Christian preacher who understood that the gospel had political implications and that those implications had to be preached in public. King paid the cost. He was jailed nineteen times. His home was bombed. He was stabbed in 1958 by a deranged assailant. He was finally murdered on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had spent fourteen years on the public stage and he had never, for a single day of those fourteen years, sat on the fence.

The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day were paid to tell the people what the people wanted to hear, which was that the situation was under control, that the cultural patterns the people had grown comfortable with would continue unchanged into the future. The situation was not under control. Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the people went into exile, and the false prophets who had assured them everything would be fine went with them, into an exile their cowardice had helped to produce.

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If the church stays on the fence while these lies are told, the church will watch the end of Western civilization from inside its own sanctuaries. Islam conquers the public square. That is what it has done in every civilization it has entered, from seventh-century Damascus to twenty-first-century London, and it is what it will do in America if the institutions that should be defending the foundations of the West continue to behave as though their job is to be polite. The polite church will not be allowed to remain polite under Islamic political authority. It will be made to convert, to pay the jizya, or to disappear.

The American church is busy with the couples’ night programs, the Wednesday small groups, the staff retreats, the building campaigns, and the budget meetings to keep the lights on in the converted shopping centers that many large American congregations now occupy. The pastor is busy preparing his sermon series on personal growth. The elder board is busy reviewing the audiovisual contract. The church is busy, while the central story of Western civilization is being rewritten by those who have been waiting fourteen centuries for the Christian West to fail.

Abd Alfadi is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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One word succinctly defines the outrage: anti-Zionism. Its adherents claim it represents legitimate political and theological positions. That excuse, however, masks centuries of hatred toward Jews. It not only contradicts the position of many churches. It not only encourages historical manipulation. It ultimately ignores the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.

Perhaps the most organized Christian exponents of anti-Zionism are traditionalist Catholics. The most visible include podcasters Candace Owens and Jason Jones—who equates Zionism with Satanism—and former government officials Carrie Prejean Boller and Joe Kent.

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Boller, fired from the White House Religious Liberty Commission, calls Israel “evil” and “a terrorist state.” She posted that “Catholics reject Zionism,” that Christianity has been “hijacked” by Zionism’s “heretical teachings” and that “We Catholics are taking Christianity back.”

When Israeli authorities prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from celebrating Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, Boller made this vitriolic X post:

“The Israeli government hates Christians. We’re seeing now how Christians are treated in occupied Palestine. You can no longer hide it. This is the fruit of your heretical teaching of Zionist supremacy.”

Joining Boller and her traditionalist comrades are such traditionalist outlets as LifeSite News, Crisis Magazine and The Remnant. Their collective stance reflects the position of Pope Pius X, who rejected a request in 1904 from Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, to support Jewish settlement in Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

“We cannot give approval to this movement,”Pius said. “We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem—but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church I cannot tell you anything different. The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”

Archbishop Angelo Roncalli begged to differ. Roncalli, a papal diplomat based in Turkey during World War II, dedicated himself as early as 1940 to helping Jews reach Palestine, which the British secured after World War I. In 1944, he managed an operation using baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas—some forged—to get Jews out of Europe. Since Nazi officials recognized the documents as legitimate, the bearers had unimpeded travel access. Many went to Palestine.

In 1958, Roncalli became Pope John XXIII, who called a council to help the Catholic Church navigate the modern world. One of the many documents that emerged, Nostra aetate [In Our Time], renounced Catholicism’s historic antisemitism.

“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues….

“Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.

“Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

Nostra aetate has since become part of the Catholic catechism.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II opened diplomatic relations with Israel, making Pius’ objections moot.

R.R. Reno, ethicist and editor of the Catholic journal First Things, dismissed Boller’s assertions in a Washington Post op-ed.

“In fact, the Catholic Church advances no specific teaching on Zionism,” wrote Reno. “I am a Catholic and a Zionist. But my position is not ‘Catholic Zionism.’ Rather, it is plain-old Zionism: The Jewish people are justified in establishing a sovereign nation in the land of their ancestors.”

Joining traditionalist Catholics in their anti-Zionism is a group of Millennial Calvinist pastors whose views reflect those of R.J. Rushdoony, who created a legal system called Christian Reconstructionism that would supplant Constitutional law with the Mosaic Law in toto.

Rushdoony not only equated Zionism to Nazism. He dismissed the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust and even dismissed the Jewish genealogy of European Jews.

The most visible of these pastors is Joel Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas and founder of Right Response Ministries, which promotes Christian Reconstructionism. On X, Webbon revels in his contempt for Jews:

“Religiously speaking, I believe that Judaism is ‘anti-Christ.’ I believe it is a pernicious evil. I fully recognize that many Jews are secular, and do not practice Judaism. However, ... American [sic] was profoundly shaped by Christian thought and Christian values. Likewise, Israel has been deeply shaped by a religion that has as its foundation, a complete rejection of Christ.

“A people shaped by a rejection of the ‘Logos’ ... will have at least some degree of hostility towards God’s natural order. They will resist, and at times even seek to subvert, natural distinctions and hierarchy.”

Webbon also uses X to broadcast the quiet part at ear-splitting volume. In response to Tucker Carlson’s comments at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, in which Carlson accused the Jews of killing Jesus, Webbon disagreed yet agreed.

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“We all killed Jesus by our sin.” Webbon wrote. “Also...the Jews killed Jesus.”

On February 26, Webbon stated his views more emphatically:

“When your Christian theology puts you on the same side as those who killed Christ then you do not know God.”

Like Webbon, the late Dr. John MacArthur was a Calvinist. Unlike Webbon, the former president of The Master’s University and pastor of Grace Community Church, both in Metropolitan Los Angeles, admonished those who shared Webbon’s views.

“I think we are obliged to stand as protectors of the Jews,” MacArthur said, “and they’re constituted now, obviously, globally in their own nation, and so we should be protectors of that people and that nation.”

One of Webbon’s ideological comrades is the Rev. Calvin Robinson, a former Anglican priest who either left or was expelled from four denominations since the Church of England refused to ordain him in 2022. In a March 14 post on X he asserted:

“Christ died for us. The Jews had him killed. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Robinson made an interesting comment on X on February 28 when the United States and Israel killed many of Iran’s key political and military leaders—including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—in a surprise bombing attack:

“Israel has proven itself to be the greatest threat to the world. Zionism is the greatest threat to the West/Christendom. That much should be obvious by now....”

Robinson followed on March 21 by posting that “Israel has no right to exist” and declared the next day that “Israel is a terrorist state. Zionism should be proscribed.”

The former Anglican also holds the term “Judeo-Christian” in contempt. In a December 18 post on X, he wrote:

“I am a Christian, not a Judeo-Christian. My faith is the Christian faith, not Judeo-Christian faith. I believe in and am a follower of Jesus Christ, not Jesus Judeo-Christ. I try to live by Christian values, not Judeo-Christian values.”

Such ignorance reflects blatant disregard for basic biblical history.

Without Judaism, Christianity would not exist. The Tanakh constitutes most of the Christian Bible. Christianity’s fundamental moral framework came from those Jewish scriptures, especially the Ten Commandments. John the Baptist’s proclamation of Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” reflected the Mosaic Law’s demands for sacrificial atonement.

Jesus was Jewish. A genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel traces Jesus’ ancestry to David. All of Jesus’ earliest followers were Jewish, as the first nine chapters of the New Testament’s Book of Acts demonstrate. They worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple. Peter was on his way there when Acts 3 describes him healing a lame man sitting at one of the Temple’s gates.

If the earliest Christians were not Jewish, the Sanhedrin would have had no authority to interrogate Peter and John in Acts 4 nor Stephen in Acts 7.

The Sanhedrin also had the authority to try Jesus but no power to execute capital punishment. Only the Romans, the civil authority, had it. That explains why the Sanhedrin transferred custody in John 18 to Pontius Pilate, Judea’s governor. Though Pilate had the power to release Jesus, as John 18 and 19 describe, he placated a mob by refusing to exercise that power. Roman soldiers then tortured Jesus before crucifying him. Thus the Romans bear the ultimate responsibility for killing Jesus.

Before his death, however, Jesus made an astonishing claim.

“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again,” John 10 quotes Jesus as saying. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Centuries earlier, in a passage Christians consider to be messianic prophecy, Isaiah wrote something even more audacious:

“It was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.”

So who killed Jesus? The Jews? The Romans? God, whom Jesus claimed to be his father?

In the final analysis, all discussion about culpability vanishes in the face of Christianity’s ultimate claim: Jesus rose from the dead to make reconciliation between sinful humanity and a holy, righteous God possible. As Paul the Apostle—a former Pharisee devoted to persecuting Christians—wrote to believers in a major Greek city, Corinth:

“If Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. ... if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost!”

In terms of Christian theology, therefore, it matters not whether the Jews, the Romans, the Martians, the Klingons or any other group killed Jesus. It only matters to those who wish to promote a pernicious ideology.

Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Pascal, writing in the Pensées (c. 1658), argued that the continued existence and distinctiveness of the Jewish people constituted evidence for the truth of scripture. His argument was modest: a dispersed people survived intact across millennia, fulfilling ancient prophecy. At best, this observation amounted to an interesting apologetic note—but not a proof.

I decided to rebuild that argument from the ground up: to extend it across seven independent domains, test it against a control group, and stress-test it for self-consistency. What follows is the result.

I. The Historical Pattern: Civilizational Inflection Points

Where Pascal noted Jewish survival, I found something far stranger: at every major civilizational collapse in recorded history, while all other peoples were diminished, the Jewish people received an upgrade. This is not survival. This is anti-fragility at civilizational scale.

1. The 4.2 Kiloyear Event (~2200 BC)

A catastrophic drought lasting approximately 200 years collapsed the Akkadian Empire, destabilized Old Kingdom Egypt, and disrupted the Indus Valley Civilization simultaneously. This is among the most significant systemic collapses in the ancient world.

If the traditional chronology of the biblical narratives holds—and here I am working with the dating proposed by W.F. Albright and Nelson Glueck—this period corresponds to the patriarchal era. While surrounding civilizations fragmented, Abraham’s lineage was consolidating a distinct covenantal identity: the foundational act of Jewish peoplehood. The dating of the patriarchal narratives remains contested in scholarship. The correspondence is suggestive rather than demonstrative.

2. The End of the Bronze Age (~1200 BC)

The most dramatic systemic collapse in ancient history: the Mycenaean civilization, the Hittite Empire, Ugarit, and numerous Late Bronze Age polities all collapsed within a fifty-year window. Egypt survived but was permanently weakened. Virtually every major civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean either vanished or was gutted. The era between 1100 and 750 BC was marked by the loss of Linear B writing, the abandonment of cities, and the breakdown of trade networks. Written language disappeared. Monumental art, large-scale architecture, and high-quality pottery ceased to be produced. The whole of the Near East went silent—with one exception. A small monarchy was entering its golden age.

This is precisely when Israel emerges as a recognizable, named entity. The Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BC) provides the earliest external attestation. The vacuum created by the collapse gave room for the consolidation that would eventually produce the Davidic monarchy.

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3. The Babylonian Exile and Return (586–538 BC)

Destruction of the First Temple, deportation to Babylon, loss of land and political sovereignty—these were the conditions that dissolved every other ancient people who encountered them. Instead of assimilating into Babylonian culture, as conquered peoples invariably did, the exiles returned with a deepened and codified religious identity. The Torah in its canonical form crystallized during this period. Destruction produced consolidation.

4. The Russian Pogroms (1880s–1920s)

Systematic massacres and expulsions across the Pale of Settlement killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. The intended outcome was elimination or permanent marginalization. The actual outcome was mass emigration that built Jewish communities in New York, Chicago, London, and Buenos Aires into enormously influential cultural, intellectual, and economic centers. The destruction of Eastern European Jewry paradoxically amplified Jewish presence and influence across the Western world.

5. The Holocaust (1939–1945)

The most industrialized genocide in human history—a deliberate, technologically sophisticated, state-organized attempt to eliminate European Jewry entirely. One third of the global Jewish population was murdered. Within three years of the war’s end, the State of Israel existed.

The causal relationship between the Holocaust and Israeli statehood is historically complex. Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, and a serious case can be made that the destruction of Europe’s most Zionist-oriented communities delayed rather than caused independence. My argument here is narrower and does not depend on a causal claim: an event specifically designed to permanently end Jewish peoplehood failed to do so within three years of its conclusion. The mechanism inverted its own intended outcome. That inversion is the datum, whatever its mechanism.

6. The 20th-Century Dissolution of Empires

The Ottoman, British, French, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires all dissolved, contracted, or collapsed within a fifty-year window. The Jewish people went from stateless diaspora—minorities everywhere, majorities nowhere—to sovereign statehood in 1948. As empires fell, the one people without an empire gained one.

The pattern across all six inflection points is identical: conditions that diminish or eliminate other peoples produce upgrades for the Jewish people. This is not survival. The pattern holds across six independent historical junctures spanning more than three thousand years.

II. The Generativity Argument: Civilizational Source Code

Pascal argued that the Jewish people persisted. I am making a stronger claim: the Jewish people produced the philosophical operating system that the majority of humanity now runs on. No other civilization independently derived the same package. Individual ideas appear elsewhere in isolation; what appears only once, in this tradition, is their unification into a coherent, internally consistent, and globally transmissible worldview.

Linear Time

Almost every ancient civilization operated with cyclical time: Greco-Roman eternal recurrence, Hindu cosmic cycles, Mesopotamian repetition. The Hebrew Bible introduced time as a directed narrative—with a beginning, unfolding meaning, and a destination. Without this foundational move, the concepts of progress, development, and history as meaningful sequence become incoherent. Secular progressivism is this idea with God removed but the architecture intact.

Universal Human Dignity

The concept of Tzelem Elohim—every human being made in the image of God—appears in Genesis 1:27 and applies without qualification to every person regardless of status, origin, or function. Not just kings or priests. Every person. This is the actual philosophical foundation of universal human rights. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) does not acknowledge its source, but it is this idea, secularized.

Consent of the Governed

The Sinai covenant is a mutual agreement: God proposes, the people ratify. The prophetic tradition then holds kings accountable to that covenant—Samuel explicitly warns about tyrannical kingship (1 Samuel 8), and the prophets repeatedly address the obligations of rulers to the covenantal community. The king is under the law, not above it.

Rule of Law

Deuteronomy 17 requires the king to write his own Torah scroll and read it daily—the sovereign is explicitly subject to the same law as the citizen. This is the conceptual grandfather of the Magna Carta (1215), constitutionalism, and judicial review.

The point is not that each of these ideas exists in isolation elsewhere. Greece had rule of law; Zoroastrianism had a version of directed time; China had sophisticated ethics. The decisive point is that no other civilization unified these ideas into a coherent, mutually reinforcing, internally consistent worldview capable of global transmission as a single package. Every other civilization produced one or two modules. Only one civilization shipped the complete kernel—and then watched it become the operating system of modernity. The probability that a Bronze Age shepherd arrived at this entire package independently, without transmission or design, is left as an exercise for the reader.

III. The Pattern-Breaking Argument: When Sociological Laws Fail

The social sciences have produced some of their most reliable findings in the study of group persistence and assimilation. These are not tentative hypotheses—they are patterns so consistent across cultures, centuries, and continents that they function as empirical laws. They hold without exception. Until this case.

Dispersed minorities assimilate within three to five generations. This has been documented across every immigrant community studied in the modern era. The mechanism is consistent: majority culture exerts demographic, economic, and social pressure on minority identity until it dissolves into the host. The Jewish people have been a dispersed minority for approximately 1,700 years. The law did not apply.

Peoples without territorial sovereignty lose their distinct ethnic identity within a few centuries. Without a homeland to anchor collective memory and organize the reproduction of culture, group distinctiveness diffuses over generations into the surrounding population. The Jewish people spent seventeen centuries without territorial sovereignty. The law did not apply.

Communities under sustained persecution without political power dissolve culturally. Pressure without protection destroys cohesion. The Jewish people were subject to sustained, multi-generational, continent-spanning persecution without political protection for the entire length of the diaspora. The law did not apply.

Languages without a living territory die and stay dead. Peoples subjected to industrial-scale genocide do not reconstitute as sovereign nations within three years of its conclusion. The law did not apply. The law did not apply.

The Jewish case does not merely challenge one sociological law. It challenges all of them simultaneously, in the same direction, across 3,500 years. When a single anomaly contradicts a law, the anomaly is investigated. When a single subject contradicts every law in the field simultaneously—and does so consistently across millennia—the anomaly has become the most important datum in the discipline.

IV. The Control Group: The Coptic Church

Being a Copt; an Egyptian, I compared the history of the Jewish people with the history of my own people. After all, we went through remarkably similar experiences—we were conquered and occupied by the same civilizations, from the Greeks to the British. So I am using my own people as the control group.

The Coptic Church of Egypt provides a near-perfect experimental control for isolating the variable responsible for Jewish survivalism—though the analogy requires care, and the disanalogies are worth stating before the comparison is made.

The Copts are not a globally dispersed diaspora. Unlike the Jewish people, we retained our homeland throughout our history of subjugation, and the dynamics of a persecuted territorial minority differ structurally from those of a stateless people hunted across multiple continents simultaneously.

This asymmetry should be kept in view. Nevertheless, the Coptic Church matches nearly every other initial condition of the Jewish experience: an ancient people, a distinct religious community, a persecuted minority with continuous identity and liturgical tradition—and with considerably better starting conditions than the Jews possessed.

The results are precisely inverted. Better conditions produced dramatically worse outcomes across every measurable dimension.

The language comparison demands particular precision. What Coptic demonstrates is the maximum achievable through religious preservation alone: clergy knowledge, liturgical continuity, and a handful of words repeated in prayer by a congregation that does not understand them. The chain of vernacular transmission is broken entirely.

The test for whether a language is alive is not whether priests recite it at services. The test is whether a secular, non-believing member of the community speaks it as a native tongue—whether the language exists outside the ritual container. Hebrew passed that test. The State of Israel contains Hebrew-speaking atheists who argue philosophy, write novels, and raise children in the language. Coptic did not pass that test. It did not come close.

Acknowledging the structural disanalogy between Coptic and Jewish experience makes the comparison more striking, not less. We Copts had the easier conditions: territorial continuity, no continent-spanning persecution, no industrial genocide. If natural variables account for what happened to the Jewish people, then we should have matched or exceeded the Jewish outcome. We did not. The inverse result—better conditions producing dramatically worse outcomes—eliminates entire classes of natural explanation simultaneously.

V. The Linguistic Argument: The Only Language Revival in History

Languages die constantly and stay dead. Latin, Ancient Greek, Sumerian, Coptic, Old Norse—all attempts at revival have produced at best liturgical preservation or academic curiosity, never a living vernacular with native speakers. The chain of intergenerational transmission, once broken, has never been repaired in any other case in the entire history of linguistics.

Hebrew went from purely liturgical use across approximately 1,700 years to the native first language of millions within a single generation. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s project in the late 19th and early 20th century accomplished what has no parallel in the entire recorded history of human language.

Language is the most fragile carrier of culture. It requires unbroken daily use to survive—not ceremonial use, not scholarly use, but the unremarkable, secular, ordinary use of daily life: arguing over prices, telling jokes, raising children, writing bad poetry. Hebrew had that chain completely severed and still returned as a living vernacular. A Hebrew-speaking Israeli atheist is an entirely unremarkable figure. That fact is, on examination, one of the most anomalous in the history of human civilization.

VI. The Biological Argument: The Only Extinct Species Revival

The Judean date palm (Phoenix dactylifera, Judean variety) was extinct since the Crusades. Seeds recovered from the archaeological site of Masada, dormant for two millennia, were successfully germinated by Dr Elaine Solowey in 2005. The resulting tree, named Methuselah, has since been joined by additional successful germinations from the same ancient seed stock.

A species declared extinct—defined biologically as having no living representatives—has been reconstituted from archaeological remains. Nothing equivalent exists in botanical history. Seeds dormant for decades are occasionally viable. Seeds dormant for two thousand years producing healthy, reproducing trees is without precedent.

This event occurred in Israel, from seeds recovered at one of the most symbolically significant sites in Jewish history—a site of mass resistance against Roman destruction—at the same historical moment as the broader reconstitution of Jewish nationhood.

The coincidence of domain, location, and timing is noted without asserting a causal interpretation. The reader may assign it whatever weight they judge appropriate.

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VII. The Compounding Case

The domains documented in Sections I through VI are genuinely independent of one another—historical, sociological, intellectual, pattern-breaking, methodological, linguistic, biological. They share no common methodology, no common timeframe, and no common evidentiary standard. A challenge to one domain leaves the others standing.

When independent anomalies accumulate across firewalled domains, their evidential weight compounds rather than averages. This is not a rhetorical claim. It is how probability works: the joint probability of independent events is the product of their individual probabilities, not their mean. Each domain, assessed honestly, is extraordinary on its own terms. The product of extraordinary events across seven independent domains is something of a different order altogether.

The precise calculation is left to the reader. The inputs are the observations in the preceding sections. Assign your own probability to each domain—be as skeptical as intellectual honesty requires—and multiply. The argument does not depend on any particular figure. It depends on whether, after an honest assessment of each domain separately, the product remains extraordinary. My judgment is that it does—by many orders of magnitude. But the reader’s own arithmetic, arrived at independently, is more persuasive than any figure I could supply. The invitation to calculate is not a dodge. It is the argument’s confidence in its own inputs.

One irony deserves acknowledgment before any such calculation begins. The tool the reader is about to use—probability theory—presupposes linear time, universal abstract invariants, and a cosmos governed by reproducible law. These are not culturally neutral assumptions. They are specifically the philosophical inheritance that this tradition transmitted to Western civilization, as documented in Section II. The skeptic who reaches for these tools to evaluate the evidence is not standing on neutral ground.

The investigation is being conducted with instruments manufactured by the subject of the investigation. This is not a flaw in the argument. It is an additional data point for it.

VIII. The Transcendental Challenge: Borrowed Tools

The preceding sections constitute an evidentialist argument. This section goes deeper. It examines the conditions under which any argument about this question is possible at all—and finds that those conditions are not neutral.

Consider what any natural explanation of Jewish survivalism must employ:

Logic—which requires non-contradictory, directed, linear inference.

Mathematics—which presupposes universal abstract invariants that hold across all

minds and all times.

Probability theory—which is only coherent if time is linear, events are distinct, and the future structurally resembles the past, because we inhabit a universe governed by reproducible universal laws.

The scientific method—which assumes a cosmos under rule of law, with results reproducible across times, places, and observers.

Every single one of these tools presupposes the worldview documented in Section II. Linear time is the distinctive philosophical contribution this tradition transmitted to the West. The universality of human reason is grounded in Tzelem Elohim—the claim that every person shares a common rational nature because every person bears the image of the same God. The rule of law in the natural order mirrors the theological framework of Deuteronomy. Probability theory as a coherent discipline requires directed time and the meaningfulness of historical sequence.

The skeptic who reaches for these tools to evaluate the evidence is not standing on neutral ground. There is no neutral ground. The tools themselves are downstream of the tradition they are being used to examine.

The skeptic faces an inescapable dilemma: use rational tools—and thereby presuppose the Jewish worldview, conceding the generativity argument—or abandon rational tools—and thereby have no argument at all. There is no third option. It is as if someone attempted to disprove the existence of oxygen while breathing.

IX. Objections Considered

Objection 1: Survivorship Bias

The most common objection runs as follows: we notice peoples who survived because they survived. The historical record does not preserve the vanished. We are therefore drawing the target around the bullet holes after firing—the classic error known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

This objection mistakes this case for its structural opposite. The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy applies when survival is accidental—random populations randomly persisting, with the observer drawing the target retrospectively. The Jewish case has the opposite structure. The targeting was deliberate, named, and premeditated—by Pharaoh, by Haman, by Antiochus Epiphanes, by Rome, by the Inquisition, by the Cossacks, by the Third Reich. Each attacker explicitly identified the target in advance, mobilized significant state power against it, and announced its eliminatory intent publicly. The target was drawn before the shot, by the attacker, not retrospectively by the analyst. The Akkadian Empire is gone. The Hittites are gone. Rome is gone. The Third Reich lasted twelve years. The target of each campaign is still here. The eliminators are history. The eliminated are history’s most documented living people.

This structural inversion transforms the objection into additional evidence. Survivorship bias would predict random survival across random populations. What we observe instead is the consistent survival of the most deliberately and repeatedly targeted population in recorded history, under conditions specifically engineered for elimination. The more sophisticated and intentional the elimination attempt, the more anomalous the survival.

The comparison with other persecuted peoples sharpens this further. Indigenous American populations were catastrophically destroyed—but primarily by disease, an accidental vector of contact that required no particular targeting. The mechanism was biological and largely unplanned. Jewish elimination attempts were the opposite: maximally intentional, organizationally sophisticated, and distributed across completely different civilizations with no shared methodology—Babylonian, Roman, Catholic, Islamic, and finally secular-bureaucratic Nazi. All of them failed. Survivorship bias explains accidental persistence. It has no mechanism for deliberate, repeated, sophisticated failure-to-eliminate followed by systematic enhancement.

Objection 2: The Domains Are Not Truly Independent

A more technically sophisticated objection targets the compounding logic. The linguistic revival, the national reconstitution, and the biological argument are all connected to the same twentieth-century Zionist project. Connected domains should not be treated as independent events.

This objection also inverts into evidence. The relevant question is not whether the domains are logically connected. It is what conditions prevailed when those connected achievements occurred.

Connected systems fail together under existential pressure. This is the universal pattern: when a civilization collapses, its language, its institutions, its cultural output, and its biological legacy collapse simultaneously. The interconnection of these elements is precisely what makes civilizational destruction so total.

The Jewish domains were connected in exactly this way—linguistically, culturally, biologically, institutionally. They shared identical kill conditions across seventeen centuries. Under those conditions, connected systems should have failed together, as they always do. The Hebrew language was preserved and revived while the people who spoke it were being hunted, their literature burned, their communities destroyed, and their children forcibly converted. The Masada seeds survived in soil soaked with the blood of the last defenders of Jewish sovereignty. The interconnection tightens the noose. The fact that connected systems survived it anyway is the argument, not a weakness in it.

X. The Witness

Every version of Pascal’s argument is vulnerable to a single dismissal: bias. The Jewish person has self-interest. The Christian has a theological agenda. The Western academic has a cultural inheritance. The Israeli has a political motivation.

I developed this argument as an Egyptian Reformed Christian—someone formed in an honor-shame culture with strong social, familial, and civilizational incentives to resist this conclusion. The cost of following the evidence was not abstract. I lost friendships. I was labeled a Zionist collaborator. I was accused of complicity in the killing of children. The sincerity of my own faith was questioned. None of these accusations engaged a single premise of the argument.

They are noted here not as grievance, but as data—testimony about the social temperature surrounding conclusions the evidence appears to require, and about what kind of pressure this argument had to be developed against.

This is not merely biographical detail. It demonstrates the argument’s generativity claim in practice: producing its most unlikely advocate not through inheritance or tribal loyalty, but through the compulsion of evidence followed honestly across every domain to wherever it led.

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XI. Jeremiah 31:35–36—Prophecy as Physics

“Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord of hosts is his name: If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the Lord, then shall the offspring of Israel cease from being a nation before me forever.” (Jeremiah 31:35–36, written approximately 600 BC.)

Pascal quoted prophecy. He did not quote this one. He should have—because this text does something categorically different from general prophetic assertion. It does not merely predict Jewish survival. It specifies the mechanism, the guarantee, and the conditions of falsification with the precision of a physical equation.

The guarantee of Jewish continuity is explicitly tied to the solar constant, to lunar orbital mechanics, to stellar physics, and to ocean wave dynamics. These are not poetic ornaments. They are physical constants. Jeremiah is explicitly anchoring the permanence of the Jewish people to the same layer of reality as the laws of thermodynamics. The falsification condition is stated with logical precision: if the fixed order of the cosmos departs, then and only then shall Israel cease. The contrapositive is equally precise: while the cosmos holds, Israel holds.

Written approximately 600 BC—before the Babylonian exile it was predicting survival through, before the Hellenistic period, before Rome, before the diaspora, before every pogrom, before the Holocaust, before 1948, before Ben-Yehuda, before the Masada seeds—this text did not merely predict the outcome. It named the domain in which the outcome would be decided.

The multi-domain analysis in this document, built from history, sociology, linguistics, and biology, arrived at the conclusion that Jewish continuity operates at the level of physical law. Jeremiah said that first. In 600 BC. The text did not just see the data coming. It named the domain in which the data would operate, 2,600 years before the data existed.

That is not prophecy as fortune-telling. That is prophecy as physics.

XII. The Kernel Argument: Function Within the Whole

The generativity argument established that the Jewish people authored the philosophical operating system that most of humanity now runs on. The accumulated evidence across all preceding sections suggests something further: the Jewish people did not merely contribute to the operating system. They wrote the kernel.

What a Kernel Does

It runs below everything else—invisible to most users. It cannot be removed without the whole system collapsing. Everything that appears to operate independently is actually running on top of it. Its operations are presupposed by every process, including processes that deny its existence.

How This Maps

Secular democracy runs on the kernel—it presupposes human dignity, linear historical progress, and consent of the governed, all of which originate there. Modern science runs on the kernel—it presupposes a cosmos under rational law, reproducibility across time, and the meaningfulness of history. Human rights law runs on the kernel—it presupposes Tzelem Elohim even when it has forgotten the name. Even the arguments against the kernel run on the kernel—they use linear logic, universal reason, and rule of law to make their case.

Function, Not Superiority

This is not a claim of Jewish superiority. That framing misses the point entirely. The heart does not consider itself superior to other organs. It performs a function within the body. The question of superiority does not arise—only the question of function. The evidence across seven independent domains converges on the conclusion that a function was assigned, and that the assignment has proven extraordinarily resistant to cancellation across 3,500 years.

As Paul wrote in Romans 11:29: “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.” The evidence, examined from the outside, appears to confirm the claim from the inside.

XIII. The Pascal Irony: The Father of Probability Missed the Proof

Blaise Pascal was arguably the greatest probabilist of the 17th century. He invented expected value theory. He built one of the first mechanical calculators. He founded modern probability theory in correspondence with Fermat. He understood combinatorics, odds, and the mathematics of uncertainty more deeply than virtually any thinker of his age.

And he looked at the most probability-defying phenomenon in human history—a phenomenon sitting directly in front of him, which he explicitly chose as the subject of his apologetic argument—and wrote a few paragraphs.

The father of probability theory failed to apply probability theory to the single event that most demanded it. He had every intellectual tool required to produce the argument in this document. He used none of them in that way.

Why He Missed It

The explanation is precise. Pascal could not see the kernel from inside the kernel. The Jewish worldview had so thoroughly saturated the intellectual atmosphere of 17th-century Catholic France that Pascal was breathing it without knowing it. Linear time, universal human dignity, rule of law, the meaningfulness of history—these did not register as data points. They felt like air: the self-evident background conditions of rational thought.

It took someone formed outside the kernel to step back far enough to see it as an object, examine it, and recognize what it was. In this case, that meant me: an Egyptian Christian, shaped in a civilizational tradition with different foundational assumptions, with every cultural incentive to reach a different conclusion.

Pascal missed the proof because the proof was already working on him. He was, without knowing it, Exhibit A of the generativity argument he was attempting to make. He was swimming in the evidence. He could not see the water.

The Irony Stated Precisely

The father of probability theory, writing an argument about Jewish survivalism, did not calculate the probability of Jewish survivalism. The argument was completed 370 years later, using the tools he invented, by someone his own civilization would have considered an unlikely candidate for the conclusion.

That is either the greatest irony in the history of philosophy—or evidence that the kernel has a sense of humor.

XIV. The Text Saw You Coming

There is a final observation that does not fit neatly into any of the preceding categories because it is not an argument. It is an event.

I set out to audit this question rather than confirm it. I followed the evidence across seven independent domains—historical, sociological, intellectual, pattern-breaking, methodological, linguistic, biological—and arrived at Jeremiah 31:35–36.

Not at a general sense of the divine. Not at a vague spiritual intuition. At a specific text, written in a specific language, by a specific tradition, approximately 2,600 years ago, which had already named the mechanism, specified the physical constants, and stated the falsification conditions of the conclusion my analysis had just independently reached.

My response was an involuntary desire to sing a doxology. This is worth examining carefully—not as emotion overriding reason, but as reason arriving at its own outer edge and recognizing that something is present beyond it, with the appropriate human response expressing itself.

Jeremiah 31 was written in approximately 600 BC. At that time:

• Egypt was a great power. Israel was about to be destroyed.

• Islam would not exist for another 1,200 years.

• Probability theory would not exist for another 2,250 years.

• The Holocaust would not occur for another 2,540 years.

• The State of Israel would not be reestablished for another 2,548 years.

And yet the text, written then, in those circumstances, produced a statement that an Egyptian Christian using 21st-century probability theory would arrive at independently, from the other direction, 2,600 years later.

The pun—that the father of probability missed the probability argument—was unintended by me when I noticed it. The joke, apparently, was not unintended by whoever constructed the situation in which it arose.

The text did not just predict the survival of a people. It predicted this discussion. It was waiting.

XV. Summary and Conclusion

Pascal’s original argument was a mildly interesting apologetic observation. The argument reconstructed and expanded here is something categorically different.

The Bayesian conclusion is straightforward. The domains documented in this argument are genuinely independent. Their evidential weight compounds. Under the null hypothesis of natural processes, any honest calculation of the joint probability of the observed data yields a figure that strains the descriptive capacity of ordinary language.

Under the hypothesis of a common cause—call it providence, design, or covenant—the probability of the observations rises dramatically. When the likelihood ratio becomes sufficiently extreme, rational inference compels updating toward the alternative. That is not theology. It is probability theory applied consistently.

Jeremiah 31:35–36, written 2,600 years ago, tied the permanence of the Jewish people to the fixed order of the cosmos—solar, lunar, stellar, tidal. The multi-domain analysis in this document, conducted with 21st-century tools, arrived at the same conclusion from the other direction: Jewish continuity operates at the level of physical law. The text named the mechanism before the data existed. The data confirmed the mechanism without knowing the text.

Pascal had a sketch. This is a proof. The proof uses tools that are themselves part of the proof. And the text that predicted the proof was written before the tools existed.

The stars are still there. So are they.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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A peace agreement between the Ethiopian Government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) formally ended the fighting in 2022. However, it did not end the human rights violations.

Over the past seven years, Ethiopian Christians have been subjected to extensive human rights abuses. These violations are marked by recurring incidents of massacres, extrajudicial killings, drone strikes, forced displacements, sexual violence, and mass arrests, amongst other atrocities.

Such acts of violence are orchestrated by far-left armed groups. These incidents often involve the complicity or passive acquiescence of local authorities. They are predominantly driven by ethnic and religious discrimination, leading to substantial casualties.

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Ethiopia is an ethnically diverse nation with around ninety distinct ethnic groups. Oromo, the country’s largest ethno-linguistic group, constitutes more than one-third of the population and is home to the largest Muslim community. A significant portion of the Oromo population also identifies as Christian. The Amhara, who are Orthodox Christian, are the next largest ethno-linguistic group in the country. Other major groups include the Somali, Tigray, Sidama, Gurage, Welaita, and Afar.

Ethiopia primarily adheres to Christianity (~60%) and Islam (~33%). The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (~43%) is dominant, particularly in the north, while Protestantism (20%) is growing in the south and west. Islam is prevalent in the Afar, Somali, and Oromia regions.

Escalating Violence

The Amhara people in Ethiopia have faced persecution and massacres for several decades. Various groups, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA)/Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which are rooted in Marxism-Leninism and ethno-nationalism, as well as the ruling Prosperity Party (PP), are accused of orchestrating these crimes.

Meanwhile, violence has escalated in the Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions and surrounding areas of Ethiopia since the beginning of this year. Rising tensions between the Ethiopian government and Eritrea regarding their disputed border territory have also brought the November 2022 Peace Agreement to the verge of collapse.

The Amhara Association of America (AAA), in a February 8 press statement, said the war was being carried out by the ruling Prosperity Party in cooperation with the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and allied forces, including Oromia Region Special Forces. “Abuses were predominantly identity-based, targeting ethnic Amhara communities and persons affiliated to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC),” the statement said.

In January 2026 alone, AAA’s initiative Amhara War Updates (AWU) recorded battle events and human rights incidents across 106 distinct districts in 19 zonal administrations in four regions (Amhara, Oromia, Benishangul-Gumuz, and Addis Ababa). “While the majority of human rights incidents implicated Oromo Prosperity Party (OPP) regime forces, other perpetrators included Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces, Oromia Region Forces, Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) militants and Gumuz militants,” AWU said.

Since January 2023, there have been consistent reports of the Ethiopian government orchestrating discriminatory displacements, targeting primarily non-Oromos, especially Amharas, in the vicinity of the capital.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) reported:

“The prevailing anti-Amhara sentiment is closely tied to an aversion to the Orthodox faith, as most of the Amhara people are Orthodox Christians…

“The human rights violations range from forced displacement and mass arrests to systematic massacres and ethnic cleansings. For instance, on June 18, 2022, the Amhara community in Wollega within the Oromia region of Ethiopia was brutally slaughtered in what is now called the Gimbi massacre. The victim count is between 400–500 people. The modus operandi involved extreme cruelty, including the burning alive of individuals and the mutilation of pregnant women…

“These violations not only qualify as crimes against humanity but also evince a systematic trajectory toward genocide.”

In May 2022, the government reportedly detained over 4,000 ethnic Amhara individuals. This number surged following the declaration of a state of emergency in August 2023. The ECLJ noted: “While these issues have garnered international attention, the extent of the abuses, specifically those inflicted upon the Amhara population, lacks sufficient coverage.”

Tedla Melaku, an Ethiopian-American author and humanitarian advocate whose academic background is in philosophy and social sciences, is trying to raise awareness about the persecution of Christians in Ethiopia. His book Reason and the Sacred: Ethiopian Metaphysics explores Orthodox Christian theology and Christian mysticism, with a focus on Ethiopia’s unique ancient Jewish-Middle Eastern links and a Semitic tradition that blends Temple Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy—a history that stretches back to early antiquity.

In an interview with this author, Melaku said:

“The greatest challenges Ethiopian Christians face are Islamic terrorism, Marxism, ethnic fascism, and factions that seek to destroy Ethiopia’s Judeo-Christian (literally) foundations and its Orthodox Christian traditions. Wahhabi-related forces in Ethiopia, collaborating with ethno-fascist elements in power within the regime, have been massacring Christians and burning churches, while also targeting specific groups, such as the Amhara people, due to their Semitic and largely Christian heritage.

“On the other hand, Marxist forces have for decades attacked the Church and Ethiopia’s Christian heritage. This started with the murder of the last Christian Emperor in 1974 and the execution of the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They killed hundreds of thousands in a course of seventeen years during the communist Derg regime, and later, another Marxist-ethno-fascist group, the TPLF, took over to introduce ‘ethnic federalism,’ intending to disintegrate the country and weaken the Orthodox Church. Those who are now in power are also infiltrating the Church to weaken it, causing a great amount of harm.

“Far-left groups, such as the TPLF and OLF/OLA, including the current regime itself, have been waging war against the Amhara people with the intent of destroying Ethiopia’s historical identity, its noble and patriotic heritage, and its Judeo-Christian civilization. The TPLF described themselves as ‘anti-Amhara imperialists’ in the early manifesto and sought to ‘bury’ Ethiopia’s Christian monarchical structure and break the country apart to create a new ethnostate; while OLF/OLA sought to destroy the Semitic heritage as whole, destroy Ethiopia itself which they perceive as an ‘Orthodox Christian expansionist force with Semitic roots.’ Both terror groups caused the death and destruction of innumerable people and Christian heritage over decades. The current regime has also been at war with the Amhara people who are fighting for their survival as a community and to protect their heritage.

“The current US administration and other pro-Western organizations should understand that the Amhara are fighting for their survival and to preserve Ethiopia’s longstanding heritage—one of the oldest Christian cultures, whose alliance with Christian Europeans can be traced back to antiquity when Ethiopia’s Axumite Empire and the Byzantine Empire collaborated. It is also a prestigious, biblical culture, albeit facing serious challenges, originating in the ancient dominion of the Queen of Sheba, and her visit to ancient Israel to meet King Solomon. These far-left forces are committing cultural erasure, as well as ethnic cleansing and genocide in order to destroy and bury this heritage and change the demographics of the region. The forces that are actively destroying Ethiopia’s Judeo-Christian heritage and committing massacres, mainly targeting the Amhara community, should be recognized as terror groups.”

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Several faith and ethnic inspired attacks murdered dozens of Ethiopians over the last months. During the last week of February and early March, for instance, militants carried out coordinated attacks in which over 30 people were killed in Arsi Zone of Oromia Region, according to church officials who spoke to BBC.

Christians in the country are mainly targeted by two groups: Islamic forces and far-left groups, with the complicity of the government and local authorities.

The first part of this series analyzes the Islamic groups targeting Ethiopian Christians. The second part concerns the Marxist and other far left as well as the ethnic-based violence they are facing.

Ethiopia ranks 36 in the World Watch list of Open Doors, which monitors global Christian persecution.

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How did Islam arrive in Ethiopia, a historically Christian country, and grow there to the point that it is still a major source of persecution for Christians?

Ethiopia is a country located on the Horn of Africa and has a population of approximately 138 million people. It is home to a diverse array of cultures and ethnicities: it has over ninety distinct ethnic groups with unique languages and traditions.

Ethiopia established Christianity as its official state religion in the early fourth century (circa 330–340 AD) under King Ezana of Aksum. Based on church tradition, Ethiopia’s conversion to Christianity is traced to the Ethiopian Eunuch, a high official baptized by the Apostle Philip (according to the New Testament’s Book of Acts).

This move established the Aksumite Empire (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) as a major early Christian power, and the faith has been integral to the region’s culture ever since. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the world’s oldest churches.

The Bible mentions Ethiopia multiple times, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintains a rich, ancient tradition. Christianity has served as a unifying force which has for centuries shaped the literature, art, and identity of Ethiopia.

Islam, however, arrived in Ethiopia during the early seventh century, primarily through the First Hijra (613–615), when Muhammad (Islam’s founder) instructed his followers to leave Mecca and seek refuge in the Christian Kingdom of Aksum. Early Muslims settled in areas like Negash (Tigray), which became an important center for early Islamic history in Ethiopia.

Between 1527 and 1543, however, Ethiopia faced repeated attacks followed by a military occupation from a Muslim sultanate. During this period, Ethiopia was occupied by a jihadist army raised from the sultanate of Adal, which grew from the remnants of Ifat in the late fourteenth century. Ifat was a medieval Sunni Muslim state in the eastern regions of the Horn of Africa between the late 13th and early 15th centuries. It was formed in present-day Ethiopia in the region of Ifat. The Islamic kingdom ruled over parts of what are now Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, and Somalia.

The 16th-century jihad led by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (Ahmad Gragn) of the Adal Sultanate aimed to conquer Ethiopia, resulting in widespread destruction of churches, forced conversions to Islam, and the temporary collapse of the Christian Ethiopian empire.

Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne, a professor of history, notes:

“The jihad of Ahmad ultimately had as its object the conversion of Ethiopia to Islam. Śihāb ad-Dín, Ahmad’s Yemeni follower and chronicler, constantly referred to Ethiopians as ‘infidels’, ‘polytheists,’ and ‘idol-worshipers’ who deserved to be fought, converted, and enslaved. With the exception of those located in inaccessible areas, all churches and monasteries were looted and razed to the ground and an estimated nine out of every ten Christians converted to Islam.”

During the Ethiopian-Adal War, Ahmad Al-Ghazi’s forces were Ottoman-backed and involved a coalition of several Islamic forces and ethnicities (at least six) that included Arabs, Somalis, Hararis, Harla, and a number of other tribes.

In addition to genociding Christians and burning churches, they looted copious amounts of gold from the Ethiopian kingdom and are recorded (in Futuh Al Habasha) to have melted down a church entirely plated in gold leaf known as “Mekane Selassie” (Abode of the Trinity) in Amhara, a wonder which Ahmad’s forces said they had never seen the like of it anywhere, and which had taken the Emperor Na’od thirteen years to build.

The campaign was a major effort to establish dominance over the Christian Kingdom. This jihad, supported by Ahmad’s Muslim allies, resulted in heavy material, human, and territorial losses for Christians. According to historian Tegegne,

“The Muslim seizure of Ethiopian provinces led to a tremendous expansion in the slave trade within the region, and included the enslavement and forced conversion of Christians… In fact, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, jihad was a primary method of obtaining Ethiopian slaves.”

The jihad ended in 1543 following the death of Imam Ahmad in battle against a combined Ethiopian and Portuguese force, restoring the Christian Solomonic dynasty.

In 1548, King Gälawdéwos of Ethiopia issued a royal edict, now held at Tädbabä Maryam, which banned the sale of Christians to Muslims and other non-Christians. This decree sought to combat the intensified 16th-century slave trade, particularly after conflicts with the Adal Sultanate.

Today, Ethiopia is a majority-Christian country (61 percent), with a large Muslim minority. Approximately 43% of the population identifies as Orthodox Christian, 33% as Muslim, and 20% as Protestant. In the eastern and southeastern regions Islam is predominant.

Open Doors reports that Islam is increasing its influence in Ethiopia at local, regional, and national levels, placing Christian communities, especially converts, in a vulnerable position:

“In Muslim-majority rural areas, Christians often face harassment, exclusion from communal resources, and violent attacks, some of them fatal. Converts from Islam are particularly at risk, frequently disowned by family, denied inheritance and child custody rights, and targeted for public shaming or assault.”

The spread of Islamic radicalism from neighboring countries like Somalia and Sudan has further deepened the threat, as cross-border radical networks affect Ethiopia’s border regions, adds Open Doors.

In an interview with this author, Tedla Melaku, an Ethiopian-American humanitarian advocate and author of the book “Reason and the Sacred: Ethiopian Metaphysics,” said:

“Ethiopia’s Christian kingdom, through its leadership, the Solomonic dynasty, successfully fought against Islamist powers and their expansion since at least the medieval period, protecting the Church: The Sultanate of Ifat in the 13th-15th centuries, and the Adal Sultanate, which it eventually defeated; it fought and overcame several regional emirates, prevented Ottoman expansion into the interior of Ethiopia, and defeated the Mahdists and the Khedivate of Egypt at war, too. Ethiopia’s ancient Christian tradition was preserved through resistance, martyrdom, and alliances with other Christian nations—namely, the Portuguese in the 16th century, who intervened to defend Ethiopia against the ottoman-backed Adal Sultanate.

“Many Islamist attacks and invasions took place, resulting in forced conversions and the destruction of magnificent Christian monuments and relics as chronicled in the Futuh Al Habasha, a 16th-century Arabic chronicle detailing the Ethiopian-Adal war; but due to a strong Christian leadership that understood what was at stake, Ethiopian Christians were able to protect the Church and their Christian heritage through great sacrifices. The West could learn that what is at stake, when allowing Islamist expansion, is far greater than anything imaginable, and that Europe’s Christian civilization and identity must be protected at all cost, as it was in the past through its Christian kings and leaders. Christianity is to be protected by God-fearing, strong leaders.”

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Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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