Philip Jenkins fears that Assad’s downfall could doom Syria’s Christians:
To describe the Ba’athist state’s tolerance is not, of course, to justify its brutality, or its involvement in state-sanctioned crime and international terrorism. But for all that, it has sustained a genuine refuge for religious minorities, of a kind that has been snuffed out elsewhere in the region. Although many Syrian Christians favor democratic reforms, they know all too well that a successful revolution would almost certainly put in place a rigidly Islamist or Salafist regime that would abruptly end the era of tolerant diversity. Already, Christians have suffered terrible persecution in rebel-controlled areas, with countless reports of murder, rape, and extortion.
Under its new Sunni rulers, minorities would likely face a fate like that in neighboring Iraq, where the Christian share of population fell from 8 percent in the 1980s to perhaps 1 percent today. In Iraq, though, persecuted believers had a place to which they could escape, namely Syria. Where would Syrian refugees go?
Dreher applauds Rand Paul for consistantly speaking out about Syria’s Christian minority (an example from December of last year is seen above). Julia Ioffe, on the other hand, thinks Paul’s remarks reflect a view that “some lives, Christian lives, are simply more important than other, Muslim ones”:
Yes, this is a legitimate concern—Christians make up some 10 percent of the Syrian population, and have largely backed Assad—and the Egyptian example is a widely reported one; and, given the reports of jihadis brutally establishing Sharia law in the areas they’ve secured, Paul raises a fair question. The only problem is that it seems it’s all he’s talking about. Aside from his standard non-interventionist caution, and the how-do-we-really-know-anything-about-anything epistemological exercises of the kind we saw in his confrontation with Kerry, the paramount concern for Rand Paul, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is not the question of chemical weapon use, or the 100,000 dead, but the Christians.
The Dish 