In his book, The Last Christians: Stories of Persecution, Flight, and Resilience in the Middle East,” Andreas Knapp records stories that are vivid and, in places, brutal. He writes true stories of torture, rape and death of Christians. In fact, it can be rather painful just to read them. But it is the resilience as well as the suffering which stand out in this account. One of the most important elements of this book involves the parallel drawn between the attacks on Christians as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing which have been taking place over the past several years in Iraq and Syria with earlier massacres, especially the aforementioned events in Anatolia in 1915 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. In this latter narrative, one of the surprises encountered is the complicity which the German government had at the time with the events in Turkey. In both cases, though Knapp presents several modern accounts in which Muslim people stood with their suffering Christian neighbors, there are many other situations described in which even friends ignored or were complicit with ISIS in the horrors visited upon Christians.
The author notes in his introduction that the views expressed in some of these stories “may not be entirely politically correct, but they are correct in the sense that they are authentic: they bear the indisputable stamp of ‘victim authority.'”
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