Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

Ms. Michels, in your testimony you touched briefly on Egypt and Pakistan. I want to focus attention a little on the Middle East. I want to give you a few numbers of the dwindling demographics in the Middle East for Christians. In the 20th century, the percentage was around 20% Christian. If we look at the 21st century, it's now anywhere from 10% to 15%. You can obviously note all the wars that have been happening and the instability. I will focus your attention on two areas. For example, Gaza had an estimated 4,000 Christians before the Israeli blockade in 2007. If you fast-forward 13 years, fewer than 700 Christians still remain in a population of 2.2 million. If we look at the neighbouring country of Lebanon, Christians were the majority in the country in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2017 it was roughly 36%. We're seeing dwindling numbers of Christians.

I would note that Lebanon has a confessional system. That's the political structure there. It's based on religion. The political structure is based on religion. The president would be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister would be a Muslim Sunni, and the speaker of the house would be a Muslim Shia. I spoke to my Lebanese colleagues and said if we ran there, we could take each position, because we come from different religious backgrounds.

Where I'm going with this is that if you look at a Middle Eastern structure and the instability that is happening there, and you look at a western structure, it's not perfect, but during the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution pushed for more equalities, freedoms and rights. They separated themselves from monarchies to a government that is for the people, by the people. This growth of democracies in the west saw a rise in secularism and secular national governance. Although the west is not perfect, if we separated ourselves from these political structures that I mentioned—for example, in Lebanon—do you feel that we would see less persecution and see a retention, if not increase, in the numbers of maybe Christian and other minority groups?

Marwan Tabbara

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