The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon

...Eastern Christianity, which includes the Christian communities of Lebanon, has had to contend over the past 1,300 years with living in close proximity to, and often under, Islam, the religion that early on Became dominant in the region. Over the centuries, Western interest In, and subsequent incursions into, the Middle East have taken on many forms—a lot of them proving disadvantageous to the Christians of the region. The eventual defeat of the Crusades, for example, precipitated a violent Islamic backlash against the indigenous Christians, particularly those like Lebanon's Maronites, who had cooperated with and supported the crusading hordes. Later Western commercial and imperial expansion into Ottoman domains seemed at first to resuscitate the sagging fortunes of local Christian communities, only to have them witness a return of persecutions once the inevitable Western retreats occurred. Rivalries among the European powers in the Levant and in Egypt often enlisted the native Christians on the side of one and against the other. This too had its deleterious effects, culminating in the 1861 massacres of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus that left a lasting scar on intercommunal relations, and aggravating the repeated oppression of Egypt's Copts to this day...

Meanwhile, the reputed tolerance of Islam, particularly for the "People of the Book", as Jews and Christians are designated, created in reality the dhimmi system of second-class servitude, which, under the guise of toleration, was actually a system of subtle repression and dehumanization leading to gradual liquidation.