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Christians in the Middle East are highly fragmented. Many of the statements above were made by representatives of various Orthodox churches, and the Orthodox, by their structure or lack thereof, are notoriously nationalistic and always clothe their natinonalism in religion. In many cases, they do not even need a "nation" to champion, but an ethnic group, real or imagined. And Orthodox churches hate the West, for cultural reasons.

I recognize none of these Orthodox churches listed in the article, except the Copts with whom we are not in communion and do not accept. The 13 Orthodox churches in the Seattle-Tacoma area here do not hate the west, while I admit that the Serbian church can be tough on Americans.

We are a very ascetic faith and we do seek non-aquisitive lives. We don't promote this world as a saving one, but try to focus on the next world instead.
Our faith promotes humility and subservience to others and our priests are excellent role models. I belong to the Orthodox Church of America and we pray for the president and armed forces of this country at every single liturgy on Sunday. I have been present at liturgies given in the Russian, Serbian, and Romanian Orthodox churches here and they all prayed the exact same way.
On the Sunday after the attacks of 9-11 our priest gave a sermon, "Bless My Enemies".
I have never heard of the Roman Orthodox Church and I appeal to my fellow Orthodox to explain to me what it is. We have gained a recent surge of popularity and many churches using the word "orthodox" in their name have arisen as of late.

In truth the Orthodox, above all others, have suffered more persecution from Islam than any other faith. It was from my fellow Orthodox, such as this one that I was fearful of Islam many, many years in advance of 9-11. I used to hand this article out to friends and family back in the late 90's and they all thought I was nuts for worrying about the growth of Islam in this country.

You will note that the above writing, from 1998, is published on an Orthodox website and was written by an Orthodox Christian. He was persecuted heavily by CAIR after it was published and you can see evidence of this by doing a simple google search of his name. They called for him to be fired from his job.

By our faith we are required to love all. But it is the Orthodox, above all, who knew well before the rest of America, about the joys of being hated by Islam.