The displacement of religious minorities has been one of the most profound demographic shifts in the Middle East but the West has largely chosen to ignore it, a visiting international scholar says.
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Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom within the Hudson Institute, a conservative American think-tank, said western governments have been hesitant to openly accept minority groups from the Middle East.
"To put it in political terms, Middle Eastern Christians are too Christian for the left and too Middle Eastern for the right," he said.
"Partly there is a Western hesitancy to be seen as defenders of Christians per se, not to play into a narrative of a clash of civilisations, that it's the Christian West defending the local Christians against the Muslims."
He said that, in reality, a government decision to prioritise religious minority groups would not make their situation in the Middle East any worse.
"If you're already being eradicated – and Christianity is being eradicated from places in Syria and Iraq – it's not as if western intervention would make it worse," he said.
Professor Tadros, originally from Egypt, told a Sydney forum organised by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies that the Middle East will never be the same again since ISIS began breaking down state borders.
"That order [of nation states] will not be recreated. If anyone has an illusion that there might be an Iraq in 10 years time, I'm sorry to inform you, it's highly unlikely," he said.
He said minority groups such as Yezidis, Kurds and Christians have been leaving in droves since the Arab Spring broke out and Western countries should expect the massive influx in refugees to escalate.
"In this grand war between Sunnis and Shiites, it's the small minorities that are caught in the middle. The Sunnis and Shiites have their weapons [and] have their funding from the regions and backers but it is those small minorities that don't actually have that kind of defence that would allow them to survive."
He said the loss of minorities is a major demographic shift and the "rich mosaic that was the Middle East" will soon cease to exist.
"Those minorities that can survive for centuries … acting as a bridge between the East and the West, bringing the two civilisations together, that is something we are about to lose now.
"The only answer in front of them is immigration to the West. The minorities of the Middle East are voting, they are unfortunately voting with their very feet."
