An Open Letter to the Vice President of the United States

Dear Mr. Vice President,

Last week, Archbishop Atallah Hanna of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem sent you an open letter, claiming to speak in “the language of love, faith, and humanity.” In truth, his letter was filled with distortion, resentment, and theological hypocrisy. It had little to do with the love of the One who conquered death by His resurrection, and everything to do with the political fear that has long governed dhimmi Christianity in the Islamic world.

As someone who left Islam and served Christ across the Middle East for fifteen years, I must respond.

In 2008, after leaving Islam, I tried to contact a church in my hometown, Amman, Jordan. The first church I reached out to was the Greek Orthodox Church in Abdali, the very same institution under Archbishop Hanna’s jurisdiction. One hour before I arrived, Jordanian intelligence warned me not to approach any church. But I went anyway, longing to meet brothers and sisters in Christ, to feel that I was finally home. Instead, the priest publicly expelled me. He had been ordered by authorities not to welcome converts. That was my first encounter with the fearful, state-controlled Christianity that the Archbishop represents, a Christianity that bends its knees to tyranny instead of to Christ.

The Archbishop began his letter saying, “You will visit the Church of the Resurrection tomorrow and you will see doors open.”

But he failed to tell you that those doors are closed almost everywhere across the Islamic world, except in Israel. It is precisely because of Israel that Christians still have open churches, protected shrines, and access to the holy places of our faith, it is good to think of Aya Sophia as you read his letter.

When Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab invaded Jerusalem in the seventh century, he forced Christians to sign the humiliating “Pact of Umar.” Under it, Christians were forbidden to build new churches, to repair old ones, to ride horses, or to walk in the middle of the road. They were required to rise if a Muslim entered the room, and to live visibly marked as inferiors.

That mentality still defines Islamic societies today. Don’t look at countries like the UAE as if they represent the Islamic world; they don’t. Their appearance of tolerance comes from adopting Western frameworks, not from Islamic theology.

The Archbishop dares to speak of injustice while ignoring that two million Arabs live in Israel, among them almost 200,000 Christians, with equal rights, representation, and freedom of worship. Meanwhile, in areas ruled by the Palestinian Authority, Christians have nearly vanished. In Gaza, under Hamas, even the “Baptist” hospital had to become “Aliman” hospital because Christianity should be erased or hidden.

Last year in Jordan, one of the most “tolerant” regimes in the region, Christians in Fuhais, the last remaining Christian-majority town, tried to install a small statue of Jesus. Within hours, they were threatened and forced to move it to a cemetery. If that’s what happens under one of the so-called moderate governments, imagine what Christians endure under Hamas or the jihadist factions controlling parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

This is the real Middle Eastern reality the Archbishop hides: wherever Islam governs, Christians shrink, flee, or are silenced. Only in Israel do they stand free.

He accuses Israel of genocide while staying silent about the 78 years of religious war launched against the Jewish people, wars rooted not in politics, but in theology and religious hatred. He laments security checkpoints, but not the suicide bombings, bus explosions, and stabbings that forced Israel to erect them. Checkpoints did not cause violence; violence caused checkpoints.

The Archbishop invites you to “change your character” and believe the same narrative that was manufactured by the Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ayatollah, that America’s policies caused Palestinian suffering. The truth is the opposite.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan rebuilt because its culture did not glorify death. But after 1948, when David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish people invited their Arab neighbors to join them in peace and progress, five Arab nations chose war. They rejected the UN partition plan, attacked Israel, and lost. Between 1948 and 1967, when the Arabs had full control over the West Bank and Gaza, they did not build a Palestinian state. They used those territories to prepare the next war, because Islamic theology cannot tolerate non-Muslim sovereignty on land once ruled by Islam.

That is the real cause of the conflict, not colonialism, not America, not “Zionist lobbies,” but a theological refusal to coexist.

I write not to condemn Archbishop Hanna personally, but to expose the cowardice and complicity that have paralyzed much of the Church in the Middle East. For centuries, Christians there have survived by appeasing Islamic rulers, not by confronting evil. They now echo the rhetoric of their oppressors, and in doing so, betray both history and truth.

Today, Christians are being massacred across the Islamic world, displaced from towns in Iraq, Sudan, Syria, and Egypt, stripped of freedom, and silenced by fear. Yet the Archbishop reserves his outrage for the one nation in the Middle East where Christians are free.

Mr. Vice President, the letter you received was not written in the language of love, but in the dialect of submission. Do not let it deceive you. The Church of the Resurrection stands open in Jerusalem because Israel keeps it open.

History is not on the Archbishop’s side. Truth is.

In Christ, Danny Burmawi Author, Islam, Israel and the West