Christians didn’t “decline” in the Middle East; they were hunted, taxed, terrorized, and pushed out in a century-long purge the West barely talks about.
Today, Meira K unpacks the chilling pattern behind the old Islamist warning, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”, and shows how it played out from Ottoman-era inequality to modern Islamist terror, from genocides and mass expulsions to the slow suffocation of daily life under discriminatory laws.
You’ll learn why Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and the Gulf states all tell the same grim story in different ways...and why Israel is the shocking outlier, where Christian life has grown rather than collapsed.
The punchline is bigger than history: the episode argues this isn’t just about the Middle East, it’s a blueprint for how alliances are fractured, and freedoms eroded, and what it means for the West right now.
