The Arab World’s Vanishing Christians. Who is at fault?

[The Mikado]

William Dalrymple's 1997 book From the Holy Mountain, a travelogue where he explores the former lands of the Byzantine Empire to see what remains of Eastern Christendom in the lands that were once its core, is very insightful on the fate of the Christians of the East and is something of a must-read. He even predicted that within 20 years there wouldn't be Christians in the Middle East outside of Lebanon and Egypt, which is starting to look like a safe-ish bet.

The most compelling moment in my opinion is when he's visiting Turkey and witnesses multiple Armenian cemeteries bulldozed to build something else on top of them. Not only are the Armenians gone, but any trace that they ever were there is unwelcome and to be eliminated.

Also, when he was in IIRC Izmir (formerly Smyrna), the local authorities hold a bikini competition in a former Orthodox Church abandoned since 1919. When Dalrymple questions the propriety of this, everyone's simply baffled.

EDIT: his basic thesis is that the elimination of Christianity in the region is a long-standing, slow-moving campaign beginning in the late Ottoman Empire ("Protecting Christians" became the excuse de jure to meddle in Ottoman affairs, so pushing them out became desirable), hit its stride in the Armenian Genocide and the post-WWI population transfers, and has been proceeding ever since. Efforts by Christians to turn back this tide, like the Lebanon War of the 1970s-1990s, have actually accelerated it, and Christians are nowhere worse off than the Palestinian Christians, now treated as undesirable Arabs by the Israelis and fifth columnists by the Palestinians. He rails to no end about the destruction of Christian historical sites in Israel/Palestine dating back to either Late Antiquity or the Crusades while artifacts from the days of Herod or earlier are zealously defended.