The Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), a Catholic Charity that serves beleaguered Christian populations in the Muslim-dominated Middle East, has corrected a graphic on its website that falsely reported that half the Christians in Israel had left the country in the years since the War of Independence in 1948. The graphic was part of a report about Christians in the Middle East, which CAMERA wrote about here.
After CAMERA publicized problems with the report, CNEWA quietly resolved one of the most egregious problems with the text. It removed a deceptive graphic that proclaimed that Israel’s Christians population had declined by 50 percent since the 1940s and that half of the Christians in the country had left the country. In fact, Israel’s population of indigenous Christians had increased by 282 percent since 1949, when the number of Arab Christians in the country was approximately 34,000. Today, there are more than 130,000 Christians in the country, making Israel the only country in the Middle East where the actual number of indigenous Christians has increased.
