Across the Middle East this year, Christians are in more trouble than at any previous point in memory. Massacres and beatings by Islamist mobs have caused 200,000 Copts to leave Egypt, their home for 16 centuries. In Iraq, scores of churches have been burned and many worshippers killed. The Christian population in most Arab states is sharply declining.

So last Sunday, the producers of the CBS show 60 Minutes did an item exposing the problems that afflict Christians … in Israel.

It was a colossal case of missing the point. Israel is the only state in the Middle East where Christians are guaranteed religious freedom, and the only place where they serve in parliament and on the Supreme Court.

But Bob Simon and the 60 Minutes crew found a fresh reason to complain about Israel’s treatment of a minority. Apparently, many Christian Arabs are leaving Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Jerusalem because they no longer find it comfortable to live there. This could leave churches without congregations. Stripped of its Christians, Simon predicted, the major Christian sites could turn into mere tourist attractions, scattered Christian theme parks.

He reported that Arab Christians feel hemmed in by the security wall that Israel built to keep Palestinian suicide terrorists from slipping into Israel. Understandably, the Christian Arabs also find it maddening to deal with endless delays at the checkpoints, built for the same reason. They don’t give their views of the terrorists who made these burdens necessary, but they’re not pleased with Israel’s (so far successful) system of defence.

The 60 Minutes footage showed one family living in the shadow of the security wall, each of its windows facing a guard tower or blank vistas of cement. That’s the kind of thing that’s driving the Christians out, Simon explained. Weirdly, however, the item did not show us a single Christian Arab who actually had left for this reason — or for any other reason.

Did some, perhaps, leave because of pressure from rising Islamist power, Hamas and its adherents? Not one, so far as 60 Minutes knows. The producer brought on a Christian Arab businessman, the guy who holds the Coke franchise for the West Bank, who said he had never, ever heard of any Christian who had been bothered by Muslim harassment. Apparently, this is the one place in the entire region where Christians and Muslims live in utter peace.

Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, appeared on the program as a whipping boy for Simon. No one mentioned that he’s a distinguished historian and journalist, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale and the author of the definitive history of the 1967 war. Simon did say Oren had been Israel’s former director of inter- religious affairs. Otherwise, he could have been any foreign ministry bureaucrat.

He was included in the show, we soon learned, in order to be scolded. Some months ago, Oren heard that 60 Minutes was planning a hatchet job on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians. Oren got in touch with the head of CBS News and suggested this should be reconsidered.

As a public-relations move, that was not necessarily shrewd. But Simon made such a fuss about it that he clearly wanted the audience to see it as a terrible, terrible infraction of the rules — and unprecedented. In his vast experience as a broadcaster, Simon claimed, no public official had ever before complained to management about an item that hadn’t yet been broadcast.

It was clearly a most serious offence against the gods of journalism. It was a “You went over my head! You called my boss!” crime, the kind of thing that makes self-important TV stars jump onto high horses in their eagerness to prove they are more important and have more inalienable rights than anyone they write or talk about. Journalists hate it when their own bosses are called, but never hesitate to use the same strategy when roles are reversed.

Why in the world, Simon wanted to know, would Israel express concern about an item that hadn’t yet been aired? By Simon’s account, no one, not even he, could guess the final shape of the story, even when the interview with Oren was being recorded.

Surely the Israeli government couldn’t imagine that CBS journalists would know the slant of a story even before the reporting and editing were done?

Perhaps Michael Oren, being a historian, remembered a few things in the past, such as the last 15 or 20 stories about Israel that 60 Minutes had produced.

And as it turned out, his experience-based prediction was precisely accurate. (© 2012 National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. 04/28/12)