Forgive Michael Kassab if he isn't whistling "Jingle Bells" and joking around with friends about who's been naughty or nice this year.

On the contrary, Kassab said he's finding it difficult to get into the spirit at all because his Christian relatives and friends in Iraq are experiencing increased persecution. It's a bleak reality made horrifyingly evident in October when Muslim terrorists stormed a Baghdad church and massacred more than 60 worshipers. One of the many wounded in the attack was Kassab's sister.

"It's very scary and frightening," he said after attending a prayer service at his church, St. Ephrem Syriac Catholic Church in Jacksonville. "How do I celebrate when I know my family is completely in danger?"

That gut-churning question plagues most members of the parish, about half of whom are from Iraq. The rest are from other Middle Eastern nations where Christians are also besieged.

Arab Christians and experts on religious persecution say 2010 has been one of the worst in terms of terms of violence against fellow believers from Africa and Palestine to the region once known as Mesopotamia.

"These are Christian communities that outdate all of Europe," said Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors USA, a California-based ministry that tracks anti-Christian persecution around the world. "We're talking about 2,000 years of Christian roots - from the time of the apostles."

'Spiritual leprosy'

While North Korea tops the group's list of worsts this year, Iraq comes in at 17 and is due to move up dramatically in 2011 due to increased ethnic and religious violence there.

The United States has been "terribly slow" in providing assistance and protection to Christian minorities in Iraq and other Arab nations where they're persecuted, Moeller said.

Americans, including conservative evangelicals, have been largely unmoved by reports of the violence, he said, because most of the victims are members of non-Protestant traditions.

"There's a bit of a hesitancy when the church [attacked] starts with 'Our Lady of' whatever," he said.

Moeller, himself an evangelical and former Southern Baptist minister, said it's wrong to withhold compassion because of denomination.

"We are guilty of spiritual leprosy if we are numb to other parts of the [church] body's suffering," he said.

Hope for peace

Iraq boasted 1.5 million Christians in 1991 compared with about 350,000 today, and the United States has been the destination of thousands of them, said Bishop Mar Barnaba Yousif Habash, spiritual leader of Our Lady of Deliverance Syriac Catholic Diocese.

Habash's New Jersey-based district governs 10 Syriac Catholic parishes in the United States and four in Canada. Most of his approximately 35,000 members are from Iraq. In 2009 there were less than 25,000.

"The numbers are going up consistently," he said during a visit to Jacksonville this week.

Christians in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are caught between two forces, he said: Islam and the West.

Muslims consider Christians extensions of the West and to be in cahoots with Israel and the U.S.

Meanwhile, Westerners view local Christians with suspicion because they are Arabs, he said.

"Hopefully our blood and tears will nurture peace" in the region, Habash said. "Maybe this is why God created us."

'No Christmas for me'

Maybe, but Qahtan Brjo is in too much pain to find comfort in that hope right now.

The Jacksonville resident and Iraqi native lost his brother and two brothers-in-law in the Oct. 31 attack on Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad.

His eyes reddening with tears as he spoke through an interpreter at St. Ephrem on Wednesday, Brjo said he would have been there, too, had he not been in the United States at the time.

"It's very difficult for me to express - I cannot even talk about it," he said. "There is no Christmas for me this year."

The interpreter, who is the man's pastor, put an arm around Brjo to comfort him. The Rev. Selwan Taponi said he's spent the past couple of months comforting his 370-family church, half of whom are from Iraq.

"I cried a lot, too - I had baptized and married many of them," he said of the church attack victims. "But I know these people - they didn't give up their faith but stood strongly in front of the terrorists."

jeff.brumley@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4310