What if someone suddenly cancelled Christmas? What would we do, and how would we feel? What if the cancellation of Christmas was accompanied by the kidnapping of women and children, the razing of people's houses, and mass executions and terror?



All these things happened when the Islamic State group seized a large swathe of Iraq in 2014, condemning Mosul's many Assyrian Christians to a living hell of violence, terror, and desperation.



It makes our petty Christmas squabbles seem so insignificant. Putting up with the crazy uncle or your father's burnt sausages would be joys to people living in tents in the refugee camps of the Middle East this Sunday.



The fact is, hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq and Syria have been displaced from the cities in which they have professed their faith for 2000 years. In Aleppo alone there used to be a population of 250,000 Christians, but this is now estimated to be just 40,000, if that. The same is true in many cities in Iraq.



These are people whose Christian tradition predates Islam by 500 years, which survived Roman persecution, the Persian Empire, the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire, two world wars and even Saddam Hussein.



All of these persecutions pale into insignificance, though, compared to the Islamic State group when it comes to barbarism and intolerance. We hear about atrocities against the Kurds and Yazidis, and even the battles between Sunni and Shia, but it is for the Christians of Iraq and Syria that Daesh reserve their most passionate hate.



Across Iraq and Syria, Christians have been beheaded, churches desecrated and burnt, and a bloody tide of violence loosed upon the most innocent of the region's inhabitants.



Ironically, one has to go back to the time of Christ himself to find as cruel a terror - when Herod killed all the males under the age of two in the hopes of killing the Messiah. Like modern day Assyrian Christians, Mary and Joseph fled with the infant Jesus to exile, only returning when the king was dead and the terror ended.



However Nina Shea, of the Centre for Religious Freedom, points out that many of the Middle East's Christian refugees are even more vulnerable because they fear going into refugee camps in most Middle East countries, where they are persecuted further. She gives the dire prediction that Iraq's Christians run the very real risk of extermination. Even the UNHCR has turned a blind eye to their plight



Here in Australia, the Assyrian Christian Church of the East is doing its best with meagre resources to alleviate the suffering. Their relief organisation, ACERO, raises money to assist refugees, and to rebuild in the towns where the Islamic State group has been driven out.



Be we religious or otherwise, the measure of our humanity is our compassion for those in desperate need. And perhaps it is the legacy of Jesus himself, that Christmas especially is when many of us stop thinking of ourselves and think of others instead.



There could be few better causes to support this Christmas, than to give to maintain the faith of Christ in the region where he once walked.



There could be few better wishes than for the hopeless of the Middle East, that they might enjoy just a fraction of the happiness and security we take for granted.



In the face of indifference by our political leaders to the plight of Middle Eastern Christians, it behoves us to give a dollar, a hundred dollars, or even just a prayer for those who truly have nothing but their poverty. This will be my pledge this Christmas.



And to all of our readers, a merry Christmas. May we never forget how lucky we are.