Religion

THE TEN MOST ARAB COUNTRIES IN LATIN AMERICA
Posted on YouTube: October 14, 2020

The video above can be auto-translated.

This is their list which seems to be ordered by population. Were one to go by percentages, Argentina would have the largest population by percentage.

10) Uruguay
9) El Salvador
8) Paraguay
7) Honduras
6) Chile
5) Mexico
4) Columbia
3) Venezuela
2) Argentina
1) Brazil

One has to remember that most of the Arabs who came to the New World were usually Christian, and quite often were fleeing Islamic persecutions.

These Christian Arabs erroneously get lumped together with Muslims, but this is a demographic and historical mistake. Unfortunately, it is a mistake that some Arab-Latin populations make themselves.

For example: The Chilestinos (Chileans of Palestinian descent) are almost always Christian, yet they identity with the Islamic cause of Palestinian liberation. They even embrace Islamic symbolism.

A POSTER by Chilestinos advertising a trip to the Holy Land
(But why did the photo focus on the Dome of the Rock: a Muslim
site, if the Chilestinos are Christian?)

Lucky, in many Latin-American countries the largest or second largest subgroup of Arabs are the descendants of Lebanese Maronites. Maronite Christianity affiliates with Roman Catholicism, and they historically have considered themselves closest to the West. They make sure to distinguish themselves from Muslims.

The Maronite-Latins remember the persecutions their ancestors suffered in Lebanon from Muslims, most recently from the PLO during the Lebanese Civil War. Some even refuse to call themselves Arabs, preferring to invoke their Phoenician ancestry.

As the Canadian-American scholar, T.B. Irving, noted:

Source Islamic Renewal in Iberia and Latin America: Its Needs and Preconditions T.B. Irving 1981
a lecture delivered at the University of Brasilia

[T]he Christian Lebanese immigrants to South America… owe much to their over‑all Arab heritage, even though many of them try to call themselves “Phoenicians”.

There are roughly ten times as many Maronites in the Americas as there is in Lebanon itself, and they remember who drove them out: the Muslims.

The Maronites in Latin America usually vary from neutral to some even being Zionist in their opinions. They can moderate the power of the anti-Israel Arabs.

However, in Chile, the Chilestinos (Palestinian-Chileans), who are Christian, are powerful, rich, influential, and the largest of the Arab subgroups. Hence, the Chilestinos distort Chile’s foreign policies.

In Honduras and El Salvador, there are also Palestinians, but those are countered by a massive Evangelical revival in those countries.