David Alan Harris of the AJC.

JNS.org – Amid the recent wave of violence directed against Christians in the Middle East and Africa, including Sunday’s massive terror attack on Pakistan’s All Saints Church that left at least 85 dead, Jewish organizations called on governments in the region to do more to protect Christians.

“The attacks on innocent civilians at their homes and places of worship in Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Syria are shocking and abhorrent,” said Abraham H. Foxman, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) national director, in a statement. “These countries are not doing enough to protect their minority Christian communities or to enforce the rule of law.”

Since the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July, more than three-dozen churches, businesses and Christian homes have been attacked by Islamists. In Nigeria, religious conflict between the mainly Christian south and Muslim north has raged in Nigeria for decades. Boko Haram, a Salafist Islamic terrorist group, calls for the formation of a “pure Islamic state” governed by sharia law and has attacked Christian targets, government offices, and moderate Muslims repeatedly since its formation in 2001. Hundreds of Christians have been killed in Syria, mainly by Al-Qaeda-linked rebel groups, and hundreds of thousands have fled amid that country’s ongoing civil war.

Meanwhile, in response to Sunday’s massive terror attack on Pakistan’s All Saints Church, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, David Harris, issued a statement calling on the Pakistani government “to do everything possible to protect the country’s Christian minority.”

Harris said there “needs to be a sustained global outcry in the face of such deadly attacks, fueled by religious extremism.”

“Sadly and inexplicably, however, that has been largely missing. Why?” he said.