THE ONGOING VIOLENT DISPOSSESSION OF THE CHRISTIANS OF THE MIDEAST
by Martin Barillas
Energy Publisher
Nov 8 2010
Members of the exile community of Iraqi Christians living in the
Detroit area are planning to commemorate those killed in an Islamist
terrorist attack on October 31 in Baghdad. “The March Against the
Ethnic Cleansing of Iraq’s’ Indigenous Christians” is being organized
on Facebook to show solidarity with those murdered during the Sunday
Mass at Baghdad’s Church of Our Lady of Salvation by a suicide squad
of Islamist terrorists who occupied the worship space and took the
congregation hostage. When Iraqi security forces burst into the church,
the terrorists detonated explosive suicide vests and fragmentation
bombs. Some reports suggest that upon entering the building, they
immediately murdered the two priests leading the congregation. In all,
some 57 people died that day.
The Detroit MI metropolitan area has the highest number of people of
Middle Eastern origin, both Muslim and Christian, of any such area in
the United States. The March against Ethnic Cleansing on November 8
is hoped to bring together likeminded Christians, Jews, and Muslims
to repudiate ethnic and sectarian violence in the name of politics.
Organizers hope to generate support for Christians persecuted in Iraq,
as they are also in other Muslim-dominated countries in the Mideast
and elsewhere such as Indonesia. The November 8 march is expected
to take place in front of the McNamara Federal Building in downtown
Detroit at noon, while other such rallies are expected in London,
Toronto, as well as Chicago, New York City, Phoenix, and San Diego
and elsewhere in the U.S.
Two more Christians were killed on November 7 under as yet to be
determined circumstances. Security at the Church of Our Lady of
Deliverance has been stepped up, and Sunday services were held without
incident even though blood still stains its interior walls. Members of
the congregation wore black robes of mourning at the Sunday Mass and
carried lighted candles in memory of the dead. The parish priest, Fr.
Mukhlas Habash, said from the pulpit that Christians pray for the
victims and their attackers, recalling Jesus’ commandment “love your
enemies.” Rev. Habash referred to the dead as martyrs. According
to eyewitnesses, one of the two priests murdered on October 31 told
the terrorists, “Kill me, not this family with children,” shielding
them with his body before he was gunned down. “The future of Iraqi
Christians – said the priest – is not in the hands of men, but in
the hands of God,” said Rev. Habash. Since June 2004, 66 churches
have been rocked by bombs and thousands of people have died.
Iraq is the home of one of the oldest Christian communities in the
world, having been evangelized in the earliest days of the Christian
era long before the emergence of Islam from the wastes of the Arabian
Peninsula. There was also at one time a sizeable Jewish community
in Iraq that had co-existed with Zoroastrian, Christian, and Muslim
neighbors until the early 1940s when Jews were murdered and cast out
by Iraqi allies of Nazi Germany. The Chaldean community long predates
Arab supremacy, for instance, and can trace its roots to the Babylonian
civilization of millennia ago. Some Christians still use Aramaic –
the language used by Jesus – in their everyday lives.
Long held in contempt by Muslim custom and sharia – Islamic religious
laws which subjected them to humiliation and persecution – Christians,
ironically, enjoyed some respite during the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Indeed, one of their number was Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz whose
fluent English and diplomatic acumen were obvious in the months
preceding both of the wars with the U.S. and its allies. He has
recently been tried for crimes against the Iraqi people and may face
the death penalty. Iraqi Christians cite indifference on the part of
the U.S. occupiers, and the West in general, to their plight. They
complain that the Iraqi government does not provide protection either.
Rev. David Jaeger, a Catholic priest who has long resided in Israel,
averred that the Baghdad attack and other threats confirmed the fears
of Christians in the midst of a exodus of Christians from the biblical
lands that were raised in the recently Vatican synod of bishops from
the Middle East. By contrast, the number of Christians living within
the borders of the state of Israel is actually increasing. Said Rev.
Jaeger, “As the terrorists themselves say, their purpose is to
eliminate the Christian presence from those lands either by physically
destroying Christians or by terrorizing them into renouncing the
faith or fleeing.”
Of the persecution, Martin Manna of the Detroit-area Chaldean-American
Chamber of Commerce said, “This is not as big an issue in the United
States.” Hoda Abdal, the mother of 32-year-old Rev. Thaier Saad Abdal
– one of the two murdered priests – told her son in the U.S. via
telephone, “I wished they had killed me. I could be in heaven with
them.” Abdal’s other son, Raid Abda, 36, was also murdered by the
suicide squad when he came to aid the priest.
Members of the Islamic State of Iraq, al-Qaeda’s front group in the
country, threatened further assaults on Christians following the
October 31 attack. That incident was the deadliest assault on Iraqi
Christians in recent memory. Iraqi militants linked their threats to
rumors that clergy of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox are holding hostage
the wives of two Orthodox clerics. Supposedly, the women converted
to Islam when they could not obtain divorce. The group is demanding
the release of terrorists linked to al-Qaeda now held in Iraqi prisons.
On November 2, as mourners went to mourn at the church where Christians
were massacred two days before, terrorist attacks on Shiite Muslims
claimed more lives as 13 attacks rocked Baghdad despite a network
of police and army checkpoints and blast walls crisscrossing the
capital. The butcher’s bill in that string of incidents climbed to
91 people by the following day.
As Christians flee their ancestral lands in Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere
in Muslim-dominated countries, comparisons could be drawn not only
to earlier persecutions of Christians, such as the Armenian Genocide
perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and ethnic cleansing of Greek
Christians in Istanbul by modern Turks in the 1950s, but also to
the collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Adolf Hitler
in the years before and during the Second World War. As part of the
murderous Nazi obsession with liquidating Jews and other enemies of
Nazism, Germany set about finding a suitable ally in the Mideast who
could add a modern twist to the age-old enmity of Islam for Jews.
Prize-winning author Edwin Black, in his new book “The Farhud: Roots
of the Arab Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust,” recounts the close
cooperation between one of the most respected leaders of the Muslim
world, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Adolf Hitler to exterminate
Jews in Iraq. In 1941, came the violent dispossession -‘farhud’ in
Arabic – of the Jewish community of Iraq that had lived peaceably with
Gentile neighbors for millennia. The Iraqi marauders, spurred by the
Mufti’s venom, spared neither women nor children in a coordinated
spree of murder and rape thereby expunging an age-old presence of
people supposedly revered by Islam as “People of the Book.” Fuelled
by Nazi hatred of Jews, despite Nazi racism that proclaimed Arab
Semites as lower forms of human life, Arabs in Iraq and Palestine
attacked Jews in mimicry of the ongoing pogroms in Europe. In fact,
the Grand Mufti provided Muslim troops to the Nazis who saw action
in Yugoslavia, committing some of the worst atrocities of the war in
concentration camps were Serbian prisoners were held.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.energypublisher.com/article.asp?id=42907