Posted on 01/25/2016 4:57:18 AM PST by marshmallow
BAGHDAD - The international community is struggling to come up with a strategy to defeat the Islamic State (IS) - but on the ground in northern Iraq, a Roman Catholic priest has found his own way to fight the jihadists.
Father Gabriel Tooma is not going after them with weapons.
He is not involved with any of the several Christian militias that have taken it upon themselves, in Iraq and neighboring Syria, to defend their villages against IS onslaught.
What he is doing, he says, is even more important to the Christian minority's fate in northern Iraq: He is rounding up ancient manuscripts and relics and hiding them in secure locations around Kurdistan, hoping to save them from the iconoclastic fury of the terror insurgency.
"If Daesh burns down a church we can rebuild it, but the manuscripts are our history. They trace back our roots, they are part of our civilization," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. "If they get destroyed, then we are lost, and our culture will be forgotten."
The 55-year old priest, a Jesuit-like Pope Francis, spoke during a meeting late last year at a monastery in al Qosh, in the Nineveh Plain.
His words took on a new, urgent meaning on Wednesday, when news broke that IS fighters had done exactly what he had said. The extremist militants had razed the oldest Christian church in Iraq, the 1,400-year old St. Elijah Monastery in Mosul, about 30 miles (50 km) from al Qosh.
In the face of this threat, Father Gabriel is trying to save what he can, including manuscripts dating back as far as the 11th Century.
(Excerpt) Read more at portalangop.co.ao ...
Nice, but how is he combatting ISIS?
I thought I would read about pigs as a weapon.
Not very smart to publish this telling his name. If he’s captured, they’ll torture the information out of him.
ISIS will come and go, but the Word lasts forever.
I applaud what he is doing and wish that someone like him had been around in Alexandria.
I have always believed that the “birthright” that Esau traded away was the actual tablets handed down from the patriarchs. Jacob saw the value of the written word and knew they were more important that the blessing and being the first born. God honored that love of His Word and blessed Jacob, but hated Esau.
I applaud him also, you missed my point.
Kind of a feeble attempt to save Christianity? I would expect that the Pope would spend some of the Catholic wealth to save Christianity not just rely on one Catholic priest???
The Catholic church needs an organization that proactively meets oppression, if not such extreme oppression.
The idea is that there are many competent Catholic soldiers and officers in modern armies from around the world. As a group, they could travel around the world to oppressed Christian communities, as diplomatic credentialed teachers.
Typically, they would go to a Christian community surrounded and oppressed by Muslims on a frequent basis. They would teach them “how to protect themselves, so they have less need to defend themselves.”
This includes physical barriers, lots of training in aggression avoidance and evasion, as well an established plan for orderly evacuation if things become very bad. They can even give them video and communications equipment, sensors, and other tools.
The cost of this would not be outrageous, as it would consist of volunteers, and undertake missions under diplomatic auspices, based on contributions.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden away in the caves where they were found for exactly the same reason as this priest cites. The radicals coming through are book-burners, like their Nazi brethren in Germany in the 1930’s, thinking that destroying the physical documents in turn destroys the memory of whatever existed that was recorded on those scriptures and documents. When the Dead Sea scrolls were found and at least some of them were deciphered, there were small differences of wording and meanings that were discovered, and scholars have been working to reconcile these differences, or read in the original intent of the persons who transcribed those documents.
So when the documents and scriptures are revealed or discovered at some future date, there shall be plenty of information available to go back and reconstruct what otherwise would have been “lost history”, and in doing so, reaffirms the continuity of belief that has existed for centuries longer than the apostasy known as “Islam”.
It is well known that Islam absolutely refuses to consider that the earlier texts and writings by Biblical scholars are considered to be “true”, and Muslims are forbidden to even peruse the texts of the Torah and the Old and New Testaments, as used by the Jewish people and Christians. They believe it their OBLIGATION to destroy any of these texts they lay hands upon, but oddly enough, they REVERE Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. Probably because it amounts to a “hadith”, explaining and rationalizing the words of the Koran. “Kill the Jews, they are the root of all our problems.”
Please note it is an infraction of the most severe nature to bring a Bible text into any Islamic country. This is written into Shari’ah Law. If the Bible had been there already, then historically it is accepted, until the possessor of the Bible is found in some other infraction, the Bible shall then be seized and destroyed. By attrition, the Bibles in any Muslim majority country eventually are all destroyed, and therefore, by their reasoning, the belief in the words of the Bible are likewise destroyed.
Tell that to the Zoroastrians who were once the majority religion of Persia, modern Iran.
Its nice that he’s doing this but its not “combatting” anything. He’s simply trying to mitigate the damage that their aggressive and successful campaign has caused. If they win, they will eventually find these relics and destroy them, along with killing him. If they lose, the relics will be safe.
Sounds like the Minutemen....
“Nice, but how is he combatting ISIS?”
By preserving Christian culture I guess.
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