Posted on 08/16/2017 8:41:23 PM PDT by marshmallow
"We've been not only abandoned by the Western countries, we have been betrayed"
The West has failed to do enough to protect Christian minorities in the Middle East, the Syriac Catholic Patriarch has said.
“I can tell you, we’ve been not only abandoned by the Western countries, but even we have been betrayed,” Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan told The Southern Cross, newspaper of the Diocese of San Diego.
He made the comments in a recent interview at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Syriac Catholic Parish in El Cajon.
While the Christian minority in Syria and Iraq is composed of “peaceful people” who have been “working honestly for the well-being of their countries,” he said, these Christians are neither oil-rich nor do they represent a terrorist threat to the West. Therefore, he said, they have been essentially ignored by the West and “abandoned to our destiny.”
The Syriac Catholic Church is an Eastern Catholic church in communion with the Pope. Among the Catholic hierarchy, a patriarch is outranked only by the pope.
Patriarch Younan, whose see is based in Beirut, visited Our Mother of Perpetual Help on July 24 as one stop on his pastoral visit to the Syriac Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Deliverance, which has its headquarters in New Jersey. The eparchy includes all Syriac Catholic parishes and missions in the United States and Canada.
The patriarch was accompanied by the head of the eparchy, Bishop Yousif B Habash, and Syriac Catholic Archbishop Yousif Abba of Baghdad.
In conversation with The Southern Cross, Patriarch Younan lamented the “horrendous war” in Syria that is now in its seventh year and he contested the claim, which has been made by Western governments and media, that there is a moderate Muslim faction among the rebel forces.
“It’s a lie,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
I asked a Bush administration State Department undersecretary way back in 2003 what the plan was to safeguard Iraq’s large Christian population after the fall of Saddam, given what had happened to those ancient populations in other Mideastern countries like Saudi Arabia.
He seemed surprised to learn that there WERE Christians in Iraq. It was a stunning moment for me, and not in a good way.
Oh, betrayed is too kind.
I think they are actually enabling those who want to kill you.
It’s okay to hate / kill Christians ....
But dare you say there was wrong on both sides of the crazies last week, there will be hell to pay.
And, of course, we’re in favor of taxpayer-funded murder of the preborn - that’s a right.
Seems to me the Pope has done even less for the Coptic Christian Catholics.
Trump has at least remarked on the neglect of Christian refugees during the campaign, and under Obama, for being ignored and rejected for dispatch to safe harbor. Trump said they would be included in refugee evacuations and intended to send refugees near their homeland.
However, Trump is reluctant to see American boys slaughtered in Syria in such an attempt. There is presently no safe harbor. There is no possible evacuation route safe for refugees under Russian and Syrian control. Are we going to sacrifice our sons when the reality on the ground is what it is. No, we can not.
By the “West” Youman’s comments comes about as close as he can to criticizing Pope Francis who at minimum could raise the question brought here
http://www.theusmat.com/islamandfreewill.htm
The center right has been worse than the left on this issue. Part of the problem is that many Evangelical Protestant churches teach contempt for Eastern Christians. The church I was raised in taught that non-Protestants were fake Christians who we shouldn’t care about except to convert them to our kind religion. We were explicity told not to think about the interests of Middle Eastern Chrisitans in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the wars Lebannon.
We see this attitude a lot from elderly conservatives who see everything through the lense of the Cold War. We saw it with Ted Cruz’s disgraceful attack on Middle Eastern Christians who invited him to speak at a conference about their own persecution.
The center right has been worse than the left on this issue. Part of the problem is that many Evangelical Protestant churches teach contempt for Eastern Christians. The church I was raised in taught that non-Protestants were fake Christians who we shouldn’t care about except to convert them to our kind religion. We were explicity told not to think about the interests of Middle Eastern Chrisitans in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the wars Lebannon.
We see this attitude a lot from elderly conservatives who see everything through the lense of the Cold War. We saw it with Ted Cruz’s disgraceful attack on Middle Eastern Christians who invited him to speak at a conference about their own persecution.
It is a disgrace what the US has done to Middle East Christians.
The Muslim Indonesian takeover of predominantly Roman Catholic East Timor back in about '75 was a dry run and Australia (who had close ties to East Timor due to what had happened in the area during WWII) and the US just shrugged their shoulders and let Indonesia slaughter tens of thousands without a peep from anyone.
A great deal of the oil Indonesia now controls was actually oil that under International Law belonged to East Timor. When the US has big economic fish to fry, how many Christians Muslims slaughter isn't even noticed as long as the economic goals are achieved.
It's like Hitler saying that no one cared about Armenia. US leaders figured no one cared about East Timor so why bother with protecting Christians in the Middle East?
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