Posted on 07/28/2007 6:42:06 AM PDT by xzins
Christian America may soon be the death of Iraqi Christians. Although Islam long has been in the ascendancy in Iraq, the so-called Assyrians, who speak a neo-Aramaic language, predate the rise of Islam. Today, however, the Iraqi Christian community faces possible extermination.
The irony is extraordinary: America, a nation with deep Christian roots, has inadvertently loosed the vicious forces bent on destroying Iraqi Christians. Persecuted by Islamic extremists and targeted for their frequent cooperation with occupation authorities, Christians have ever less hope in a nation that has fallen into violent chaos.
The Assyrian International News Agency has released a new report titled, "Incipient Genocide: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Assyrians of Iraq," written by Peter BetBasoo. It makes for dreadful reading.
Since the American invasion, several hundred Assyrians have been murdered. Even more have been kidnapped. Dozens of churches have been bombed or otherwise attacked.
Hundreds of Christian businesses have been torched because of the faith of their owners, wrecked for being non-Islamic (such as liquor stores) or ruined by criminal attacks and kidnappings. Christian women are being threatened and attacked for failing to follow Islamic law.
As sectarian violence has risen and the insurgency has surged, Christians have been targeted for retaliation. They long were despised by jihadists for their faith.
Then many Christians, who disproportionately spoke English, signed up to serve the U.S. military and occupation authorities. For them, the U.S. connection is a potential death sentence.
Yet Washington has done essentially nothing. In hopes of demonstrating impartiality, Washington has refused to help Christians, even when they have been literally placed under siege in their homes and neighborhoods.
Iraqi Christians have responded in the only way possible: running away. Roughly half of the pre-war Christian community, possibly 750,000 people, is thought to have fled Iraq.
That Iraqi Christians have fared poorly in the midst of Muslim radicalism, whether Shia or Sunni, comes as no surprise. Christians possess no military forces, no militias organized for their defense. Nor are their enclaves large enough to offer protection.
Less expected was Kurdistan's mistreatment of the Assyrians. Indeed, writes BetBasoo, the "systematic campaign of persecution .. began in the Kurdish regions of north Iraq shortly after the first Gulf war and spread to Baghdad and Basra after the liberation of Iraq in April of 2003. In the last three months it has intensified and is now openly declared in some areas of Iraq."
Unfortunately, there is little hope that the violence will abate. To the contrary, contends BetBasoo, "since Assyrians are not capable of defending themselves and are targeted as a class because of their distinct identity, what is now unfolding in Iraq can be termed an incipient genocide."
Using the term is inherently controversial, but Christianity is disappearing from Iraq. A distinct ethnic, language, and religious community is being driven out.
Although the violence appears to be more anarchic than concerted, it has had the same effect as an organized campaign to destroy Iraq's Assyrians. Virtually every member of the community is under siege.
Today there is no safety even in Christian neighborhoods, since Islamist forces can invade them with impunity. Whatever the virtues of the so-called surge, safeguarding Christians is not among them.
BetBasoo reports that in early March "al-Qaeda moved into Dora, a predominantly Assyrian neighborhood in south Baghdad, and began imposing strict Islamic law." The only alternatives offered were death or flight—or delivering a daughter or sister to the mosque for marriage to a local Muslim man. Families who did leave were charged an "exit fee."
Threatened Christians appealed to both the Iraqi government and U.S. military, without result. "Nobody really cares," one of them despaired in an email to the Assyrian International News Service.
Unfortunately, the worse the situation in Iraq, the less hope there is to save Iraqi Christians. The Assyrian community has called for creation of a protected enclave, though its survival after a future U.S. military withdrawal is doubtful.
Certainly the United States should welcome Christians fleeing the violence Muslim refugees may have some hope of returning to a future Iraq that becomes stable if not liberal. The Assyrians are far less likely to find a tolerant and tolerable environment.
America and other coalition members should open their doors. These are, after all, people who favor the United States, have been endangered because of American policy, and have nowhere else to go.
Doug Bandow is a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and Vice President for Policy of Citizen Outreach. He is a member of the Economic Theory & Policy Working Group with the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College and the author or editor of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire (Xulon Press).
One has to wonder if it isn't best to depart.
On the other hand, why were Bosnia and Kosovo such huge issues regarding ethnic cleansing?
The christians in Iraq feared this would happen if Saddam was toppled. He pretty much left them alone. WHAT is wrong with our country and its leaders when we can just let this happen? God will judge us mightily for this, just as He will for our treatment of the Jews who wanted asylum in America and were turned away. God help us all—we sure don’t deserve it.
It could also be God’s provision....
If Iraq were becoming more islamo-fascist, al qaeda, taliban friendly, then these Christians would have been doomed anyway, eventually.
Perhaps their departure from Iraq is best, so the best thing we can do as a nation is to open immigration to them.
the Christians were also abandoned in the Palestinian territories, despite the fact that they kept up the Christian sites like Bethlehem. most have fled by now. there are Arab Israeli Christians that see to Nazareth, but in general, people have not been paying attention to the plight of non-Muslim in a Muslim country.
The surge is working!
Huh? How was Iraq becoming more islamo-fascist friendly under Saddam? Iraq was a secular state - by brute force. The Islamists only got to power after we came on the scene.
Was that sarcasm or do you really believe it?
We are letting it happen...we let genocide against Christians happen previously...the first genocide in the modern era...and we will be punished for it.
Not doubt in my mind.
WE din't bring on any Christian persecution by fighting in Irag and thereby trigger some ficticious "angry reaction" to the "invasion"
No one seems to put together that it was the WORLD Trade center that was hit .... twice, and that the main protector of the friggin' world has been the U.S.
Planet Earth was attacked September 11, 2001 !!
Why do you think they're called 'globalists' ?
We are considered a great serpent by the stupidstitious ones and a serpent without a head is no longer a threat.
Another “Islam Is As Islam Does” article.
And yet mainstream USA still doesn’t want to believe we’re at war.
The point of the article is that there’s been no provision for the Christians in Iraq.
We did try to protect the Kurds and created an enclave for them.
No barf alert necessary. This article is not about the legitimacy of the war or even the conduct of it.
It is about whether we’ve provided for the Christian minority.
Place blame where it is due. The Islamists are to blame, not the US. Damn, everybody wants to blame America first.
mrs
It isn't American policy that is endangering Christian Iraqis, it's the demonic Islamic religion that demands that all non-Muslims who won't convert are either killed or become virtual slaves of Muslims that is endangering them and all others who won't convert to Islam.
Any religion that demands conversion under pain of death or slavery should be eradicated from the planet no matter how difficult and costly that would be to accomplish. I think that a lot of Muslims are not fanatics, and would probably welcome being freed from having every aspect of their miserable lives rigidly controlled by the murderous thugs who pass for clerics in Islam.
My late brother-in-laws Lebanese CHRISTIAN family was driven from Lebanon years ago by muslim persecution — including death threats if they did not convert.
I understand your frustration, and I agree that it is the islamofascists who are doing the killing and definitely not the U.S.
The question, though, is “how would you protect them?”
At least with saddamn the brutal, violent, savage tendencies of the population were kept in check by his brutal, violent savage repressive regime.
see #15
I met a Turkish Christian (barber) in Germany on my final tour. He had recently left and explained some of the restrictions on him as a Christian, even though Turkey was supposed to be a more “enlightened” modern state.
My memory may be faulty, but I think he said he wasn’t allowed to vote or had restricted voting privileges, had to pay special taxes, etc.
Ditto.
Here are the final 2 paragraphs of an article that appeared just a few days ago in a lebanese newspaper which address this very issue and places the “blame” exactly where it belongs:
The Destruction of Iraq’s Christians
7-20-2007
snip only:
Eventually, the violence in Iraq will subside and a modicum of security will return. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds will arrive at a modus vivendi, however imperfect. In attempting to forge some semblance of unity, a nationalist historiography will likely blame the occupation forces for Iraq’s post-Saddam violence. And this will be the second crime perpetrated against Iraqi victims of Islamist terror. After all, there can be no greater insult to the murdered than to exonerate their murderers.
For the Christians of Iraq, indeed, for all Iraqis who have been killed or otherwise persecuted for their religious affiliation, this would mean exonerating the Islamist purveyors of holy war, Sunni or Shiite, who incite against one another and against non-Muslims. It would mean “moving forward” without ever confronting the Islamist theologies of murder, rape and genocide, whose adherents have forever disfigured Iraq.
By Rayyan al-Shawaf
Daily Star, Lebanon
http://www.aina.org/news/20070720001552.htm
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