Posted on 11/09/2010 6:24:23 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints' Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad.
As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of mass murder.
When security forces broke in, the killers threw grenades to finish off the surviving Christians and detonated explosive-laden vests to kill the police. The toll was 46 parishioners and two priests killed, 78 others wounded, many in critical condition after losing limbs.
Within 48 hours, al-Qaida in Mesopotamia issued a bulletin: "All Christian centers, organizations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the (holy warriors)."
It was the worst massacre of Christians yet. For Assyrian Catholics known as Chaldeans, whose ancestors were converted by St. Thomas the Apostle, the U.S. war of liberation has been seven years of hell.
Estimates of the number of Christians in Iraq in 2003 vary from 800,000 to 1.5 million. But hundreds of thousands have fled since the invasion. Seven of the 14 churches in Baghdad have closed, and two-thirds of the city's 500,000 Christians are gone.
While Saddam Hussein, a secularist, had protected religious minorities, Muslim vigilantes -- Shia, Sunni and Kurd, as well as al-Qaida -- have attacked the Christians who have endured kidnappings, pillage, rapes, beheadings and assassinations.
And what has happened to this Christian community, which had lived peacefully alongside Muslim neighbors for centuries, must be marked down as one of the predictable and predicted consequences of America's war in Iraq.
In editor Tom Fleming's Chronicles, just days before President Bush ordered the invasion, columnist Wayne Allensworth warned pointedly:
"Iraqi Christians fear they will be the first victims of a war that might dismember their country, unleashing ethnic and religious conflicts that Baghdad had previously suppressed. Tariq, a Christian merchant in Baghdad, told the French weekly Marianne that 'If the United States goes to war against our country ... (t)he Wahhabis and other fundamentalists will take advantage of the confusion to throw us out of our homes, destroy us as a community and declare Iraq an Islamic nation.'
"If recent history is any indication, Tariq has cause for concern," wrote Allensworth. "The Shiite uprising in southern Iraq during the first Gulf War -- encouraged and then abandoned by Washington -- targeted Christians. Many Christians had supported Saddam's regime, in spite of creeping Islamicization, as their best hope of survival in the Islamic Middle East."
"We let the Shia genie out of the bottle," said a rueful Yitzhak Rabin after Israel's invasion of Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah.
We Americans did the same with our wars against Saddam's Iraq.
Why is Christianity being murdered in its cradle by Muslim fanatics?
Multiple reasons. A return of Islamic militancy. The rise of ethnic nationalism that conflates tribal and religious identity. Hatred of America for its domination of the region, for our war on terror that they see as a war on Islam and for our support of Israel in its suppression of the Palestinians.
Christians across the Middle East are now seen as both members of an alien religion and a fifth column of the Crusaders inside their camp.
Paul Marshall of Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom warns that we may be in another great wave of persecution, "as Christians flee the Palestinian areas, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt."
Christians are gone from Jerusalem, gone from Nazareth, gone from Bethlehem. From Egypt to Iran, the Vatican counts 17 million left.
"Across the Middle East," writes Robert Fisk in The Independent, "it is the same story of despairing -- sometimes frightened -- Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions."
In an essay titled in Christ's own words, "Whoever Loses His Life for My Sake ..." columnist Doug Bandow writes,
"Although Christians are no longer tossed to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, believers are routinely murdered, imprisoned, tortured and beaten. Churches, businesses and homes are regularly destroyed. The opportunity to meet for worship and prayer is blocked. There is real persecution rather than the cultural hostility often denounced as 'persecution' in America."
America remains the most Christianized of the Western nations. Yet, the protests of the White House, State Department and major media over the eradication of Christianity in the Middle East is muted.
Where is the outrage? What happened to the America whose president, with a British prime minister in Placentia Bay, on the eve of war sang with his sailors, "Onward Christian Soldiers"?
Are we so wary of offending Muslim sensibilities or inflaming Muslim rage we cannot denounce the pogroms perpetrated against Christians in the name of Allah?
Of what worth are these wars for democracy if we end up freeing fanatics to annihilate communities or expel populations of our own Christian brothers and sisters across the Middle East?
Islam is a disease.
Islam is a disease.
Islam and all its adherents need to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Very little has been said about this horrific event in the news. I expected a call for prayers for this community at church on Sunday, but nothing was said.
For years I have been wondering why there are few Christians left in countries where Christianity once flourished. This is the answer.
Communism is a religion disguised as a political ideology.
Mohammedanism is a political ideology disguised as a religion.
Both are evil, and incompatible with Christianity or with liberty.
ping
We won’t even acknowledge who our enemies are.
Islam is one side, Christianity is the other, and thier leaders go back a long way.
From the title I was expecting a story about Christian seminaries and divinity schools.
We do face many challenges these days.
Aryan Pat has no problem with the Muslim invasion here at home. I don’t see him denouncing it.
I agree. I have no idea what the solution is, but one thing I know, SILENCE, is not an answer.
Where are the rallies? Where are the calls for prayer for those who are attacked and murdered? Have we actually got beyond the point of standing up for our Christian beliefs?
If we as members of a Christian church do not call out our pastors, priests, religious advisors, we are just as responsible as those who dominated this society and moved us to a ‘freedom from [Christian] religion’ world.
Time for all Christians to openly stand for their beliefs! If your church advisors won’t ask for prayers, then it is up to you, the congregant, to stand up and be counted asking for what they should have.
That does not make his denouncement of the Massacre in Baghdad wrong. And it does not make the fact that the lamestream news media is totally ignoring it right.
OMG. Prayers for this martyred family.
The money quote.
Their doing so is entirely understandable. But regimes such as Saddam's are inherently unstable. Had the US not invaded, it would have fallen eventually from some other cause.
And then those who supported such a regime would pay the price, regardless of their motives for doing so.
The best thing these poor people can do is flee the country. As I understand it, they tend to make pretty good Americans.
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Ummm hmmm.....
All of this accomplished....
"in the name of Allah...
Most Beneficent....
......Most Merciful"
**********
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There remain only these rabid animals...
Filled with unclean spirits....
....Given over to depraved minds...
incorrigible... perverse... blood-crazed...
They need to be dealt with like mad dogs loose in the street...
jmho...
Communism is Satan’s #1 weapon against the Kingdom of God designed for atheists.
Islam is the same thing, but for people who accept that a supreme God exists.
Satan can only copy God, so Islam takes basic tenets if Christianity like monotheism and fidelity - but it removes the love and replaces it with hate. A basic comparison between how the Koran and Bible instruct it’s followers to proselytize clearly shows that.
Now sic them alien Mexicans!!! [/sarcasm]
Israel's invasion of Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah
our support of Israel in its suppression of the Palestinians
The disgusting audacity of this repulsive anti Semitic POS.
Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982 was welcomed by the Christians who allied with Israel because they were being massacred by the Palestinians before there was a Hezbollah.
First they came for the Jews.
Where the Islamic were mostly waging war on Jews and Israel, this POS cheered them on.
Seeing the mute reaction from the World, they now go after Christians too.
The Arabs/Islamics were an impotent nuisance before they accumulated the support of the World's Jew haters.
You want to know why Christians are being massacred in the Mideast today, look in the mirror Buchanan.
Where is the outrage indeed?
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