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Showing posts with label Christian Persecution in Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Persecution in Iraq. Show all posts

Monday, July 21, 2014

Iraq Catholic Leader Says Islamic State Worse than Genghis Khan

An Iraqi Christian boy fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Mosul, stands inside the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Chaldean Church in Telkaif near Mosul, in the province of Nineveh, July 20, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Stringer

(Reuters) - The head of Iraq's largest church said on Sunday that Islamic State militants who drove Christians out of Mosul were worse than Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu who ransacked medieval Baghdad.

Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako led a wave of condemnation for the Sunni Islamists who demanded Christians either convert, submit to their radical rule and pay a religious levy or face death by the sword.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis decried what he said was the persecution of Christians in the birthplace of their faith, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the Islamic State's actions could constitute a crime against humanity.

Read more from Reuters >>


Thursday, June 16, 2011

Young Christian Beheaded in Northern Iraq

By John Newton and Andre Stiefenhofer

The decapitated body of a Christian man has been discovered in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, a few days after he was kidnapped.

Ashur Yacob Issa, 29, was abducted late Friday night or early Saturday morning and his mutilated body was discovered Monday morning.

His family had been asked for a ransom but was not able to pay the sum of more than £61,500 (€70,000) the kidnappers demanded.

Speaking to Aid to the Church in Need, the charity for persecuted and other suffering Christians, Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk condemned the killing, and went on to pay tribute to the strength and faith of his community despite the continuing threat of violence.

Friday, January 21, 2011

European Parliament Adopts Resolution Condemning Attacks Against Christians


Members of the European Parliament today adopted a resolution condemning persecution and discrimination based on religion. In particular MEP’s condemned attacks against Christians in countries including Egypt, and Iraq.

They also called for a strategy to enforce the human right to freedom of religion, including a list of measures against states who knowingly fail to protect religious denominations.
Lydia O’Kane spoke to MEP Mario Mauro, who is head of the delegation of the EPP group in the European parliament.

He says there is now a growing awareness in Europe of the plight of Christians in many countries.

“I think we are in a very significant moment in the history of the European institutions, because for the first time we declared this kind of judgement, the fact that there exists the problem of persecution of Christians.”

MEP’s also want the forthcoming External Affairs Council of 31 January 2011 to discuss the persecution of Christians and respect for religious freedom. 

Listen to Mario Mauro's interview with Lydia O'Kane. RealAudioMP3

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Iraq's War on Christians

Oil and geopolitics prevent the United States and Western European countries from speaking out against what amounts to genocide against Christians in the Middle East.

By Tim Rutten

As much of the world once more prepares to celebrate the birth of Christ, it is a melancholy fact that many of the most ancient churches established in his name are being pushed to the brink of oblivion across the region where their faith was born.

The culprits are Salafist Islam's increasingly virulent intolerance, the West's convenient indifference and, in the case of Iraq, America's failure to make responsible provisions to protect minorities from the violent disorder that has persisted since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

When America intervened to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Christians — mostly Chaldeans and Assyrians — numbered about 1.4 million, or about 3% of the population. Over the last seven years, more than half have fled the country and, as the New York Times reported this week, a wave of targeted killings — including the Oct. 31 slaying of 51 worshipers and two priests during Mass at one of Baghdad's largest churches — has sent many more Christians fleeing. Despite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki promises to increase security, many believe the Christians are being targeted not only by Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has instructed its fighters "to kill Christians wherever they can reach them," but also by complicit elements within the government's security services.

The United States, meanwhile, does nothing — as it did nothing four years ago, when Father Boulos Iskander was kidnapped, beheaded and dismembered; or three years ago, when Father Ragheed Ganni was shot dead at the altar of this church; or two years ago, when Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was kidnapped and murdered; as it has done nothing about all the church bombings and assassinations of lay Christians that have become commonplace over the last seven years.

The human tragedy of all this is compounded by the historic one. The churches of the Middle East preserve the traditions of the Apostolic era in ways no other Christian rites or denominations do. The followers of Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch Syria, and it was there that the Gospels first were written down in Koine Greek. For 1,000 years, the churches of Iraq and Syria were great centers of Christian thought and art. Today, the Christian population is declining in every majority Muslim country in the region and is under increasingly severe pressure even in Lebanon, where it still constitutes 35% of the population.

Putting aside America's particular culpability in Iraq, the West as a community of nations has long turned a blind eye to the intolerance of the Middle East's Muslim states — an intolerance that has intensified with the spread of Salafism, Islam's brand of militant fundamentalism. Our ally Saudi Arabia is the great financial and ideological backer of this hatred. In fact, when it comes to religion, the kingdom and North Korea are the most criminally intolerant countries in the world.

Oil and geopolitics prevent the United States and Western European countries from speaking out against what amounts to genocide, though something more sinister than self-interest also is at work. The soft bigotry of minimal expectation is in play, an unspoken presumption that Muslim societies simply can't be held to the same standards of humane, rational and decent conduct that govern the affairs of other nations.

Paradoxically, the one country in the Middle East whose Christian population has grown in recent years is Israel, where more than 150,000 Christians enjoy religious freedom. That lends a particular pathos to the way in which the current persecution of Christians mirrors that which destroyed most of the region's ancient Jewish communities following Israel's establishment in 1948. Iraq, for example, was home to one of the Mideast's largest and most vibrant Jewish populations, one that predated Christianity by many centuries. It was in the great Jewish academies along the Euphrates that the more authoritative of the two Talmuds was argued out and compiled after the Second Temple's destruction. All that was swept away in a wave of hatred, as were all but vestiges of the equally ancient Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and, more recently, Iran.

As one of the recent Christian refugees from Baghdad told the New York Times this week, "It's exactly what happened to the Jews."

A world still dazed and distracted by a world war's aftermath stood by and did nothing then. The West has no such excuse now.


Tim Rutten has been a journalist for more than 30 years. He participated in The Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning team coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He also won a 1991 award from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club for editorial writing.