Monday - April 06, 2015

The Christian tragedy in the Middle East did not begin with Isis

He’s a pretty good wordsmith, articulate, and knows how to use the language. But.

There’s any number of reasons why I am not a fan of this columnist. Mostly his twisted very left wing take, no. Hold on. His take may be sincere. He may believe what he says about the USA from time to time. So it may not be what he honestly believes, but how he twists things to fit his always naughty America reporting.
So I generally avoid his column because instead of informed, what I get is frustrated and angry. This column is a rare exception.
Every so often he does an article like the one below.  It deals with Christian persecution and muslims but even here there’s a slight dig at the US thru Hollywood, which he claims “demonises” muslims, and did so long before 9/11.
Of course, the ROP did nothing to earn the attention of Hollywood and it’s writers and producers.  Nah. All innocent and light they were.

The following has been edited for space. Please see link to the rest at the bottom.

A hundred years on from the Armenian genocide, and a Christian minority is again suffering

By Robert Fisk

One summer’s day in 1990, I walked into a beautiful Crusader chapel in Keserwan, a gentle mountainside north of Beirut, where an old Catholic Maronite priest pointed to a Byzantine mosaic of – I think – Saint John. What he wanted to show me was the holy man’s eyes. They had been stabbed out of the mosaic by a sword or lance at some point in antiquity. ‘The Muslims did this,’ the priest said.

His words had added clarity because at that time the Lebanese Christian army General Michel Aoun – who thought he was the president and still, today, dreams of this unlikely investiture – was fighting a hopeless war against Hafez Assad’s Syrian army. Daily, I was visiting the homes of dead Christians, killed by Syrian shellfire. The Syrians, in the priest’s narrative, were the same ‘Muslims’ who had stabbed out the eyes in the ancient picture.

I remember at the time – and often since – I would say to myself that this was nonsense, that you cannot graft ancient history onto the present. (The Maronites, by the way, had supported the earlier Crusaders. The Orthodox of the time stood with the Muslims.) Christian-Muslim enmity on this scale was a tale to frighten schoolchildren.

And yet only last year, as shells burst above the Syrian town of Yabroud, I walked into the country’s oldest church and found paintings of the saints. All had had their eyes gouged out and been torn into strips. I took one of those strips home to Beirut, the painted eyes of the saints staring at me even as I write this article. This was not the sacrilege of antiquity. It was done by ghoulish men, probably from Iraq, only months ago.

Like 9/11 – long after Hollywood had regularly demonised Muslims as barbarian killers who wish to destroy America – it seems that our worst fears turn into reality. The priest in 1990 cannot have lived long enough to know how the new barbarians would strike at the saints in Yabroud.

Note how I have not mentioned the enslavement of Christian women in Iraq, the Islamic State’s massacre of Christians and Yazidis, the burning of Mosul’s ancient churches or the destruction of the great Armenian church of Deir el-Zour that commemorated the genocide of its people in 1915. Nor the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Not even the very latest massacre in Kenya where the numbers of Christian dead and the cruelty of their sectarian killers is, indeed, of epic, Hollywood proportions. Nor have I mentioned the ferocious Sunni-Shia wars that now dwarf the tragedy of the Christians.

The crimes of Islamic State are as brutal as any committed by the German army in the Second World War, but Jews who converted were not spared Hitler’s plan for their extermination. What the Islamic State and the 1915 Ottoman Turks have in common is a cruelty based on ideology – even theology – rather than race hatred, although that is not far away.

After the burning of churches and of synagogues, the rubble looks much the same.

The tragedy of the Arab world is now on such a literally Biblical scale that we are all demeaned by it. Yet I also think of Lebanon where the old priest showed me his mosaic with the missing eyes and where the Lebanese Christians and Muslims fought each other – with the help of many foreign nations, including Israel, Syria and America – and killed 150,000 of their own people.

UNEDITED VERSION CONTINUES

Posted by peiper     on 04/06/2015 at 08:19 AM   
Filed Under: • muslims • Terrorists •  
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