Suffering In Syria And Elsewhere In The Middle East
Catholic charities like “Caritas” and “Aid to the Church in Need” are doing an enormous amount of good in Syria itself, as well as in the camps and among the refugees, Catholic and Orthodox. The aid given to all by other bodies often does not reach the Christians: (listen to the podcast from Vatican radio by clicking the title).
The persecution of Christians by radical Islamic groups in Syria over the past two years has been appalling—and largely ignored
from an article by Raymond Ibrahim My source: Frontpage Mag.Wherever U.S. leadership has helped Islamic jihadis topple secular autocrats in the name of “democracy and freedom,” indigenous Christian minorities are being forced to convert to Islam or die.
Many are accepting death.
Most recently, on August 28 near Aleppo, the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) tortured, mutilated, publicly raped, beheaded and crucified 12 Christians for saying “they would never renounce Christ” for Muhammad.
The jihadis took one group in front of a large crowd. They cut off the fingertips of a 12-year-old boy, who steadfastly refused to submit to Islam. They “severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam.” He refused, so they “also tortured and beat him and the two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion.”
According to a Christian leader associated with the martyrs, “They were left on their crosses for two days. No one was allowed to remove them.” A sign saying “infidels” was placed next to their crosses.
West has ‘betrayed the Christians of the East’, says Syrian Patriarch
by STEVE RAY on NOVEMBER 28, 2015
Syria, November 19, 2015: The head of the Syrian Catholic Church, Mar Ignace Youssif III Youan, has said the West has betrayed Syrians and caused an endless conflict in the country.
“We Christians are not able to live in this chaos,” the Syrian Patriarch said. “The West has betrayed us.”
“It’s a shame that the West has abandoned Christians to this situation,” he said.
ISIS, genocide, and us
Western politicians seem to fear that naming the genocide of Christians for what it is, or treating Christian refugees as refugees, will be taken as a gesture of disrespect for Islam.
February 17, 2016 01:25 EST by George Weigel
(Photo illustration: us.fotolia.com | fusolino)
my source: Catholic World Report
The Monuments Men was a disappointing movie, but one of its most chilling scenes sticks in my mind as an analogue to the appalling wickedness underway in the Middle East.
In the film, SS Colonel Wegner supervises the destruction of art works plundered by the Nazis: treasures intended for Hitler’s fantasized Fuehrer Museum in Linz, Austria. But as the Allies close in on Germany in 1945, Hitler decides that, if he and his goons can’t have these masterpieces, their rightful owners – and the future – won’t have them, either. So Wegner and an SS squad armed with flamethrowers incinerate painting after painting, including Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. Colonel Wegner, we learn later, was an extermination camp superintendent before he got busy destroying paintings.
The Nazi destruction of stolen was an act of gratuitous violence against Europe’s cultural heritage, undertaken in service to a demented ideology – the corollary, in the field of culture, of the far more wicked Nazi slaughter of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, the mentally ill, and all those who fell under the category of Lebensunwertes Leben: “life unworthy of life.” Similarly gratuitous destruction of ancient cultural centers and artifacts is now underway wherever the black flag of the Islamic State, ISIS, is raised in Iraq and Syria. And so is another genocide, this time of Christians.
The jihadists of ISIS routinely tear the crosses and bells from Christian churches in areas under their control, even as they hammer Christian images and statues into dust, desecrate Christian tombs, and do everything possible to destroy the artifacts of a Christian civilization that dates back to the days of the apostles. But, as with the Nazis, even greater evils are visited upon people. In ISIS-controlled areas, Christians are murdered by beheading or crucifixion for refusing to convert to Islam. Rape, regarded as a religious benefice by maniacal barbarians who “pray” before and after violating their Christian victims, is a routine occurrence in these ISIS enclaves, from which Christians are also sold into slavery, including sex-slavery.
The most recent cultural outrage to come to light was Islamic State’s demolition of the vast stone monastery of St. Elijah in Mosul. As the indefatigable human rights campaigner Nina Shea wrote, the monastery, a house of Christian worship for a millennium and a half, was “reduced to rubble” by the “determined application of sledgehammers, bulldozers, and explosives.” But as Ms. Shea went on to note, the wanton destruction of a sacred place is also a metaphor for “the genocide of Iraq’s Christian people and their civilization.”
Martyrdom is a daily fact of life wherever the black flag of ISIS stains the Mesopotamian sky. Those Christians who can flee have done so. Yet they cannot take shelter in U.N.-run camps, where they are often targets of Muslim violence. And the U.S. State Department treats Iraqi Christians fleeing ISIS to autonomous Kurdistan as “internally displaced persons” who have no claim to resettlement. So the Iraqi Christians are stuck in ramshackle, Church-run camps or housing, stateless in fact if not in law, and increasingly desperate: for in Kurdistan they cannot legally work, drive, or open bank accounts. Which means they have, literally, no future.
Many Iraqi Christian leaders are pleading with western countries to accept their people along with their priests, so that these Christians can rebuild their lives and save their culture. Thus far, the West has been craven and cruel in its response: Nina Shea reports that the U.S. State Department even sent one Iraqi girl, brought to the U.S. by the Knights of Columbus for a life-saving operation, back to Kurdistan, although she has relatives in Arizona.
Which takes us back to the era of The Monuments Men. Then, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill both declined to prioritize Jewish refugees from Nazism, for fear of offending anti-Semitic elements in the political coalitions they led. Today, western politicians seem to fear that naming the genocide of Christians for what it is, or treating Christian refugees as refugees, will be taken as a gesture of disrespect for Islam.
This is shameful. The shadow that their decisions in the 1930s and 1940s now cast over the historical reputations of Roosevelt and Churchill should stand as a warning to western political leaders today.
A HIGHLY INFORMATIVE AND INTERESTING PODCAST (Vatican Radio):
Source: http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.com/2016/02/suffering-in-syria-and-elsewhere-in.html
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