THE VIOLENT PERSECUTION OF MIDEAST CHRISTIANS
ISIL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE. WHAT IS CANADA DOING ABOUT IT?
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is hell- bent on exterminating ancient Christian communities across the Middle East.
U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry finally confirmed this Thursday when he declared ISIL was guilty of genocide against Christians and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria. This follows a similar declaration by the European Union last month.
ISIL’s outrages against Christ i ans in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen had created a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, to which the Obama administration clearly felt compelled to respond.
Regrettably, the violent persecution of Christians across the Islamic world never seems to cause a sustained stir in Canada. The lack of interest in actively defending Christians and other minorities in Iraq from harm was underscored by the Trudeau government’s decision last month to withdraw Canadian warplanes from combat operations against ISIL. It presumably explains why Global Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion has been noncommittal about whether to close the Office for Religious Freedom or appoint another ambassador to oversee it when its mandate and funding run out in two weeks.
The office, established by the Harper government in 2013, has funded programs to encourage religious tolerance in Indonesia, Pakistan and Iraq.
Sadly, it has not succeeded in making Canadians much more aware of this growing problem, which, it should be stressed, does not only afflict Christian minorities but many other religious groups.
First among them are Iraq’s horribly abused Yazidis, whose fate was mentioned Thursday by Kerry. Yazidi men and boys have been slaughtered.
Yazidi women have been forced to become sex slaves and are being bought, sold and traded by jihadists.
Those being persecuted elsewhere include Muslims who have been attacked by Buddhists in Myanmar, Hazara Shias in Afghanistan, Sunnis in Iran and Shias in the Persian Gulf states, Sunnis and Shias in Iraq and Syria, and the few Sephardic Jews who are still brave enough to live where their ancestors have for many centuries across the Middle East.
Christians are at greatest peril in Iraq and Syria, but they are also at grave risk from Sunni extremists from Tripoli, Cairo and Aden to Baghdad. Egypt’s Copts, long the most numerous Christian group in the Middle East, and the still vibrant multi-denominational Lebanese Christians, may survive. But other Christian enclaves in and near the Holy Land are being bludgeoned to death or slowly fading away.
Further afield, Pakistan’s two million Christians are back on their heels. Their churches, homes and schools have often been burned down and they find it increasingly difficult to find work. Christians in sub- Saharan Africa, Indonesia and Sudan face similar difficulties.
In one of the most heinous acts, ISIL overran a compound last month in Yemen where sisters from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity cared for the elderly. Four nuns and 12 others were bound and shot in the head, then a priest was kidnapped. As many as 28 Ethiopian Christians were shot or beheaded by ISIL last year in Libya
The Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus and another group which calls itself In Defense of Christians, demanded in a recently published report the U.S. declare what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria was genocide. Of the two million Christians who lived there at the turn of the century, only 300,000 remain.
My first brush with violence against Christians occurred in 2003, when I attended mass at a Chaldean Catholic church in Baghdad. U.S. troops had erected barriers to stop suicide bombers in vehicles and built a heavily fortified bunker across the street.
Mothers inside the church were not shy about approaching foreign Christian males to ask if they might wish to marry their daughters, and spirit them and their kin out of the madness that was closing in on them.
A few years back, I visited the hauntingly beautiful churches and monasteries carved into a hillside of Maaloula, not far north of Damascus. One of the last pockets in the Middle East where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, was still spoken, the town is now back under Syrian government control after having been plundered, its architectural treasures and Christian relics blasted apart by al- Nusra, another Sunni extremist group.
Several times in 2014 and again last year, I met panicked Christians from Mosul and the historically Christian plain that surrounds the city, who had taken refuge on church grounds in the Iraqi Kurdish capital, Erbil.
One young fellow with a cross tattooed on his hand told me the best he could have hoped for if ISIL had spotted the cross was to have his hand lopped off. It is far more likely he would have lost his head.
Such ghastly abominations are a reality of Christian life in the Middle East. It is perverse that other than occasional bland platitudes few Canadians appear to be moved by such horrors.
IT IS FAR MORE LIKELY HE WOULD HAVE LOST HIS HEAD.