Across the Middle East, a long history of hard-won co-existence faces extinction from a belief system devoted to domination, and this time in control of an "Islamic state." Will it again strike us directly, as it did 13 years ago this Sept. 11?
Nuri Kino - reported on Fox News - confirms the tragic situation in Syria and identifies those engaged in persecuting these ancient Christian communities:
Aleppo, Syria's largest city, also has been nearly emptied of Assyrians, Armenians and other non-Muslims...
... The prideful tone in which the perpetrators speak whenever I have interviewed them --both Al Qaeda and IS ---- is equally shocking. These are mostly disgruntled young men who were teetering on the edges of society in their own homelands, often in European suburbs, and now believe they have the power to do whatever they want in the name of Islam. They can claim any house in IS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria as their own, and tell the owners to either leave or risk being killed. They can take any woman as their wife…
… At least 700, 000 non-Muslims -- Christians, Mandeans, Yezidis and others -- have left Iraq by now. No one knows how many have left Syria.
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Nina Shea reports in the Christian Post:
ISIS has set out to erase every Christian trace. All 30 churches were seized and their crosses stripped away. Some have been permanently turned into mosques. One is the Mar (Saint) Ephraim Syriac Orthodox Cathedral, newly outfitted with loudspeakers that now call Muslims to prayer. The 4th century Mar Behnam, a Syriac Catholic monastery outside Mosul, was captured and its monks expelled, leaving behind a library of early Christian manuscripts and wall inscriptions by 13th-century Mongol pilgrims.
Christian and Shiite gravesites, deemed idolatrous by ISIS, are being deliberately blown up and destroyed, including on July 24, the tomb of the 8th-century B.C. Old Testament Prophet Jonah, and the Muslim shrine that enclosed it.
Patrick Coburn does not mince his words in The Independent:
It is the greatest mass flight of Christians in the Middle East since the Armenian massacres and the expulsion of Christians from Turkey during and after the First World War.
Yet the media shows little interest in exposing the decimation and dispersal of the Christian communities in Syria and Iraq.
Google reports on the Israel-Gaza war outnumber reports on the ISIS-Christian conflict by about 20:1.
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The West is equally as disinterested at this appalling ethnic and religious cleansing and forced transfer of Christians.
An impotent United Nations shows its unwillingness to intervene.
Israel meanwhile ensures that Jews will never find themselves in the same boat as the abandoned and hapless Christians.
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