Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald examines the difficult situation of Iraqi Christians under the new Iraqi Constitution, and the difficult position of Middle Eastern Christians in general:
No law that contradicts Islam can be allowed. And Islam insists, Islam is based upon, treating Believers and Infidels (i.e., all non-Muslims) quite differently. Many of the Middle East's Christians have long tried to do everything they can, including parroting and even internalizing anti-Israel sentiments -- as the "Palestinian" Christians emptying out of Bethlehem and other PA-controlled areas are coming to realize, it won't save them. Others generally promote an Islamic agenda.The sense of "Uruba" or "Arabness" that sometimes accompanies the use of the Arabic language, and that has helped persuade a great many non-Arabs that they are "Arabs," and must, as Arabs, take pride in what all Muslim Arabs perceive as the greatest contribution to the world of the Arabs, which is to say Islam, and with it something called "Islamic civilization" (though High Islamic Civilization is very largely a product of Jewish and Christian translators, and of Persians), has no doubt affected some --but by no means all -- in the various churches still extant in Iraq.
Tens of thousands of Christians have left. They have been terrified into leaving. In Basra Christian sellers of alcohol have been summarily executed. Christian girls have been seized, raped, never seen again. In Ramadi, the last remaining Christian families -- eight of them -- were early on "invited" to accept Islam, the men killed, the women seized for Muslim delectation. There are no Christians to be found in Ramadi right now. They've "disappeared."
If the full story has not been told by their co-religionists in this country, it is because they are afraid to say a word as long as there are still Christians remaining in Iraq. What will happen? Well, whatever else Saddam Hussein was guilty of, he was a protector, in a way, of the Christians -- not out of kindness or tolerance, but simply because they were useful to him and were never a threat, the way those rooted in the mosques, especially among the Shi'a, could be. His tasters, his cooks, his cleaners, his entire domestic staff were Christians, for he could trust them. The same staff, by the way, was inherited by American officials and employed by them for the same reasons.Tariq Aziz, the Christian with the Muslim pseudonym, was like many Christians useful not only because his loyalty (born of fear) would be total, and he would never be caught plotting with the likes of some local Muslim Brotherhood group, but because as a Christian, he had no one else to plot with even if he wished to plot. In the same way, Hafez al-Assad had various units in his palace guard. Along with the Alawites, he had Armenians, for they could also be trusted not to betray a regime that, for all of its murderousness, is felt by Christians to be better for them than what the Armenians in Haleb (Aleppo) call "the real Muslims" -- i.e., those that do not, as the Alawites do, worship Mary (Miriam).
The Bush Administration does not know what to do. It pretends that the proposed constitution does not give pride of place to Islam, but of course it does. It does not matter that there are some "contradictory" clauses; the clause that counts is this, and everyone in Iraq -- those who wanted that clause put in and those who wanted it kept out -- know exactly how it will be used. It is only the Americans, ever hopeful, ever naive, ever confusing silly obstinacy with "resolve to see this through," who do not understand what, for Muslims in an overwhelmingly Muslim land, such a clause must mean.
Does anyone think, for one minute, that the proposed Iraqi constitution could conceivably permit apostasy from Islam -- i.e., permit the freedom of conscience that is possibly the most important of all freedoms, that which we find in the First Amendment, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (non-Muslim version only)? Of course not.
I don't envy the Christians in Iraq. But of course, the situation of any non-Muslims, anywhere in a Muslim country, with or without an American invasion, with or without oil being present, with or without (fill in the blank here with anything you like), will always be difficult. It has to be. All non-Muslims are allowed to exist, but not as by right. On sufferance. The sufferance of the dominant Muslims, whose favor or disfavor can appear or disappear, depending on the ruler's whim, or still worse, the fickle attitudes of the primitive populace – which has in every case been shown to be more ill-disposed toward non-Muslims than the occasional odd quasi-enlightened despot, such as Ataturk, the Shah of Iran, Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Mohammed V of Morocco.
And the relative enlightenment of the ruler, as opposed to the people, was demonstrated just two days ago when King Abdullah of Jordan made a speech that, while it contained all sorts of false history, was made, one assumes, in a spirit far more advanced than that of the hysterically anti-Jewish population in Jordan itself. Yet the Administration keeps prating about the virtues of "democracy," ignoring the role of the enlightened despot in the Middle East in constraining Islam and thereby, naturally, making things safer for non-Muslims.
One more example of the Great Intelligence Failure of the Iraq War: the failure to understand Islam, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics, that affect everyone who still insists on being called a Muslim.
Mr. Bush, you do not know what you have done to Christians !!!
So much for moral equivalence.
Prophet Geoff
Hugh:
Saddam used Iraqi Christians the way Eastern European nobility and landed gentry used its Jews. As the Jews tended to be educated, they were entrusted with certain managerial duties they didn't want to be bothered with, like collecting rents from tenant farmers, so that any hatred and resentment would be directed at the Jew and not the man he worked for. As a despised minority, the Jews could also be punished with great impunity without raising any blowback from the local population.
If Saddam could "trust" the Christians around him, it was largely because he knew that they knew he held the power of life and death over them even more than he did over the Muslim communities he didn't like. Like the Jews of Europe, Iraq's Christians were such a small and disliked minority. Saddam had ample power to punish them if he pleased exactly as he he did to the small remnant of Iraq's Jewish community after Saddam came to power -- accuse a bunch of them of treason and hang them in public squares without fear of a palace coup like the one he orchestrated to take power in the first place. The few thousand that were left after previous mass exoduses fled soon after, decimating a community that constituted about a quarter of Baghdad's population as recently as the 1930s.
Just because Hugh calls it a "Great Intelligence Failure" doesn't necessarily make it so.
Personally, I find it more reasonable to think intelligence had a very good idea indeed of what would happen to Iraq's Christians - they just didn't (and don't, particularly) care. The Great Intelligence (And Others') Apathy, if you like.
What is being said about Christians in the new Iraq may be true to some extent of women. Saddam was an equal opportunities oppressor. Even a tiny bit of dog shit would spoil an ice-cream. Even a tiny bit of sharia in the constitution makes it bad for women.
Depressingly, I'm coming to the conclusion that democracy is bad for Muslims, as it just unleashes the beast of Islam that may sometimes be caged by a dictatorship or, very occasionally an enlightened despot, such as Ataturk, peace be upon him.
Look at the UK - democratic, tolerant to a fault. Muslims have nothing at all to complain about. And look what happened on July 7th.
Give them an inch and they'll take a mile is the least of it. Most mile-takers don't then blow up the inch-profferers.
All Middle East Christians are outside the formula of the western correct politicians at large. I have some hope with environmentalists, "Middle East Christians is an engangered species, help."!!
`conclusion that democracy is bad for Muslims`
That is true. Islam simply does not permit democracy as it is known. It subborns democracy to apply the sharia and all their divine decadency.
What needs to be done is to recognise the fatwa calling for sunnis to war on the shiites. A golden opprtunity that should not be wasted. It is the best thing that could have happened.
Muslims should not be duped into believing that they can have their cake and eat it. Muslims can build democratic society provided they treat Islam as a matter of personal, private belief and not as a political ideology that seeks to monopolise the public space and regulate every aspect of individual and community life.
Ladies and gentlemen: Islam is incompatible with democracy......
-AMIR TAHERI'S REMARKS AT DEBATE "ISLAM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY"
* The motion was carried by 403 votes for, 267 against and 28 undecided.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/4462
There were mass executions of both Jews and Christians in Iraq and Syria back in 1933 I believe. If the Muslims had killed as many Jews over the centuries as they have killed Christians there wouldn't be any Jews left. When will the west wake up?
If the idiots running this dubious and bizarre war haven't yet ascertained that Islam is a demonic scourge, why would they worry about Christians? They believe that Islam is a "great religion" and muslims are just regular people with aspirations similar to our own; good jobs, educations for their children, blah, blah, and last but not least, a deep and abiding desire for freedom and democracy. Their Sharia -inspired constitution resonates a clarion call for freedom and democracy. I am confident that the Iraqi electorate will eagerly ratify their passport to "freedom."
The generals, bureaucrats, politically correct politicians and other assorted, clueless advocates of the great M.E. democracy experiment just don't get it. We will either withdraw and relinquish Iraq to Al Qaeda, or we will be in Iraq for decades. What a choice.