In Spiegel Online (thanks to Fjordman), Amira El Ahl, Daniel Steinvorth, Volkhard Windfuhr and Bernhard Zand give a generally good summary of the plight of Christians in the Middle East.
Violence, terrorism and the Islamists' growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival -- or fleeing for their lives.In New Baghdad, the driver of a minibus, a Shiite named Ali, set out at 7 a.m. on the last Sunday before Christmas. A few hours earlier he had received a call on his mobile phone with instructions to pick up five passengers for a long trip outside the city. His first passenger, he had been told, would tell him who the other passengers were and what their destination would be. He was also told not to mention a word to anyone.
The first passenger was a 24-year-old man named Raymon, who was sitting on his suitcase a few blocks away. He directed Ali through the city's dreary east side, where having a Shiite as a driver is a smart move -- first to the Karrada district, where Amir and Fariz boarded the bus, and then to Selakh, where Wassim and Qarram were waiting. By 9 a.m., Ali had picked up all of his passengers and the bus left Baghdad and began traveling to the northeast -- for the 350-kilometer (218-mile) journey to Kurdistan, the only part of Iraq that is anything close to safe.
The five young men traveling in Ali's red Kia were the last seminary students at the Chaldean Catholic Babel College to leave Baghdad. Four priests have been abducted since mid-August, and two others were murdered. Father Sami, the director of the seminary, was kidnapped in early December. The community managed to raise $75,000 to buy his freedom, but after hesitating for weeks, Emmanuel III, the Chaldean patriarch, decided to withdraw the teaching institutions of his community from Baghdad. He ordered the evacuation of the city's four Catholic churches, the Hurmis monastery and the college in the city's Dura neighborhood, but chose to remain behind in the city as the lonely shepherd of a rapidly shrinking congregation.
Read it all.
non-muslims always had a shitty life among muslims, it's just that now we have news agencies reporting it
And a Jewish exodus that took place in 1948, because of the pogroms everywhere, in Libya and in Yemen, in Morocco and in Iraq, sometimes little and sometimes big.
And a Hindu exodus from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and from Kashmir, all the result of steady Muslim pressure, while in India itself Muslims continue to enlarge their absolute numbers, and their percentage of the population.
No Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Italians left in Egypt -- booted out in the 1950s by Nasser no matter how many centuries their families had lived in Egypt (some had been there since long before the Arabs arrived, bearing Islam), their property seized without compensation. And so the worldly Cairo and Alexandria that some Egyptians like to wax nostalgic over, and hope that somehow can come again, will never come again, becuase what non-Muslim in his right mind would now choose to live, forever, in a Muslm country, including "soft" Egypt?
And Constaninople in 1914 was 50% non-Muslim, and is now 1% non-Muslim. And the murders of more than a million Armenians, and the murder or hundreds of thousands, and expulsion of millions, of Greeks, have caused the non-Muslim population of Turkey itself to drop from 20% to less than 1/2 of 1%.
And all of this took place in less than a century, and in the "full light of history." And yet no one appears to have noticed how, everywhere that Muslims rule, now that they have regained their sense of power, they have managed to exert steady pressure to force non-Muslims out, everywhere that Islam rules.
Shouldn't this be taken in? Shouldn't some conclusions be drawn from the overwhelming evidence?
"There is only one other region of the Middle East where Christians enjoy freedoms comparable to those in Syria: the Kurdish Autonomous Zone in northern Iraq."
Religious freedom comparable to that 'enjoyed' by Syrians? Sorry, but the conditions 'enjoyed' by Syrians don't rise to the level of freedom. Within the Islamically dominated world, there is no practical freedom for anyone.
Hugh, "...everywhere that Muslims rule, now that they have regained their sense of power, they have managed to exert steady pressure to force non-Muslims out, everywhere that Islam rules.
Shouldn't this be taken in? Shouldn't some conclusions be drawn from the overwhelming evidence?"
Yes. And, yes.
A good discussion topic for the students and teachers of the Swarthmore course: "Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism."
Shouldn't this be taken in? Shouldn't some conclusions be drawn from the overwhelming evidence?
Conclusions can be a dangerous thing. Conclusions can, when wielded by a person untrained in political correctness, become the wrong conclusions. Someone might, for instance, incorrectly conclude that there is indeed something suspicious about non-Muslims rapidly dissapearing from Muslim areas, sometimes in body bags. No, it's better if we let the politicians and media do the conclusions for us. First people make the wrong conclusions, and the next thing you know they're building gas chambers and conducting ethnic cleansings.
.....great proof that we need to ban Muslim Immigration. Ban land purchases by Muslims, Ban Mosque construction, Ban political offices to Muslims, Ban the Qur'an and in general, just ban anything Muslim.....
This is why it is essential that Iraq be partitioned into four states. A Shia state in the south, a Sunni state in the center, a Kurdish state in the northeast, and an Assyrian Christian state in the northwest centered on Mosul. The oil fields in the north would be shared between Assyria and Kurdistan.
" gas chambers "
.. Muslims have no need for these, they have discovered bullets, RPGs, IEDs, Suicide bomb vests, and nukes.......
"Four priests have been abducted since mid-August, and two others were murdered. ""
.... What would happen if some Ayatollahs,Mullahs,Inmans or other Muslims clerics suddenly found themselves blindfolded , chained and mistreated with their captors telling them to call someone to bring money????
Let's see. We 'surge' to victory, so democracy can flourish in Iraq. Then we have a new friend in the war on terror.
But wait: the last Iraqi Christians are being killed, beheaded, ransomed, tortured.
Why does not a single news person ask W about the Iraqi treatment of Christians? I wouldn't give a dime in aid to the Iraqis.
The Christians should all leave that area of the world. Then the muslims can kill each other off.
While these people don't deserve the crappy treatment they receive they do live in the ummah and are subject to all its barbarity. All infidels should leave the ummah to the savages and settle where they would be treated much better. And while we're at it, send all the Islamaniacs back to the ummah so they can live with their wonderful sharia. Let's deal-the West is sure to get the better end of such a trade.
I am somewhat surprised Hugh failed to mention the history of Iraq's Jewish community which was established over two milenia ago in Mesapotamia. As recently as the 1930s, Jews constituted about a quarter of Baghdad's population and were well represented in its middle class. By the late 1970s, after decades of systemic persecution that included the "Farhud", and the public hangings of a number of prominent members of the very reduced community that remained, Iraq was entirely cleansed of Jews. Saddam not only proudly gave money to Palestinian martyrs "back home", he also ensconced Iraq's Palestinian immigrants in the vacated Jewish homes (which actually fueled a lot of resentment). Most of these Iraqi Jews fled to Britain and the US. Their story was recently documented in "The Last Jews of Baghdad" by a granddaughter of one of Baghdad's Jewish leaders, a New York-based lawyer named Carol Basra (or something like that).
its abt time. they shouldve left centuries ago
why is man sooooo irrational/cowardly
"A Christian Exodus from the Arab World"
....exodus or expulsion....