Anybody on this thread dumb enough to believe
anything reported by SeeBS Smooze?
Posted on 07/10/2008 6:30:54 PM PDT by forkinsocket
BAGHDAD (ANS) -- The Reverend Canon Andrew White, affectionately known as The Vicar of Baghdad, says the situation for Christians in Iraq is "clearly worse" than under the Saddam Hussein regime, toppled by US and Coalition forces in 2003.
In a segment of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, originally broadcast on Dec. 2, 2007, updated June 26 and aired on June 29, 2008, correspondent Scott Pelley asked Canon White: "You were here during Saddam’s reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?"
"The situation now is clearly worse” than under Saddam, White replied.
"There’s no comparison between Iraq now and then," he told Pelley. "Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They’ve never known it like now."
"Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years," Pelley remarked.
"Yes," White said.
"And it’s now the worst it has ever been," Pelley replied.
In the opening sequence of his report, Pelley remarked that from the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east in the year 35.
"But now," said Pelley, "after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee -- persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq's religious civil war.
Pelley comments: "You'd have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today, but if you must, then the vicar of Baghdad is your man. He's the Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican chaplain who suffers from multiple sclerosis and from a fanatical determination to save the last Iraqi Christians from the purge."
White invited 60 Minutes' cameras and correspondent Scott Pelley to an underground Baghdad church service for what's left of his congregation. White's parishioners are risking their lives to celebrate their faith.
"The room is full of children, it’s full of women, but I don’t see the men. Where are they?" Pelley remarked.
"They are mainly killed. Some are kidnapped. Some are killed. In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed," White explained.
"All dead. But we never got their bodies back. This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here but it's not easy to get the bodies," said White.
Many Iraqi Christian churches are destroyed or abandoned, Pelley explained.
Pelley continued: "The congregation is smuggled in and out of this secret sanctuary. Even letting 60 Minutes come to the service was a terrible risk. White is among the last Christian ministers here, a savior with crosses to bear. Larger than life, stricken with MS, and by his own reckoning, driven a little bit mad."
White was first sent to Baghdad by the Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, well before the Christian persecution, the CBS correspondent remarked.
Pelley said that to understand the history of Iraqi Christianity, start with the Last Supper. One saint sitting to the right of Jesus in Leonardo Da'Vinci's paiting is the Apostle Thomas, who took the gospel and headed east after the death of Christ.
In modern times, under Saddam, Christians were treated much the same as Muslims; Saddam's right hand man, Tariq Aziz, was Christian, Pelley said.
"Before the war," said Pelley,"it's estimated there were about a million Christians in Iraq. They were a small minority, but free to worship, free to build churches, and free to speak the ancient language of Jesus, Aramaic. But, after the invasion, Muslim militants launched a war on each other and the cross."
On Sunday, Aug. 1, 2004, five churches were bombed. The Iraqi Christian community, which had survived invasions by Mongols and Turks, was driven out under American occupation.
No one can be sure, said Pelley, but White estimates most of Iraq's Christians have fled or been killed. Those still here are too old, too ill or too poor to run.
"Why are you feeding them all?" Pelley asked Canon White.
"Because, this is the only decent meal they’ll have in the week," White explained.
"They can’t afford food. So we're just moving from every other week to every week because they've got nothing," he said.
Nothing for many, not even their families, Pelley commented. The 60 Minutes team was confronted with one of many stories of depravity as the congregation left.
"Outside the church service this gentleman put these pictures in my hand. I can't show you the pictures. They’re just too much. They’re pictures of his children. His daughter who was 15 years old. And his son who was about four years old. They've both been shot in the head," Pelley said.
The man's children were killed, the father said, because he ran a liquor store. Liquor stores are typically Christian businesses there, legal, except under the Islamic street justice that rules since the invasion.
"So I hear stories of shootings, death, torturing, kidnapping, mutilation. I hear it all," White told Pelley.
The people with those stories once lived in a neighborhood called Dora, where Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites had lived together.
60 Minutes wanted to see what happened there so the TV crew took a ride with U.S. Army Colonel Rick Gibbs. His men picked up Pelley and the team under a rusting relic of Saddam's tyranny, a parade archway made of two enormous swords, and from there they headed to ethnic cleansing's "ground zero."
"We have 13 churches. None of them are operational," Col. Gibbs said.
Asked if this was the worst neighborhood in town, Gibbs said, "It’s the toughest neighborhood in town."
Gibbs commands the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kan. In Dora, he set up a combat outpost in an abandoned Catholic seminary.
Pelley remarked: "I was at a secret church service yesterday. A man came up to me and handed me some photographs of his children. They’d been shot to death. Somebody had come by their house and murdered his children because they were Christians."
"What are you seeing?" Pelley asked Gibbs.
The colonel responded: "I don't see a lot of that anymore. But when we first arrived we saw lots of that. We have 500 a month. That's what we were tracking. It would not surprise my soldiers to walk down a street on a patrol and see three or four bodies laying in the street with a bullet behind their head."
U.S. forces do not protect the churches, Pelley explained, adding that there's a hands-off policy for all religious sites.
Col. Gibbs says there's another reason.
"The Christians do not what us to guard the churches openly," he said.
Why wouldn't the Christians want Gibbs and his soldiers to protect the churches? Pelley wanted to know.
"They feel that if we are overtly protecting the churches that someone underground covertly will come in and murder the Christians because they’re collaborating with the U.S. forces," Gibbs explained.
The CBS reporter said there seems to be less violence now in part because of the surge of U.S. forces but also because the purge of Christians from Dora is largely complete. Gibbs says Islamic militants are on the run now.
"We hear that through our intelligence sources on the ground people telling us they’re running that’s how we knew to come down here with our next big fight to keep getting after them," Gibbs said, as shots could be heard in the background. "And that's what you hear over there is us in that fight trying to go get them."
60 Minutes wanted to see one church that had been destroyed but Gibbs couldn't take them there -- roadside bombs blocked the way. So he walked the TV crew over to a church next to his combat outpost. Because of the proximity, it hadn't been looted. In fact, it hadn't been touched by anyone for a very long time.
"This is one of the abandoned churches of Dora," Pelley remarked inside the church. "It looks like it was left suddenly and completely. There’s a fine coat of dust over everything in the church. It was all left just as it was. One of the reasons these churches have been abandoned is in this letter, a letter that went out to the neighborhoods of Dora about a year ago. It reads like this: 'To the Christian, we would like to inform you of the decision of the legal court of the Secret Islamic Army to notify you that this is the last and final threat. If you do not leave your home, your blood will be spilled.' And in case there was any chance that anyone would not get the message, the letter ends like this: 'You and your family will be killed.'"
Pelley talked to a young man, a Baghdad Christian, whose name he could not use. He told Pelley that after the invasion, posters appeared near his home.
"They were like telling us that Christians were against Islam, that we're infidels, that women shouldn’t drive and a woman that doesn’t wear a scarf would get her head cut off," the man told Pelley. "And I thought, 'What, are we going back to the Middle Ages?'"
He told 60 Minutes his family began going to Mass in shifts. Asked why, he told Pelley, "If like the church gets bombed on like one of the Masses, so like half of the family will be there and half will be safe."
Ultimately, the church was bombed.
Asked what has become of the people he used to worship with in that church, the young man told Pelley, "I simply don’t know. A lot them are in Syria. I don’t know any of ‘em that stayed in Baghdad."
His family, unharmed, fled to neighboring Jordan. But most Christians ran north to Syria where they've filled a Damascus neighborhood. Knock on any door and you'll find a story.
"They threatened this young girl," one woman told 60 Minutes. "They want her to become a Muslim. The boy is in danger of being kidnapped. My other boy is in danger of being kidnapped because we’re Christians."
Pelley talked with another woman was on a bus outside Baghdad, when gunmen boarded and demanded to know her husband’s faith. "They told him, 'How come you have not embraced Islam yet?' He said, 'To each his own religion,'" she recalled.
"He told him 'I am a Christian.' He told him to get off the bus," a child added.
They never saw him again.
Pelley reported that Christian refugees are now swept up in an exodus of historic proportions. The U.N. estimates more than four and a half million Iraqis of all faiths are running from the war. The United States has promised to help, but so far about 2,000 Iraqis have been allowed into the U.S., less than one tenth of one percent of all the refugees.
Those who remain in Iraq are bound together by a particular kind of faith known only to those under siege, Pelley said.
Why is this happening? he asked Canon White.
"It's happening because religion has gone wrong," White told Pelley. "And when religion goes wrong, it kills others."
"The Muslim religion has gone wrong, is that what you're saying?" Pelley asked for clarification.
"It has. And in the past, Christianity has gone wrong," White says. "And what I say to people very clearly is that the history of Christianity is no better than the history of Islam."
"Some of your parishioners must ask you, 'Why is God allowing this to happen to us?'" Pelley asked.
"To them I say, 'God is with you and he is with me and I am with you and I'm not going away,'" White replied.
Since 60 Minutes first reported this story in December 2007, the purge of Christians in Iraq has continued.
In February, gunman ambushed, kidnapped and eventually murdered Iraqi Archbishop Paul Faraj Rahho.
Canon Andrew White is still ministering to what's left of his congregation.
I guess I'll never understand why it is that we didn't go in after winning the war and saying "Here's how your new government will be set up and running" the way we did in Germany and Japan after WWII.
Mark
This is probably the first recorded instance of a liberal media outlet caring about Christians.
Seriousy, though, the situation there appears to be grave judging from the reports I’ve been reading recently. Explains why some of my Christian Iraqi friends would actually speak well of Saddam.
The MSM continue to make us proud.
It's as if reporters at the end of World War II would go around asking civilians in the bombed-out ruins of Berlin if their life was better now or under Hitler.
But no reporters ever wrote such stories, because it would have been such an obviously treasonous thing to do.
So we’ve made Iraq a better place for Muslims, and a worse place for Christians?
Declassified Iraqi War Crimes
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/884889/posts
I guess the “We’re Losing” meme is no longer working, so it is time to shift to the “Things Are Worse Now” meme.
I say Bullsh!t.
“Considering that 100 percent of the Anglican/Episcopal clergy are dyed-in-the-wool liberals...”
How about US Army colonel Gibbs? Is he also likely to be a dyed-in-the-wool liberal?
“..the way we did in Germany and Japan after WWII.”
You are proposing to make the same mistake that our government made when they entered Iraq — they were dealing with Muslims and did not know how to handle that sinister sect, and still don’t.
What good is it to win in Iraq and lose the war at home? Can anyone guess what the final result will be if we continue to “fight” the war the way we do? Say what you want, but presently Islam is winning.
I'm old enough to remember the "Iranian Revolution" and the 444 days of "America Held Hostage". Tariq Aziz is IRANIAN.
“I guess I’ll never understand why it is that we didn’t go in after winning the war and saying “Here’s how your new government will be set up and running” the way we did in Germany and Japan after WWII.”
In WWII we had a Civil Affairs Division that followed in the wake of the front line, to establish order and set up local governing bodies. The Iraq invasion was done without anything like that and something like anarchy prevailed in the rear. It would have required a much larger army.
Paul Bremer seems to have been an ineffective administrator who had little knowledge of how postwar governments were set up in Germany and Japan. And it appears that few above him were concerned with the issue either.
But more important is that Germany and Japan were real nations with homogenous societies. When Hirohito told his people the war was over they stopped fighting and cooperated with the occupation government.
Iraq isn’t an homogenous nation. Once you removed the secular strongman you opened a Pandora’s box of old grievances - Shiite vs Sunni, Kurd separatism, Islamic triumphalism. And you had outside sympathizers against the occupation force, something lacking in the case of Japan and Germany, who had alienated all their neighbors.
Tariq ‘Aziz is a Christian from an Assyrian village in Iraq. His original name was Michael Yuhanna. But the reason he changed his Assyrian name to an Arabic one was because many were hostile to his Christianity.
Makes me feel like a wimpy Christian. I pray for those persecuted.
Gibbs in the clergy?
My point is that most of the priesthood is/are left-leaning who would say "things are worse" because they do not like the fact that things are actually better because men and women are under arms and are committed to the cause of waging a war for freedom.
Besides, if true Christians readily accept persecution for Jesus (see the early days of the Church during the Roman empire).
Exactly; and that was an implied promise, “we will establish a western-style democracy.” It was a lie and it was not politically or islamicaly correct. Therefore, the Christians die. Another failure of the the executive branch and the state department.
No, he's an Iraqi. And he is a Chaldean Catholic--in name only, of course.
Saddam wasn’t interested in religion, he was interested in power. Christians weren’t an issue for him and as long as they didn’t threaten his hold on power he let them live as they pleased. Saddam even had nominal Christians in his government.
Since the invasion of Iraq Muslims have become even more polarized over there. Christians of all denominations are finding the area increasingly more hostile. Even “mainstream” Islam has absolutely no intention of living in “peace” with Christians - EVER.
Islam is evil. We need to start admitting that.
“My point is that most of the priesthood is/are left-leaning who would say “things are worse” because they do not like the fact that things are actually better because men and women are under arms and are committed to the cause of waging a war for freedom.”
To me, waging a war for freedom would include freedom to be a Christian.
Hmm.... Maybe there is a lesson to be learned.
Are the Iraqi Christians somehow similar to canaries in coal mines?
Is the treatment that Iraqi Christians are receiving a portent of what would happen to Christians in other countries, if Muslims take over?
Many of the thousands of Iraqi Chaldean Catholics here would find that interesting since a large per cent escaped in the 1990s under Sadam. I have talked with some who appreciate what the U.S. is doing in Iraq
Just paging thru the article I did not see any references to Nina Shea who has done alot on this topic as well.
Anybody on this thread dumb enough to believe
anything reported by SeeBS Smooze?
You really have to search hard to find bad news about Iraq today but the MSM will never let you down.
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