Churches in the West Trying to Throw Lifeline to Iraqi and Syrian Christians

Aletelia ^ | August 17, 2015 | JOHN BURGER

[NYer]

Sister Diana Momeka encounters stories like this on a daily basis. A mother came to her the other day, desperate for answers. She couldn't get her four-year-old son to eat. He couldn't sleep at night. His bones ached constantly. And the medicine he was taking was no help.

In ways, the boy is a metaphor for the larger Christian community in Iraq—100,000-plus souls still wondering what will happen to them, more than a year after an Islamist movement forced them from Mosul and the Nineveh Plain. Once industrious, hard-working, proud homeowners, the sons and daughters of a millennia-old Christian tradition scrape by, living in trailer-like facilities or unfinished buildings in the Kurdish capital of northern Iraq. The temporary housing, set up in sprawling camps around Erbil, let in no sunlight and can be roasting in the summer and frigid in winter. The internally displaced persons have very little privacy and often get little sleep.

With a spike in childhood illnesses last year, Sister Diana was inspired to seek the aid of a local priest, and both of them recruited doctors and nurses. They eventually established clinics that could make at least a dent in a growing public health problem. 

Meanwhile, almost 400 miles to the west, the Greek Melkite Archbishop of Aleppo, Syria, returned from a visit to the United States to find a flock still shaking in fear. Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart's once proud city lay largely in ruins, and clashes between the Islamic State group, the al-Nusra Front, other rebel groups and the military of Bashar al-Assad's regime hover perilously close. In fact, the archbishop said in an interview Friday, the Christian neighborhood had suffered a bombing just two days before his return, leaving seven people dead.

Four years after the outbreak of civil war, with no real hope of a solution, a plan Archbishop Jeanbart proposes seems almost ludicrous. He calls it "Build to Stay," and he expects that it will provide enough motivation to keep distraught Syrian Christians from emigrating. It is, he says, a "movement that has the goal to gather together a great number of faithful who are convinced of the importance of our presence in this country."

Groups like the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and Aid to the Church in Need, side with people like Archbishop Jeanbart, as hopeless as the situation may appear. The Knights’ Christian Refugee Relief Fund has delivered more than $3 million in humanitarian aid to persecuted Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East and has kicked off a public education campaign about the crisis. Assistance from the Knights of Columbus has included permanent housing for those who have had to flee their homes, as well as support for medical facilities in areas flooded with Christians and other refugees.
 
“We have seen people killed, slaughtered, women violated, priests and bishops kidnapped, houses destroyed, churches and convents invaded,” said Archbishop Jeanbart at the Knights' convention in Philadelphia earlier this month. “But we persist with the help of God and with the help of those who help us, like the Knights of Columbus.”

"I have just begun to work with the Knights, and we have good reasons to think that they will be helpful in our main project, Build to Stay, which will be significant in the support of the Christians willing to continue the presence of the Church in Syria," the archbishop told Aleteia. The Catholic men's fraternal organization has provided the Eparchy of Aleppo $350,000. 

Catholic Near East Welfare Association, an agency of the Holy See founded in 1926, has disbursed more than $7.2 million to assist displaced Iraqis and Syrians. The funds have enabled CNEWA’s on-the-ground partners, the local churches, to respond to needs, including food staples, medical supplies, and bedding. The aid has also helped set up and equip clinics, such as Sister Diana's, and provide counseling and tutoring.

 
The international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need also recently announced a new aid package worth approximately $4 million for Iraq's Christian community. Money will go toward providing food for at least 13,000 families and housing for clergy. ACN will also continue to provide significant amounts of aid to Christian refugees in Lebanon and Syria, in particular humanitarian supplies for Melkite and Syrian-Catholic families in the city of Homs.

"Without the help of the benefactors and organizations that have been supporting us, we would not be able to run the clinic at all," said Sister Diana in an interview.

She spoke of the virtue of hope as something like a flickering candle, burning down to its end.

"It’s been a year, and we’ve been working [at the clinic] like machines day and night, accompanying our people," she said. "But it feels like we’re numb, like we don’t know if this is real or a nightmare, and after one year, we are waking up from our nightmare and we have to face what we are looking at now: people are losing their hope. They tried to keep their faith up and we tried to help them, but after one year...."

Her voice trailed off. The nun pointed out that Christians forced out of their homelands have lost everything except their dignity, but now even that is at stake.

"Now they are trying to figure out how to provide for their families and not have to depend on humanitarian aid for the rest of their lives," she said. "People are getting desperate and wondering what’s next. And we still feel abandoned by the world."

Sister Diana traveled to the United States earlier this year to help raise awareness of the plight of Iraq's Christians. One of her stops was at the U.S. Congress, where she testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

"When I returned after testifying before Congress people were waiting for a message, asking me 'Sister, what happened?' To tell you the truth I couldn’t tell them anything because, you know, people want to see some changes," she said. "There’s no action. We feel we need action. Words are fine, prayers are good. But what can we do to help people to keep their faith?"

[ETL]

Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left
by David Horowitz

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51WGRMWB35L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

[ETL]

From AsiaTimesOnline
Feb 26, 2008

"Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. ...

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. ..."

Article: Obama's women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

From AsiaTimesOnline
Feb 26, 2008

"Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. ...

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. ..."

Article: Obama's women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

[null and void]

Obama has no true religious faith, of any kind.

Zatso?

[ETL]

The a-hole bowed to everyone, including the ChiCom president!

[null and void]

Yeah. AFTER he got called out bowing to the highest muslim authority on the planet, and then only to camouflage his reflexive bow to him.

Seriously, can you see anyone of his ego bowing to any mere mortal?

[ETL]

Can you see anyone of his ego and sense of intellectual superiority truly believing in a religion? Commie elitists like him scoff at religion. They think it’s for idiots. They may PRETEND at times to adhere or respect one or the other, but that is only for appearances, when it serves some higher purpose/political agenda.

[azishot]

Christians don’t fit into jug-ears’ vision for the U.S.

[LucyT]

.

Back to the thread.

Begin at # 13 and read to end of page. - See ETL's post.

Thanks, AZ.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping, LucyT. Great thread. Has anybody considered tweeting the 2nd amendment to them?

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[cradle of freedom]

Beautifully and clearly stated.