IRAQI CITY OF MOSUL CLEANSED OF CHRISTIANS

Christian families streamed out of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday after Islamist fighters said they would be killed if they did not pay a protection tax or convert to Islam.

“For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians,” Patriarch Louis Sako lamented as hundreds of families fled ahead of a noon deadline set by Islamic State for them to submit or leave.

The warning was read out in Mosul’s mosques on Friday afternoon, and broadcast throughout the city on loudspeakers.
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Mosul’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has shrunk rapidly in the years since US-led forces pushed Saddam Hussein from power. Before 2003 the city’s Christians numbered some 60,000 people, but that dropped to some 35,000 by June this year, Mr Sako told AFP.

The United States is complicit in the destruction of the earliest Christian communities in the history of Christianity in Iraq as a result of sanctions and the invasion of the country.  As well, the US is complicit in the rise to power of IS (Islamic State) radical fundamentalists in northern Iraq.

The 1987 census gave 1.4 million Iraqi Christians out of a then population, probably, of 19 million. By 2003 the Christians were estimated at 800,000, with over half a million having emigrated during the years of harsh US/ UN sanctions, or having not been able to afford to have children. The US military occupation of Iraq gave Christianity a bad name and Iraqi Christians were most unfairly targeted as somehow American clients. Over half of the remaining Christians were said to have left by 2008, leaving about 300,000 or so. Now it appears that the remaining 300,000 are being ethnically cleansed in the north of Iraq, where most Christians had lived.

Wars always produce unintended consequences, but the mindless rush to invade Iraq on the basis of lies and deception resulted in the destruction of Iraqi society, along with many of its institutions. We see the results in the violence in Iraq today.  How ironic that the cruel dictator, Saddam Hussein, protected Christians in Iraq, even as the violent intervention by the US enabled the rise of cruel and violent Islamic fundamentalists who completed the destruction of the Christian communities.

Republicans and right-wingers can rave on from now till kingdom come blaming President Obama for the chaos in Iraq, but the facts of history show that the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of  Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush and their enablers in Congress, including, I'm sad to say, Democrats in both houses.

THIS IS GETTING RIDICULOUS

From the New York Times:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a proclamation on Thursday calling for every priest, parish and layperson to participate in a “great national campaign” to defend religious liberty, which they said is “under attack, both at home and abroad.” 

In particular they urged every diocese to hold a “Fortnight for Freedom” during the two weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, for parishioners to study, pray and take public action to fight what they see as the government’s attempts to curtail religious freedom. 

Wait!

For more than half a year, the bishops have put the religious liberty issue front and center, but it has not yet galvanized the Catholic laity and has even further polarized the church’s liberal and conservative flanks. In an election year, liberal Catholics have accused the bishops of making the church an arm of the Republican Party in the drive to defeat President Obama, an accusation the bishops reject. 

Could it be that the laity are not galvanized because they do not see their religious liberty at risk?  Could it be that a good many Roman Catholic women view the bishops' campaign as an assault on women's health care? 

Quoting from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the bishops say that unjust laws should be either changed or resisted.

Puhleeze!  The citation of Martin Luther King's letter from jail and the comparison to to the Civil Rights struggle for equality for African-Americans is a bridge too far.  Bishops, you make yourself look foolish.  You speak well to immigration and other issues, but who will listen when you destroy your own credibility with comparisons to MLK, as you campaign to deny women health care in the name of religious freedom?

And if you don't mind strong language, read Charles Pierce's post titled 'The Clan of the Red Beanie Stalks MLK, Sanity.'

'The Clan of the Red Beanie' is good, isn't it?  Charles is quite the wordsmith.

Image from Wikipedia.

ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS DON'T LIKE THE PRESIDENT'S TWEAK

The Vatican

From the New York Times:

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have rejected a compromise on birth control coverage that President Obama offered on Friday and said they would continue to fight the president’s plan to find a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions.

The Roman Catholic Church will take matters to the courts, and they will call upon Congress for relief from their oppression.

Already three lawsuits have been filed against the birth control mandate, two by religious colleges and one by a Catholic media outlet.

The bishops will also renew their call for lawmakers to pass the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act,” which would exempt both insurance providers and purchasers — and not just those who are religiously affiliated — from any mandate to cover items of services that is contrary to either’s “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

Whoa! Internal divisions are developing.

However, the bishops are now facing a potential rift with some of their allies who welcomed the compromise yesterday — including Catholic Charities, the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals across the country and individual Catholic Democrats and liberals who had helped persuade the administration to make the change.

James Salt, executive director of Catholics United, a liberal advocacy group that is organizing support for the Obama administration, said, “The bishops’ blanket opposition appears to serve the interests of a political agenda, not the needs of the American people.”

It's about time!

Is it possible that President Obama will offer further concessions to bullying, celibate, old men, who experience nothing of the costs and difficulties of family life?

TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS: STOP CRYING PERSECUTION!

The Vatican

I've spoken of the heavy-handed tactics of the Roman Catholic Church in which the leaders and their true-believer followers, including Rick Santorum and the converted Newt Gingrich, accuse the Obama administration of waging war on Roman Catholics. I've written about their practice of deception by omission in never mentioning that they already provide health insurance coverage for contraceptives in 28 states that mandate coverage. Whatever reasoning the bishops use to square the coverage with their consciences, I'd suggest that they apply that same reasoning to the remaining 22 states and stop crying, 'Persecution!' Enough already!

However, should the bishops continue to prefer deceptive, political power plays to telling the truth, I recommend that the prelates and their true-believer followers visit their fellow Christians in countries in the Middle East and Africa, where real persecution of Christians is happening. Perhaps then they'd stop their pathetic braying. The group generates more heat and noise than their true numbers warrant. What they do is shameful.

Remember that RC bishops stand in obedience to the pope, a foreign head of state. Why should a foreign head of state have such great influence in the processes of government in the US?

For more light on the subject, I refer you to IT's post at The Friends of Jake and Rmj's post at Adventus.

Picture from Wikipedia.

IRAQI CHRISTIANS FLEE

From the New York Times:

A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.

The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.
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The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country’s prewar population.

More than half of Iraq’s Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.

This post is dedicated to the persecuted Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England, who are forced to flee to the Roman Catholic ordinariates. (Irony alert!)

From the Telegraph:

Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, on his defection to the RC ordinariate:

"I don't feel I have any choice but to leave the Church and take up the Pope's offer. The General Synod has become vindictive and vicious.

"It has been fascist in its behaviour, marginalising those who have been opposed to women's ordination. We have not been given any space."