Iraq’s Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/world/middleeast/17christians.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

(Big photo)
Johan Spanner/Polaris, for The New York Times

Services at St. George’s Anglican Church in the green zone. Estimates of the Christian exodus range from tens of thousands to 100,000 or more.

Iraq’s Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: October 17, 2006

BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 — The blackened shells of five cars still sit in front of the Church of the Virgin Mary here, stark reminders of a bomb blast that killed two people after a recent Sunday Mass.

In the northern city of Mosul, a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church was kidnapped last week. His church complied with his captors’ demands and put up posters denouncing recent comments made by the pope about Islam, but he was killed anyway. The police found his beheaded body on Wednesday.

Muslim fury over Pope Benedict XVI’s public reflections on Islam in Germany a month ago — when he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as calling Islam “evil and inhuman” — has subsided elsewhere, but repercussions continue to reverberate in Iraq, bringing a new level of threat to an already shrinking Christian population.

Several extremist groups threatened to kill all Christians unless the pope apologized. Sunni and Shiite clerics united in the condemnation, calling the comments an insult to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. In Baghdad, many churches canceled services after receiving threats. Some have not met since.

[rodeodance]

1. under SH-says they existed side by side with Muslins:

......Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq.

Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country’s largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

But since Mr. Hussein’s ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country’s liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims.

Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors.

[LynnTheDem]

3. They did indeed...but SHHHH!!!

You're only allowed to demonize Hussein.

Facts that do not demonize whoever the US government wish demonized are not welcome in America.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Ain't (majoritarian) democracy grand?

Compared to anarchy, I suppose.

A constitutional republic employing democratic principles protects religious and social minorities from oppression and persecution by the majority.

The religious right must be quite conflicted about this turn of events, which IMO, was quite predictable.