IRAQI ARCHBISHOP: "ANOTHER WAVE OF PERSECUTION WILL BE THE END OF CHRISTIANITY
AFTER TWO THOUSAND YEARS" IN IRAQ
BY ROBERT SPENCER
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/10/iraqi-archbishop-another-wave-of-persecution-will-be-the-end-of-christianity-after-2000-years-in-iraq; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
You won’t hear much about this, because the Catholic Church has committed itself to Islamopandering, such that it is largely silent about the Muslim persecution of Christians that has taken place in Africa as well as in the Middle East.
Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, gave an interview to a French reporter in which he was highly critical of the mainstream media and even of his fellow bishops for ignoring the Muslim persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. “The European media,” he charged, “have not ceased to suppress the daily news of those who are suffering in Syria and they have even justified what is happening in our country by using information without taking the trouble to verify it.” And as for his brother bishops in France, “the conference of French bishops should have trusted us, it would have been better informed. Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just!”
Archbishop Jeanbart was not the first to say this. “Why, we ask the western world, why not raise one’s voice over so much ferocity and injustice?” asked Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI). Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Younan himself has in the past appealed to the West “not to forget the Christians in the Middle East.” The former Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III has also said: “I do not understand why the world does not raise its voice against such acts of brutality.”
But Gregory III should have understood, since he was a major part of the problem. After all, he himself said: “No one defends Islam like Arab Christians.” The Melkite Greek Catholic Eparch in the U.S., Nicholas Samra, also told me to keep quiet about jihad violence. It is to defend Islam that Western clerics do not raise their voice against such acts of brutality. It is to pursue a fruitless and chimerical “dialogue” that bishops in the U.S. and Europe keep silent about Muslim persecution of Christians, and enforce that silence upon others. Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, said it on February 8, 2013 as he was suppressing a planned talk (by me) at a Catholic conference on that persecution: “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.”
Remember that Mohamed Atta, about the plane he had hijacked on September 11, 2001, told passengers over the intercom: “Stay quiet and you’ll be OK.” The Catholic Church appears to have adopted that statement as its policy regarding Muslim persecution of Christians.
“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
“Iraqi archbishop fears more persecution, says IS went underground,” by Simon Caldwell, Catholic News Service, October 9, 2018:
CHESTER, England – Christianity in Iraq is just one wave of persecution away from extinction, said the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Basra.In an interview with Catholic News Service, Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali said there were now so few Christians in his country that the church there would disappear if it was subjected to further persecution….“Another wave of persecution will be the end of Christianity after 2,000 years,” he said in the Oct. 5 interview in St. Columba’s Church.“There is a global game, and the peaceful people – the minorities – in the end will be the ones who are destroyed,” he said.He said he was fearful of renewed persecution because he believed the Islamic State terror group had not been defeated, but had gone underground. It was suspected of being behind a recent spate of murders of women who had chosen to dress themselves in Western fashions, he said.“We have seen with our own eyes how they attack Christians,” he added.He said Iraq’s Christians had suffered “systematic violence” intended to uproot and eradicate them, to “destroy their language, to break up their families and push them to leave Iraq.”“If this is not genocide, then what is genocide?” he asked.Christians have lived in what was known as Mesopotamia since the time of the apostles and speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. But the archbishop said their number has plunged from 1.5 million to just 250,000 in the last 15 years, and they now represent about 1 percent of the population, compared to 6 percent a century ago.In the decade that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a church or a monastery was destroyed every 40 days on average, the archbishop said.“There are still more than maybe a quarter of a million of us struggling to stay in our homeland,” added Nafali.“Others went to more than 70 countries, which is a crime against humanity when you find Chaldeans and Syrians (Christians) everywhere – in Sweden, Denmark, in the U.K. and the United States.”…
