More Catholic Blood Flows From The "Religion of Peace"
by Thomas A. Droleskey
As Blind Now As He As Always Been discussed the moral obtuseness of former President George Walker Bush, who was deaf, dumb and blind as the blood of Catholics flowed from the hands of adherents of what he called the "religion of peace," Mohammedanism, in Iraq following the needless, unjust and immoral war that this American "exceptionalist" unleashed early in the morning, Iraqi time, March 20, 2003.
The current president, Barack Hussein Obama, is an even greater enthusiast of this false religion, to which both his own father and his step-father belonged and in which he was educated for a while when he lived as a boy in Indonesia (see All Caesars Go Mad). He has been as silent as Bush the Lesser about the slaughter of our own people as the Mohammedan authorities in Iraq, such as they are, either give lip service attention to this bloodshed or simply let it go on unabated for fear of endangering their own lives and power and wealth.
The current reign of terror that has been visited upon the Catholics of Iraq began on October 31, 2010, the Feast of Christ the King in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, as Chaldean rite Catholics who belonged to Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad were subjected to an attack that took fifty-eight Catholic lives. (Yes, of course, let it be stipulated that the Eastern rites are in communion with the false "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Granted. The Mohammedans who are targeting our fellow Catholics are doing so precisely because they are Catholics. We cannot expect people who are being targeted for death because of their Catholic Faith to pay much attention to the apostasies of the moment that we in the West are able to reflect about and reject as being the antithesis of Catholicism.) The shedding of Catholic blood unleashed by the attack that took place on October 31, 2010, has gone largely unnoticed by American policy-makers. To say anything about this, obviously, would be to "offend" Mohammedan sensibilities.
The following story in, of all places, The New York Times, should break your Catholic hearts:
QOSH, Iraq — 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.
It threatens to reduce further what Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East called “a community whose roots were in Iraq even before Christ.”
Those who fled the latest violence — many of them in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars — warned that the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq’s Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
“It’s exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.”
Iraq’s leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, have pledged to tighten security and appealed for tolerance for minority faiths in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
“The Christian is an Iraqi,” he said after visiting those wounded in the siege of the church, Our Lady of Salvation, the worst single act of violence against Christians since 2003. “He is the son of Iraq and from the depths of a civilization that we are proud of.”
For those who fled, though, such pronouncements have been met with growing skepticism. The daily threats, the uncertainty and palpable terror many face have overwhelmed even the pleas of Christian leaders not to abandon their historic place in a diverse Iraq.
“Their faith in God is strong,” said the Rev. Gabriele Tooma, who heads the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, part of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Qosh, which opened its monastic rooms to 25 families in recent weeks. “It is their faith in the government that has weakened.”
Christians, of course, are not the only victims of the bloodshed that has swept Iraq for more than seven and a half years; Sunni and Shiite Arabs have died on a far greater scale. Only two days after the attack on the church, a dozen bombs tore through Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people and wounding hundreds.
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.
The Islamic State of Iraq, an iteration of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, claimed responsibility for the suicidal siege and said its fighters would kill Christians “wherever they can reach them.”
What followed last month were dozens of shootings and bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, the two cities outside of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. At least a dozen more Christians died, eight of them in Mosul.
Three generations of the Gorgiz family — 15 in all — fled their homes there on the morning of Nov. 23 as the killings spread. Crowded into a single room at the monastery in Qosh, they described living in a state of virtual siege, afraid to wear crosses on the streets, afraid to work or even leave their houses in the end.
The night before they left, Diana Gorgiz, 35, said she heard voices and then screams; someone had set fire to the garden of a neighbor’s house. The Iraqi Army arrived and stayed until morning, only to tell them they were not safe there anymore. The Gorgizes took it as a warning — and an indication of complicity, tacit or otherwise, by Iraq’s security forces. “When the army comes and says, ‘We cannot protect you,’ ” Ms. Gorgiz said, “what else can you believe?”
There is no exact accounting of those who have fled internally or abroad. The United Nations has registered more than 1,100 families. A steady flow of Christians to Turkey spiked in November to 243, an official there said.
The Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq offered itself as a haven and pledged to help refugees with housing and jobs. Many of those who fled are wealthy enough to afford rents in Iraqi Kurdistan; others have moved in with relatives; the worst off have ended up at the monastery here and another nearby, St. Matthew’s, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world.
There have been previous exoduses, especially from Mosul. In October 2008, more than 12,000 Christians left after a wave of assassinations killed 14 Christians. In February of this year, more than 4,000 fled to the Kurdish-controlled region in Nineveh or to Syria after 10 Christians were killed. When violence ebbed after each exodus, many returned to their homes and jobs, though not all, leaving fewer and fewer Christians. By one estimate, only 5,000 of the 100,000 Christians who once lived in Mosul remain.
“I expect that a month from now not a single Christian will be left in Mosul,” Nelson P. Khoshaba, an engineer in the city’s waterworks, said in Erbil, where he joined a chaotic scrum of people trying to register with the local authorities there.
The displacement of Christians has continued despite the legal protections that Iraq’s Constitution offers religious and ethnic minorities, though Islam is the official state religion and no law can be passed contradicting its basic tenets.
Christians have a quota of 5 seats in the new 325-member Parliament, though little political influence. Christmas was declared a national holiday in 2008, though celebrations are muted, and in Kirkuk, a tensely disputed city north of Baghdad, Christmas Mass was canceled last year.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, appointed by the president and Congress, said that the nominal protections for religious minorities in Iraq — including Christians, Yazidis and Sabean Mandeans, followers of St. John the Baptist — did little to stop violence or official discrimination in employment, housing and other matters. It noted that few of the attacks against minority groups were ever properly investigated or prosecuted, “creating a climate of impunity.”
“The violence, forced displacement, discrimination, marginalization and neglect suffered by members of these groups threaten these ancient communities’ very existence in Iraq,” the commission said in its latest annual report in May. Last week security officials announced the arrest of insurgents whom they said planned the attack on Our Lady of Salvation; those who actually carried it out died when Iraqi forces stormed the church. They offered few details, and a spokesman for the American military, which regularly joins Iraqi forces during such arrests, said he had no information on those arrested.
Archdeacon Emanuel said the government needed to do more to preserve a community that has been under siege in Iraq for decades — from the first massacre of Christians in Sumail in 1933 after the creation of the modern Iraqi nation to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to today’s nihilistic extremism that, in his words, has taken Islam hostage.
Invitations by European countries for Christians to emigrate following the attack, he said, would only hasten the departure of more, which “is not a solution.” Instead, the latest violence should give impetus to the creation of an autonomous Christian enclave in the part of Nineveh Province near here that is now under the control of the Kurdish region. That idea, though, has little political support in Iraq in Baghdad or Iraqi Kurdistan.
“What happened has been done repeatedly and systematically,” he said. “We have seen it in Mosul, in Baghdad. The message is very clear: to pluck Iraqi Christians from the roots and force them out of the country.” (More Christians Flee Iraq After New Violence.)
Far from being a "crusade against Islam," as some Catholic writers kept insisting in the months leading up to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq that destabilized the country to make it a safe haven for Mohammedans to engage in their own sectarian warfare while targeting Catholics for execution, the decision to conduct a "preemptive" war in Iraq was fueled by neoconservative war hawks who believed, quite delusionally, it should be noted, that the Iraqis would rise up and embrace the "American way," the "exceptional way," of course, thus providing stability in the Middle East and security for the puppeteers of American Middle Eastern policy in the government of the State of Israel. These neoconservative war hawks, many of whom are Jewish, were planning for an invasion of Iraq ever since the Persian Gulf War of 1991 (see
Letter to President Clinton on Iraq and my own
Longer Than World War II). It was to accomplish their dreams of exporting American "exceptionalism" to Iraq to provide the State of Israel with a "security buffer" from the Islamic Republic of Iran that these neoconservatives were willing to prop up any manner of Mohammedans in Iraq, heedless that their own chosen stooge, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, is himself a client of Iran.
This is what I wrote in an article (recently unearthed in the back of our TrailBlazer) that appeared in June of 2003 in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos after the American invasion and "liberation" of Iraq had turned into an occupation that has been nothing other than a moral and economic and geopolitical disaster that has so needlessly cost the lives of American military personnel and squandered so much of this country's treasury to prop up corrupt Mohammedans who are not in the least concerned with stopping the shedding of Catholic blood:
To wit, the American overseers of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq are discovering that many Iraqis desire to have an Islamic state. Shiite and Sunni Moslem leaders met in special prayer services in mosques throughout Iraq on Friday, April 18, 2003, to pray for the creation of such an entity to replace the secular nature of Hussein's regime. Some short-sighted Americans policy makers will convince themselves that an Islamic state in Iraq would be an expression of the will of a majority of the Iraqi people. Such an Islamic state could be "tolerated" and "controlled," these policy makers will not doubt convince themselves, in exchange for an American military presence in Iraq, especially in the form of air bases.
Lost in these considerations, however, is the plight of the small minority of Catholics who live in Iraq. The Chaldean rite Catholics trace their origins back to the beginnings of the Catholic Church. . . . One of the paradoxes of the complex situation in the Middle East is that two of the region's most highly secularized nations, iraq and Syria, have permitted great freedom to Catholics and to Orthodox Christians.
The freedom of Catholics and Orthodox Christians in Iraq and Syria to practice their Faith without fear of state-sponsored intimidation or arrest stands in stark contrast with the active intolerance of Christianity in Saudi Arabia or other Persian Gulf states. The degree of intolerance is such that American military officials in both the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the recent war have gone to great lengths to instruct their subordinates to avoid any public display of Christian symbols (Crucifixes, Miraculous Medals, Rosary beads) that might offend their Islamic hosts. The Islamic government of the Sudan goes Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states one better: it engages in active persecution of Catholics and other Christians (as do the Hindu governments of many states in India at present). It is therefore not unreasonable to express concern about the future of Catholics and other Christians in an Islamic Iraq.
Apologists for the American "liberation' of Iraq might protest that the United States would guarantee "rights" to minorities such as the Christians of Iraq. This flies in the face of all American history and even of what is happening at present in Bosnia, where "revenge killings" of Serbian Christians by Bosnian Moslems are taking place with the full knowledge of peacekeeping forces, which include members of this country's military. Those peacekeeping forces are under instructions. not to interfere with this killing. this is seen as just a regrettable part of social engineering known as "nation-building."
American indifference to the slaughter of Catholics and other Christians is not new. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson actively aided the Mexican revolutionaries in their persecution of believing Catholics in the second decade of the Twentieth Century. Although those revolutionaries were engaged in a bitter exercise of fratricide amongst themselves, they were absolutely united in the "need" to persecute anyone deemed to be supportive of the Cristeros, who were seeking to oppose by the use of armed force the persecution being visited upon Catholics of Mexico. As describe in Robert Leckie's book, American and Catholic, Wilson believed the the bloodletting in Mexico was a a sad but necessary part of "nation-building" there:"
Wilson replied [in 1915, to a Father Clement Kelley, who was a representative of James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, for whom Wilson had such contempt that he addressed him as Mister Gibbons]: 'I have no doubt but that the terrible things you mention have happened during the Mexican revolution. But terrible things happened also during the French revolution, perhaps more terrible things than have happened in Mexico. Nevertheless, out of that French revolution came the liberal ideas that have dominated in so many countries, including our own. I hope that out of the bloodletting in Mexico some such good yet may come.'
"Having thus instructed his caller in the benefits which must perforce accrue to mankind out of the systematic robbery, murder, torture and rape of people holding a proscribed religious conviction, the professor of politics [Wilson] suggested that Father Kelley visit Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, who expressed his deepest sympathy. Obviously, the Wilson administration was committed to supporting the revolutionaries." (Robert Leckie, Catholic and American, p. 274.)
One presidential administration after another has expressed its absolute indifference to the active persecution of Catholics who are part of the "underground" Catholic Church in the so-called "People's Republic of China." The communist authorities created their own rump church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in 1957. Catholics who do not join this rump church have been mercilessly persecuted in the past fifty years, including the late Bishop Ignatius Kung of Shanghai, who spent over thirty years of prison before being released to house arrest in 1986 and then sent into exile in the United States of America in 1988. Scores upon scores of bishops and priests have been rounded up and arrested in recent years. There has not been one word of protest by any leading official of the government of the United States of America about the treatment of underground Catholics in Red China. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have been more concerned about developing this country's corporate ties with Red China, believing that such corporate ties will "liberalize" life there. The only thing liberal about the communist regime in Red China is its liberal persecution of all political dissenters in general and and Catholics who are faithful to [what they think is] the Church in particular. A word of American protest might jeopardize the profits of American corporations, after all.
Thus it is not at all beyond the realm of possibility that American officials would look the other way if an Islamic Iraq started to restrict the freedom of Iraqi Catholics and/or if Shiite and Sunni Moslems tried to justify an active persecution of those Catholics by claiming that they were collaborators with the Hussein regime (repeating the pattern of the soviets and their stooges in Eastern Europe after World War II). One could hear Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld say,"Well, I have hard some reports about atrocities and persecutions of Catholics and other Christians in Iraq. You've got to understand, however, that nation-building takes a long time. you can't expect the process to go off without a hitch or two." And that might be all any American administration ever says or does to deal with such an eventuality, preferring not to do anything that might jeopardize the new American presence in Iraq.
One can only hope and pray that a persecution of Iraqi Catholics and other Christians does not take place. Give the track record of Islamic states in recent years, however, their future should be very much a matter of concern for our policy-makers, to say nothing of an intention in the prayers of their co-religionists. ("Whither the Iraqi Catholics," Christ or Chaos, June 2003.)
Well, there was no need for an "Islamic Republic of Iraq" to form for there to be the violence that some of us predicted would be the fate of Iraq's tiny population of Catholics following the American invasion of that country in 2003. No, given the instability that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq produced--and given the corruption the Iraqi officials who have been very happy to line their pockets with billions upon billions of American taxpayer dollars, hordes of indigenous Mohammedans, as well as those from Iran and Pakistan who have taken advantage of Iraq's porous borders, have seen fit to take advantage of the chaos in Iraq to visit terrorism upon Catholics and other Christians there, driving over half of them out of their native country into uncertain lives elsewhere.
Silence from George Walker Bush.
Silence from Barack Hussein Obama.
Indeed, there has not been in the putative "tsk, tsk" comment that I thought seven and one-half years ago might issue from the mouth of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, who, if you will recall, shook hands vigorously with Saddam Hussein on December 20, 1983, when he served as then President Ronald Wilson Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East to arrange the sale of biological and chemical weapons that Hussein could use in his ongoing war with Iran (but stockpiled to use on the Kurds in northern Iraq following the end of the Persian Gulf War).
Silence is the only thing that has characterized the non-reaction of any leading American policy-maker, whether from the naturalist "right" or the naturalist "left," to the slaughter and persecution of Iraq's Catholics. After all, a word of criticism might impugn Mohammedanism's mythical reputation as the "religion of peace."
Behold the Catholic blood that flows at the hands of those who are adherents of that hideous "religion of peace."
The lords of Modernity believe that their various delusional schemes--be they based in American exceptionalism of George Walker Bush and the neoconservative war hawks or the insane globalism of the likes of Barack Hussein Obama and his fellow band of international socialists--can produce "peace." They are mad, madder still when you consider the fact that they have made possible the slaughter of the innocent preborn, both by chemical and surgical means, in this country and elsewhere with American taxpayer dollars and as they show great "tolerance," if not actual support, for the sin of Sodom that destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha. God will never "bless" a land guilty of these grave sins that cry out to Him for vengeance with prosperity at home and "security" from foreign threats. The caesars are mad.
Yes, the lords of conciliarism decry the violence in Iraq. Granted.
Do they urge us to pray for the conversion of the Mohammedans?
No.
The lords of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism simply urge one and all to respect the "guarantees" of "religious liberty" that are found in Iraq's 2005 Constitution as many of them say that the violence that has been visited upon Catholics in Iraq is the result of "extremist" elements and not representative of acts that are fully faithful to the dictates of the blasphemous Koran. Yes, the conciliarists believe that a respect for "religious liberty" is the answer, not a conversion of all Mohammedans to the true religion, Catholicism. They do not believe that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order, believing that "peaceful coexistence" of "religions" can produce "peace." They are as delusional as the lords of Modernity.
This is just one of chastisements being visited upon us at this time, which is why we must all the more trust in Our Lady's Fatima Message as we seek to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart for our own many sins and those of the whole world, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits, even more so as we are in the final days of Advent preparation to celebrate the Nativity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Bethlehem.
May we remember to pray for our fellow Catholics in Iraq at this time as we pray also for the conversion of those are attacking them and for the conversion of all men, including our own governmental officials, to the Catholic Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
