Posted by pancho from pool0052.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.52) on Sunday, January 19, 2003 at 9:19AM :
Every time you read or hear, "Islam tortured and robbed our ancestors"...remember that the speaker is speaking as a Christian and not as an Assyrian. It's an important detail left out of these wailings for reparations to our NATIONAL identity...it isn't national at all...it's religious. And if they maintain that the Assyrian "nation" is a Christian one...remind them that when Assyria WAS a nation it was neither Christian nor Muslim.
We deliberately confound the two to give some political muscle to our religious squabbles. To give us some grounds for claiming our "national" rights or lands and property be returned to us. This group is merely a dispossesed Christian sect, that's all. There isn't a damn thing Assyrian about them...they do nothing as Assyrians...which they've conveniently made synonymous with Christian so that when they cross themselves, or kneel at the altar or get baptized, they are doing "Assyrian" things. And when they demand their church lands be restored to them it is" Assyrian" property they want back. Clever ain't smart.
During the Muslim Conquest it may or may not be true that non-Christians were faced with death or conversion...though the Yezidis managed to stay alive, so that any true Assyrians would have been killed or forced to convert...but I don't think it could have been a totally successful campaign. And if Assyrians voluntarily chose to adopt Christianity...how many more would have taken to Islam out of fear and to protect their property and families.
Whatever you think of the correctness of such conversions...and Christians forcibly converted millions whose descendants today are pleased as punch to be Christian...still, it stands to reason there would be even more Muslim converts, through force if needed, than there would be voluntary converts to Christianity...which could explain why Islam succeeded in the MidEast where Christianity was driven out.
Like I said, maybe it's deplorable...but there it is in all its brutal reality. The fact is it's over...if it was wrong then, it's the way things are today. No amount of pleading or demanding is going to get the Muslims to return anything to a Christian sect it has no reason to like or tolerate. They have every reason to drive them out...would that our own people in Urmia had driven the missionaries out before they carved us up some more...
Christianity caught Assyrians at the lowest point in their history...we were susceptible to its promise of dignity and wealth after death. But it's been centuries now and things do change. As Christianity came to that region, it can just as easily leave. No loss and most of the people there would say good riddance.
-- pancho
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