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Posted by parhad (Guest) - Tuesday, July 27 2004, 16:32:06 (CEST)
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...from a lifted article skipped till now cause I was commuting in the desert....

The Assyrians were quickly Christianised, and this caused them to suffer great reprisals by the Persians who saw them as a potential fifth column of the Byzantine empire.

...there is so much bad history out there...and as no one really knows what happened back then...and since we`re all building our theories and castles in the air, I`d like to move in now and enjoy the view.

...What is it with people? Where did the idea ever come from that whole cultures threw away their beliefs because someone told them the story of Christ? If it was such a cakewalk to win people away, why did the church have so much trouble in the New World? Why did the friars and monks have whole armies at their backs to impose their will? Why would any African, dragged to America in chains...seeing his wife gang raped to produce more "product"...his children sold from his embrace...why would such a man willingly opt for such a religion? Is it plausible? Wouldn`t that be like saying that after all the Christians supposedly suffered at the hands of crool Islam...they JOINED UP WILLINGLY?

...aren`t we the first to maintain that we would NEVER make friends with those who oppress and massacre and humiliate us? Don`t we use the treatment meted out to Christian Assyrians by Islam as PRooooVES that Muslims CAN`T be Assyrians...because no one would do these things to a brother? Then why on earth would an African or members of one of the several civilizations the Christians trashed in the New World EVER willingly convert to the same religion his family was killed under?

...There has to be an explanation for the countless times in Christian history and increasingly so as we near the modern era that Christians "get it wrong" by the millions. It`s as if this is a religion FOR the hypocrite..the one with a painted Christian leer over his face...someone who can`t FEEL the religion in her bones....exactly like the Jews we know who were forcibly converted by the Spanish Church...whose conversions were never trusted for that very reason..because their Christianity was all on the surface.

...None of us knows with any certainty what happened..but we can REASON. We can if we know how, or aren`t afraid of our own minds...afraid that when our minds poke through the heavy gauze that passes for education we are doing the right thing, using what is unique to us and not the "devil`s work". Religion makes people distrust themselves..it takes the mind, which is the one really unique thing we have that sets us apart from animals...and makes it something to be despised...turned upside down and villified, making a child doubt what is in essence the very core of his or her HUMANITY. We are turned into people who have no use for their peopleness...becoming receivers of "revealed truths" by those wiley and cagey enough to know how to manipulate us out of our Human legacy...the thousands of years of trial and error and discovery that led us through so many Dark Ages only to dump us at the feet of another one.

...It is IMPOSSIBLE that things happened the way the Church says they did...but only if you haven`t been sent to the laundromat as a kid. You can find individuals here and there who will believe ANYTHING..who go shopping for convictions and spirituality like they do for cheese...but No culture as a whole threw itself away to become what those who attacked them said they SHOULD become.

EVERY nation that "embraced" Christianity after the Romans made it their Imperial religion was a nation conquered by Rome and dragged into its sphere of influence. The Jews were sent wandering before that and they were spared by the Church fathers from forcible conversions on a mass scale because it was thought good to keep an example laying about of what those who rejected Jesus could expect. The Jews were to be an object lesson long after the Church had converted those within it`s jurisdiction. All the filth and violence heaped on them by Christian Europe was supposed to be their just desserts for "killing Christ" when it was the same fucking Romans who milked his corpse that killed him.

In this respect the Assyrians formed an uneasy buffer zone between two hostile civilisations, absorbing influences from both. Establishing a vital theology, the Assyrian Orthodox Church of the East embarked on a vast missionary feat that had it spread Orthodoxy as far as China and India.

...in this context what does "spread" mean? People in China and India saw these weird people come chanting and praying among them and because THEY were tolerant, allowed them to worship freely. But the religion never took. Why? Had the Roman army managed to get that far...and had they done to those people what they did to the rest they conquered...you can bet Christianity would have "taken" hold there as well...and today the Chinese and Indians would tell us all how their ancestors gladly threw away those awful religions and cultures THEY had developed in favor of Jesus.

Indeed, Marco Polo found Assyrian monasteries in Mongolia and the Mongolian Khans, rulers of the largest empire of the world, protected and were profoundly interested in Assyrian Orthodoxy.

....what people back then felt for religion is different than today. If you saw a Christian doctor who could heal your clapp...you would ascribe his miraculous powers, not to the powders and ungents he used, but to his god. Bringing the science of BetNahrain with them, Christians made an impression on impressionable people..as the Muslims later did when they brought BetNahrain to Europe and the New World. This is not the same as throwing your own religion away because your headache was cured...or you were shown how to bake bread by someone who believed in fish gods. Of course you would be "interested"...but not enough to neglect the worship of your own ancestors and parents..which is what religion boiled down to back then.

You`d have to be torn kicking and screaming away from that...and your children could then be raised to believe it was all a natural fit...but the entire history of this bloody religion shows it WASN`T a natural fit at all....in fact the violence done to people to make them worship this new god...made then INTO one of the bloodiest and most violent RELIGIONS the world has ever seen...one that STILL trots out its exceptions to the rule as a ploy to keep us looking the other way...away from what the millions are doing in its name to the one person who would have been a decent human anyway had Christ been snuffed in his manger.

..To maintain that the advent of Christianity brought with it love and kindness and fillial piety and love of children to your own ancestors is to insult and villify them like no enemy ever could. There was NOTHING in Christ that was NEWS in BetNahrain..except for this business about a Jewish Messiah and he WAS to be Jewish, not Assyrian..because them Hebrews needed saving BADLY. Assyrians only came to need that sort of Messianic "saving" when they got lost in Christ. The belief in Ashur meant far more to Assyrians..inspired their greatness and ensured their cohesion far more than Christ ever did...he was given to us as a consolation prize..after our own god and culture was torn from us...Christ was made the only game in town and that made us the mess we are today....and we WOULD see this mess as "survival"...but Ashur never would and neither would an Assyrian worth the name.

Today, though much diminished, the Orthodox Church in South India still looks to the Assyrian Patriarch for guidance. Assyrians also looked to the Greek world for theological and philosophical inspiration.

...here we have yet another people taking credit for our "pagan" ancestors gave THEM!

Many of the ancient Greek as well as ecclesiastical texts surviving today, are so extant because of the Aramaic translations and commentaries compiled by Assyrian scholars, while the Antioch school of theology that so influenced Byzantine thinking was mainly Aramaic speaking.

...and of course we are given a role in the new world order of its day..we are the scribes, the secretaries and translators..very like we`re credited with being in Iraq today. That may have been all we ever did again under Christianity..but we did far more than that under Islam where we were generals and Caliphs and inventors...but we all know what the boys think of someone who rises to the top in a muslim state...such as Iraq...they call that person a TRAITOR TO JESUS!

Again it is through the medium of these scholars that Greek philosophy was able to be passed on to the Arabs and dispersed throughout the Middle East, while Assyrians take pride in the fact that their language, Aramaic, was the language spoken by Jesus Christ.

...sure, we love it when we can be of service. That knowledge didn`t just go to the Middle East..it travelled with the Muslims to North Africa, all the way to southern Spain and almost into Europe where, had it triumphed, we would have skipped 1000 years of Dark Ages lit by human torches the Church provided for free. And the light of BetNahrain didn`t remain there only..it eventually entered Europe and was taken to the New World by the Spanish who`d had 700 years of Mesopotamian cultural influence. Assyrians were much much more than "scribes" inthe armies of Islam. The original Arabs that came from Arabia were augmented and their ranks swelled by our people...we LED that campaign as well as enlightened it.

The rise of Islam has not been kind to the Assyrians, though they have tenaciously clung to their Christian heritage.

...the prevalence of Christianity hasn`t been a boon to Islam either...OR to other Christians...ask the Byzantines who were plundered and murdered by Western Christians...or check out the Reformation and later Restoration if you would see what Christians do for their god..they basically do unto each other what was done to MAKE them Christians...murder.

...I`m glad we cleared up what it was they clung "tenaciously" to..it was a Christian religion, NOT an Assyrian Heritage.

Forced to retreat to their heartland among the mountains of northern Iraq and southern Turkey, their story is one of continuous persecution and massacres by their Muslim neighbours.

...this is no different from the continuoius massacres and persecution the Muslims received at the hands of their Christian neighbors.

This has been never more so this century when the Assyrians suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottomans and Kurds at the same time as the Armenians and Pontic Greeks were going through a similar tragedy.

...in this same century the Jews suffered more at the hands of Christians than they ever did before...as Muslim nations have also suffred more than ever before at the hands of Christian nations. You people always gloss over your manifest crimes to drag out any instance when someone had enough and paid you all back..as we see in Palestine and now Iraq, you expect to do as you please when you please and for as long as it suits you, then YOU get furious and dispense even more violence in retaliation if a Muslim father ONCE dares lift a bloody finger in defense of his family...or a Muslim mother or daughter straps a bomb to her body in desperation because she can no longer stand your cruelties...all of them sanctified by your Lord.

One of the world's better known Assyrians, Thea Halo, author of the book Not Even My Name who visited Melbourne last year, emphasises the joint suffering as creating an unsunderable bond between our two peoples - that is, if the Greeks paid attention to the 5,000-strong refugee Assyrian community within its borders. It is worthwhile noting that an Assyrian regiment of the British army fought in defence of Crete in 1941.

...it might be fair to point out that millions of Turks..minding their own business were marshalled into a war against a coalition of the wealthiest and most industrialized nations of their day, and killed and butchered and blown up...people who`d never harmed a single member of the nations who circled them eager for an excuse to plunder the oil fields. Had Turkey embarked on a war of aggression against Chrisdtian nations in order to steal their resources, you might get away with claiming they were at fault..but it was Christians again who started it and then blamed their victims for defending themselves as best they could...are the rest of us to die without a whimper in order that you may serve your god?

Today, the once strong Assyrian community in Bet-Nahrain is slowly evacuating its ancient homeland. From an estimated two million Assyrians living in Iraq at the turn of last century, it is estimated that only 200,000 or so remain today. British promises of Assyrian independence caused thousands of Assyrians to enlist in British regiments, only to have their dreams snatched away from them and be left alone to face the mounting hostility and reprisals of Kurds and Arabs.

...you just answered your own question. No one bothered the Christians of Turkey..in fact under the Millet System the Turks granted them they had more freedom to rule themselves than they will ever have again. It was their willingness to believe co-Christian promises that made them a fifth column all over again..and they paid the price for their blind and stupid trust...as well the lies and false history and claims to ownership their clergy teach the children entrusted to them...all of it done to gain a wider role for their Jesus Christ at the expense of their flock of sheep.

...we saw what Christian reprisals can be like...when we noted that 19 Saudi citizens attacking America led to an all out war against Islam in which the Afghanis and Iraqis were seen as fair game...yet you only mention Muslim reprisals..once again leaving the impression that whatever Christians do MUST be right...why? Why wasn`t Saudi Arabia attacked instead? If your wrath can embrace anyone you target..why can`t Muslims and Kurds and Turks do the same?

The Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein encouraged further tension between Kurds and Assyrians, resulting in murders and internecine strife. During Saddam's rule, 200 churches were destroyed and the archaeological finds attesting to the glories of Assyrian civilisation were spirited away. Formal Assyrian language classes were banned and Assyrians were forced to give their children Arabic names in an effort to assimilate them.

...assimilation is the name of the game. Who forced Firas Jatou to consider becoming Frank Jones instead? Who forces MidEastern Christians in America..free to name their children ANY name they like, to choose Scott...and Jennifer and Ashley over Doumarina and Nineveh and Ashur? The village churches destroyed were madrassahs teaching this billious nonsense, that Iraq belongs to the Christians in it because THEY SAY SO. That is sedition and any government would stamp it out..as America has done several times in attacking the right wing nuts in Utah and Idaho and New York and anywhere else they pop up...the fact that Christians use their churches for such activities invites the justifiable anger of the authorities...as it did in Catholic Ireland.

Saddam's son Uday would deliberately target Assyrian girls as his playthings, to be raped and then killed by his bodyguards or ripped apart by his menagerie of wild beasts while members of the Assyrian community in Melbourne tell stories of kidnappings, murders and mutilations that turn one's stomach. All the time, in the interests of strategy and big petro-dollars, the west stood idly by and did nothing.

...okay, you`re losing it now. We`ve heard these and bayonet stores before...in EVERY war. The West never stood by...it encouraged and supported the thugs who could be counted upon to terrorize their own people.

Now, after the so-called 'liberation' of Iraq, it is noteworthy that while a fundamentalist and anti-Christian climate has been created, none of the 'protectors' of Iraq has seen fit to take steps to protect its most vulnerable and peace-loving people. American soldiers permitted Iraqis to loot the Baghdad museum of all Assyrian antiquities, while imams actively encouraged looters to destroy artefacts that were not Islamic. The new Iraqi constitution studiously avoids any mention of the Assyrian minority and definitely does not provide any measures for the protection of its cultural heritage.

...you`re doing that dance again..the "Christian/Assyrian Rag". We are talking about Muslim vs Christian. Now you sneak in "Assyrian". No one in BetNahrain or elsewhere has anything againt Assyrians..why would they? This is the common heritage of ALL the people in those lands. They don`t even hate all Christians..as Thea Halo tells in her book. What they rightly despise is the BEHAVIOR of people who would be objectionable in ANY religion and culture..who happen to be Christian, in this case. You are talking about a portion of a Christian minority that hides behind the Christian name...as it hides behind the Assyrian heritage. Repeat this all you want to..the Muslims know the truth...you are NOT Assyrians, you hide behind the name and they see you...and the rest of the world will increasingly come to view you as the charlatans and "scoundrels for Christ" you are.

In the meantime, the few Assyrians remaining in the zone controlled by the new government are subject to harassment and violence by their Muslim neighbours.

...these Muslim neighbors, as well as the Christians on the block, have been subjected to the most inhumane attack against a civillian population since the Nazis, also devout Christians looking for purity of blood, inflicted on the Jews. If your retaliation in the name of your church and suffering is justified...why can`t Muslims lash out at the only Christians they can lay their hands on? America COULD have struck back at the source from which the attack on it came...but chose instead to go after anyone Muslim...why is it only okay for them?

In the Kurdish controlled north, the traditional Assyrian heartland, thousands of Assyrian families are streaming across the border to Syria in fear of their lives. In towns such as Mosul and Arbil, the scene of Alexander the Great's great victory over the Persians, being towns that enjoy significant Assyrian minorities, Assyrian businesses are plundered and prominent members of the community are being assassinated.

...and this was never the case until the Christian West came attacking and murdering and plundering AGAIN. No sooner do the people settle down, even under the most trying circumstances, than they are stirred up again...made to recall the self-righteous religion that excuses all its excesses while castigating Muslims for DEFENDING themselves by daring to strike back at those they feel are their tormentors...if America can go after Iraqis because they are Muslims, for what 19 Saudis did...then Iraqi Muslims can go after ANY Christian anywhere. When Law breaks down everyone will eventually pay for it.

So much then for a pluralistic and tolerant Iraq and for the efforts of our Western bringers of light, or rather to use the Latin, ‘lucifers.’

...there was never any intention to bring light to Iraq..or to Cuba or Puerto Rico or the Phillipines or Chile. The West brings death in order to retreive resources and stifle growth and competition...unless it is a subsidiary of their`s anyway. There was no "failure" in Iraq..it is the same dismal success these people have enjoyed elsewhere.

An ancient people is through a situation caused by the West, or at the least by deliberate neglect, being allowed to walk the slow, traumatic walk into the pages of extinction. A proud people, to whom the prophets of the Old Testament refer to as the rod of God's anger and who have contributed so much to world culture are doomed to revisit genocide and ethnic cleansing over and over again, victims of the machinations of 'greater Powers' and major historical bungling.

...their own as well. And please stop cleansing us all over again by claiming we all became Christians..or were ever in Yahwe`s pay as his rod or anything else. If he has a shirt to cover his nakedness it`s because an Assyrian gave him one he didn`t need.

What a triumph of Western Civilisation the 'democratisation' of Iraq proved to be, especially for a Christian people.

...do you mean "for a Christian people" as in look what the Christian West did yet again to completely innocent victims..or do you mean the Iraqi Christians, whom according to you, are the only ones who suffred in Iraq?

Now that, to quote the emperor Claudius in Robert Graves' Claudius the God, all the poisons that lurk in the mud have hatched out, let us pray that despite this further Western betrayal of them, the Assyrian people will find the strength to survive, albeit just.

...they are Christian Iraqis..they are not Assyrians. All Assyrians did not convert to Christianity...neither by force and NEVER willingly. The majority became Muslims and that`s what you hate them for.

“An ancient people is through a situation caused by the West, or at the least by deliberate neglect, being allowed to walk the slow, traumatic walk into the pages of extinction”

...it is the religion that may become extinct..and that would be a wonderful thing for you people would have to find your next fifth column somewhere else. The Assyrians remain in BetNahrain, as they always have and they will rebuild.

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