The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: part 10

Re: part 10
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, August 27 2007, 21:53:09 (CEST)
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“The position of the Jacobites was different from that of the Armenians and the Maronites, whose relations with the Crusaders were cemented by military alliances. Renowned for their skill as archers, the Maronites were used in war against the Muslims, and formed a most useful part of the Latin infantry.”

The downside of the tolerance that the Muslims extended to all Christians, regardless of variations in belief, was that by accepting them all as “just” Christians, they reacted to all of them as “just” Christians. Just as it didn’t matter to Muslims if a Christian crossed himself with one or two fingers…so it didn’t matter if the one who betrayed them crossed himself with one or two fingers…to them they had been betrayed by a Christian, not a Monophysite or Montanist or Nestorian or Presbyterian or Catholic…so that all Christians, no matter how apart each sect held itself from the rest, or how innocent one sect had been, or if only one sect had acted treacherously…all Christians would be treated as one group and punished accordingly.

“The Armenians of the barony of Cilicia often called upon the Latins to strengthen their political and military position. Throughout the crusading period, the Armenian rulers of Cilicia maintained friendly relations with the Franks, who in turn considered the Armenians as their natural ally against both the Muslims and the Byzantines. The Armenians occasionally paid a price for the good will of the Franks. In the words of Mathew of Edessa, Armenian leaders received ‘terrible chastisement…on the part of the Turks and their brothers, the Byzantines.’”

The Maronites joined forces with the Europeans against their Muslim neighbors…and the Armenians called on their help in their conflicts with Islam…this could only lead to retaliation for all Christians.

“When the Mongols invaded the Middle East in the thirteenth century, the Christians of the area were again caught in the middle. Those of them who found it expedient to side with the Asian invaders were severely punished.”

The key word is “expedient”. The native Christians must have seen some opportunity in siding with the Mongols…who were decidedly not Christian. Perhaps it was nothing more than the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”…though once again one wonders if the native Christians could have expected better friends than the Muslims they found tolerance among. What gave them a sense of opportunity where the Mongols were concerned?

How often have we traded our peaceful lives among Muslims for the chance to see Christ “triumph” over Muhammad…through warfare and murder? More important to us, it would seem, is a symbolic victory of Jesus over Islam than the reality of our daily lives and the welfare of our families…even as “second-class” citizens. We’ve chased a fantasy at the expense of our reality..and we just did it again.

“Like the Latins the Mongols at first favored the native Christians over their Muslim neighbors. A number of Mongol conquerors had Christian wives, converts of Nestorian missionaries to Central and Eastern Asia.”

Mongols were not monogamous…how then did Christian women consent to be one of many wives? In any case, this must have been what gave the native Christians “hope”….when, in reality, it led to further death and destruction. It seems the hope that Christianiy holds out of Christian fellowship has been a curse instead to Middle Eastern Christians.

“Conscious of the good relations between the Mongols and his Christian subjects, the caliph al-Musta’sim sent the Nestorian patriarch of Baghdad along with his wazir in order to ‘treat with Hulagu’, whose queen Doquz Khatun was a Nestorian Christian. Hulagu was not moved; according to Bar Hebraeus, he ‘continued the war with still greater ferocity.’ Baghdad was sacked and the caliph murdered, but the Nestorian patriarch was rewarded; he ‘was given rich endowments and a former royal palace as his residence and church’”.

What was the Nestorian patriarch rewarded for? How did it look to the Muslim population when they saw the patriarch rewarded by the Mongols?

“These pro-Christian policies of the Mongols gave rise to false hopes among the Christians. The news of the fall of Baghdad, capital of Islam for five hundred years, was a ‘ghastly shock’ to the Muslims, but was received with jubilation by some of the Middle Eastern Christians. An Armenian writer hailed Hulagu and his Christian queen as ‘the new Constantine and Helena’”. The Mongols not only had Christian wives but also Christian generals. The man who led Hulagu’s forces into Syria after the fall of Baghdad was the Nestorian Kitbuga”.

So much for the benefits of missionary work among the Chinese.


“With the fall of Damascus, the Arab historian Maqrizi wrote that the Christians there began to be in the ascendancy, and started to act accordingly. ‘They drank wine freely in the month of Ramadan’, he reports, ‘spilling it in the open streets on the clothes of the Muslims and the doors of the mosques.’ It was the turn of the Christians to treat the Muslims as second-class citizens. They traversed the street, writes Maqrizi, ‘bearing the cross, (compelling) the merchants to rise and ill-treated those who refused.’ They preached sermons proclaiming their new-won liberty, saying that ‘the true faith, the faith of the Messiah, is today triumphant.’ When the Muslims complained of these indignities to Hulagu’s governor, they were bastinadoed.”

…”is today triumphant”. What rash behavior…what a world of trouble they brought down on their heads for this one-day triumph of their Messiah.


“After the Mamluks (Egyptians, mine) had defeated the Central Asian invaders, they turned their anger upon the native Christians. Many were massacred or sold into slavery; others were forcibly converted to Islam, their church and monastic property confiscated.”

At last! At last there is reference made in the historical record, not in hysterical church writings, to forced conversions. If you leave it at that, as Peter Jassim does with that list of his, or as the church teaches, then you leave without understanding what made the Muslims behave in this manner…something no historian has accused them of till that moment.

Forced conversions are, of course, insincere…but those imposing such conversions aren’t looking for sincerity of faith…neither are they fooled by what they do. It is the next generation, the children and grandchildren of those they force to convert that they are looking to….for they know that with some strict surveilance and monitoring of the behavior of the converted Christians…they will reap a crop of Muslims down the line…and it is to achieve this “deferred sincerity” that they forced Christians to convert…and their overriding interest was to remove a potential source of future treachery…as they’d just experienced. It was the behavior, not the religion, of the Christians, of even a portion of them, that led the Muslims to these drastic steps.


“The slaughter that followed the occupation of Antioch by the troops of Baybars shocked even the Muslim chroniclers who reported it. The fate of the Christians of Damascus was determined by their behavior during the Mongol occupation of the city.”

Here we come again to those infamous lists of Peter Jassim, Rosie and so many more Christian hysterians. Indeed there was violence visited upon Christians by Muslims…but it was retaliation for what Christians did…how they behaved and not merely for their faith. This little fact, rounding out the real history of those events is conveniently left out of any modern Christian retelling of that time...at least among our propagandists. In other words, they lie or are terribly and smugly ignorant…their main objective being not a recounting of history but an effort to slander and smear Islam while obscuring what they did to earn its scorn.

To hear our religio-nationalists tell it, the Quran and Muhammad, all along, ordered Muslims to behave in these ways towards Christians, “just because of their Christian religion”. Their biased version is not only inaccurate, to say the least, but makes a person stupid and forces them to remain willfully ignorant if they would remain “true” to their Christian faith and its propaganda…it also obscures the historical record so that these same mistakes occur time and again..as they are today when the withdrawal of American troops will bring retribution again.

The motivation of our religio-nationalists is not the betterment of the lives of the Iraqi Christians…their one goal is to fan the flames of hatred against Islam, something American policy is more than happy to use them for…they are consumed with hatred of Islam, Arabs, Turks and Kurds…they are motivated by racism and will, like white rascists, use and twist anything they can to attain their goals….even if in the process they cause more death and destruction to their own people.

“Many of them were massacred along with the Jews and Muslims as collaborators with the enemy. The Jacobite patriarch was told not to entertain foreigners and so were other Christian leaders warned.”

It’s significant that Muslims as well as Jews and Christians were punished for collaboration..proving once again that it was not for their religion that the Christians suffered, but for their acts of betrayal…as even Muslims did.

“By the second half of the thirteenth century, Syria was desolate and unsafe for the Christians. The Jacobites found security in northern Iraq and in the territory north of it, in south-central Anatolia. Bar Hebraeus, writing toward the end of the thirteenth century, found in his diocese in Iraq ‘much quietness;’ the Syrian diocese he described as ‘wasted’”.

If you stood back far enough and contemplated the sweep of history in the Middle East where Muslim-Christian relations are concerned you’d think there has been a concerted effort by the West to make life impossible for the native Christians…maybe in the way that Jews were spared only to be abused at intervals to show what happens to people who reject Jesus…who supposedly wanted him killed.

Was the West punishing heretics it could not directly get its hands on? Of course not…but still, the end result has been the same. Chased from Christian lands these heretics found refuge among Muslims only to see a succession of western Christian nations attack their lands making their position untenable in the long run, especially as many of them took sides with the Christians against their own neighbors and rulers.

Over the centuries the native Christians have been chased from Syria to Lebanon to Iraq, Iran and Turkey…round and round BetNahrain they’ve gone, periodically losing numbers to conversion and the West as several families simply gave up trying to remain in their ancestral homelands due to the attacks of western Christianity.

Does it need to be emphasized that the same thing is happening even now with more dead, more subject to suspicion and eventual retaliation with thousands leaving the country altogether to settle in the West. Christianity in the East wasn’t doomed by Islam…on the contrary our heretical sects were welcomed, protected and allowed to grow and prosper. What doomed them was Western Christianity which, unable to get at them directly, nonetheless managed to cause them great suffering at the hands of the Muslims…much as they’ve placed the remnants of the Jews they could not kill in the Holocaust among Muslims, to suffer a protracted persecution and retaliation for the crimes of Christianity.

And this is where our religio-nationalists come in for they are adept at giving one side of the history to make it seem Islam was to blame..that Muhammad and the Quran specifically called on Muslims to attack, kill and forcibly convert Christians when just the opposite was true. This is the function of aina “news”..of “articles” on Zindalite…this is what these forums exist for; to spread these lies and scoff at “so-called” experts who tell a more complete and well rounded tale..this is the reason our Christians are so proud of their ignorance and backwardness, disdaining to “read stupid books” or even dictionaries…because these books tell a more accurate story of human frailty and not just pin blame on “perfidious” Islam.

There’s plenty of fault and guilt to go around but our Christians can’t bear to be seen for what they are and so they’ve tried to obscure the fact that once again the Christians of BetNahrain will suffer and are suffering because of the attacks of western Christianity plus their own efforts to cozy up to the Christian nations they live among. The death of Iraqi Christians is a price THEY are willing to pay for the murder by proxy of the Muslims they have always blamed for their own personal and, to give some semblance of grandeur to their undistinguished existence, their “national “failures.



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