Silent accomplices to incipient genocide

Andrew Doran has an excellent, and damning, blog post on The American Conservative, regarding the impact of the Iraq War on the Christian community of that country. It is utterly stunning to me, in light of all of Bush’s supposed piety, how utterly and brazenly uncaring these people were about the dangers to Iraq’s native Christian community. The Bush Administration refused to heed warnings from the Catholic Church about how a war would come at a massive cost of life, particularly to sectarian violence against religious minorities; and it refused to issue guarantees of freedom of religion in the newly-‘liberated’ country.

As a result, Orthodox and Catholic priests and bishops in Iraq began being targeted as scapegoats. They were kidnapped and often decapitated or otherwise brutally murdered. And the US military, in spite of clerics coming to them for assistance, stood by and watched as Christian churches went up in flames and clerics were butchered. Chaldean and Assyrian Christians who sought asylum in the United States were almost always denied it, instead being detained in prison-like conditions and then deported. Likewise, the United States refused to give any aid to the Kurds to help with the refugee crisis when they took in Christians fleeing from the south of the country.

Another refuge of choice for Iraqi Christians was - you guessed it - Syria. And now it is a case of déjà vu for them as Syria’s rebels fall into the same pattern of persecuting Christians and kidnapping priests. And once again, these rebels against Assad are committing these acts with the aid and tacit blessing of the United States government.

Please do read Mr Doran’s article in full. And please pray with me that the US government does not decide to get any more involved in Syria on the side of these religious extremists than it already has.