Mick Hartley

The Daily Star has the details:

Last month, a Chaldean priest, Ragheed Ganni, and three sub-deacons were murdered by Islamist terrorists in Mosul, Iraq. Before being executed, they were informed that they would be spared on the condition that they converted to Islam. All refused. Ganni was one of many Iraqis killed since 2003 for no reason other than their Christian identity. Additionally, thousands of Christians have been expelled from their homes, extorted, harassed, beaten, raped and ordered to covert to Islam, spawning a frantic and ongoing exodus. As a result, Iraq’s Christian community stands on the verge of extinction. Other religious minorities have also been persecuted, including the Yazidis of the north and the tiny Mandaean community of the south.

Until recently, the Iraqi diaspora was relatively small. The 1980-1988 war between Iraq and Iran, which was accompanied by an economic boom, did not prompt mass emigration of Iraqis. Large-scale emigration began with Saddam Hussein’s 1988 Anfal campaign against Kurds, and skyrocketed with the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam’s crushing of a Shiite rebellion, and international sanctions. The resulting economic deterioration led large numbers of Christians to leave. Saddam’s post-war Islamization drive provided an added incentive…

It is crucial to understand that Christians in Iraq are not simply suffering from the general violence and anarchy plaguing the country, but are being targeted as Christians by Islamists as well as criminal gangs. While Islamist terrorists openly aim to rid Iraq of all “infidels,” criminals seek to exploit the perceived wealth of Christians. Thus, many Christians who were middle-class are now destitute, having paid exorbitant ransoms for kidnapped loved ones – some of whom were killed nonetheless.

Though Christians have been persecuted by Muslims in the past, today’s Islamist onslaught against Christians in Iraq has led to something virtually unprecedented in the history of Islam in Mesopotamia: Christians must hide their identity so as to avoid being harassed or killed. Christian women routinely don the hijab, and men and women with identifiably Christian names have taken to concealing them. Concomitantly, Christians have been forced to remove the cross from public view, including church steeples and domes as well as from around their necks. This is a hugely symbolic act that powerfully illustrates the tragic position of Christians in Iraq today…

Eventually, the violence in Iraq will subside and a modicum of security will return. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds will arrive at a modus vivendi, however imperfect. In attempting to forge some semblance of unity, a nationalist historiography will likely blame the occupation forces for Iraq’s post-Saddam violence. And this will be the second crime perpetrated against Iraqi victims of Islamist terror. After all, there can be no greater insult to the murdered than to exonerate their murderers.

For the Christians of Iraq, indeed, for all Iraqis who have been killed or otherwise persecuted for their religious affiliation, this would mean exonerating the Islamist purveyors of holy war, Sunni or Shiite, who incite against one another and against non-Muslims. It would mean “moving forward” without ever confronting the Islamist theologies of murder, rape and genocide, whose adherents have forever disfigured Iraq.