Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing
violence from forces loyal to the Isis in Sinjar town, walk towards the
Syrian border, on the outskirts of Sinjar mountain, near the Syrian border town
of Elierbeh of Al-Hasakah Governorate One summer's day in 1990, I walked
into a beautiful Crusader chapel in Keserwan, a gentle mountainside north of
Beirut, where an old Catholic Maronite priest pointed to a Byzantine mosaic of
– I think – Saint John. What he wanted to show me was the holy man's eyes. They
had been stabbed out of the mosaic by a sword or lance at... some
point in antiquity. 'The Muslims did this,' the priest said.
His words had added clarity because at that time the
Lebanese Christian army General Michel Aoun – who thought he was the president
and still, today, dreams of this unlikely investiture – was fighting a hopeless
war against Hafez Assad's Syrian army. Daily, I was visiting the homes of dead
Christians, killed by Syrian shellfire. The Syrians, in the priest's narrative,
were the same ‘Muslims’ who had stabbed out the eyes in the ancient picture.
I remember at the time – and often since – I would say to
myself that this was nonsense, that you cannot graft ancient history onto the
present. (The Maronites, by the way, had supported the earlier Crusaders. The
Orthodox of the time stood with the Muslims.) Christian-Muslim enmity on this
scale was a tale to frighten schoolchildren.
And yet only last year, as shells burst above the Syrian
town of Yabroud, I walked into the country’s oldest church and found paintings
of the saints. All had had their eyes gouged out and been torn into strips. I
took one of those strips home to Beirut, the painted eyes of the saints staring
at me even as I write this article. This was not the sacrilege of antiquity. It
was done by ghoulish men, probably from Iraq, only months ago.
Like 9/11 – long after Hollywood had regularly demonised
Muslims as barbarian killers who wish to destroy America – it seems that our
worst fears turn into reality. The priest in 1990 cannot have lived long enough
to know how the new barbarians would strike at the saints in Yabroud.
Isis warns of the 'end of Christian
presence' in Middle East
Coptic Christians in Egypt beheaded by militants
Coptic Christians in Egypt beheaded by militants
Note how I have not mentioned the enslavement of Christian
women in Iraq, the Islamic State’s massacre of Christians and Yazidis, the
burning of Mosul's ancient churches or the destruction of the great Armenian
church of Deir el-Zour that commemorated the genocide of its people in 1915. Nor
the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Not even the very latest massacre in
Kenya where the numbers of Christian dead and the cruelty of their sectarian
killers is, indeed, of epic, Hollywood proportions. Nor have I mentioned the
ferocious Sunni-Shia wars that now dwarf the tragedy of the Christians.
Soldiers
standing over skulls of victims from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan
But the Christian tragedy in the Middle East today needs
to be re-thought – as it will be, of course, when Armenians around the world
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the genocide of their people by Ottoman
Turkey. Perhaps it is time that we acknowledge not only this act of genocide
but come to regard it not as just the murder of a minority within the Ottoman
Empire, but specifically a Christian minority, killed because they were
Armenian but also because they were Christian (many of whom, unfortunately,
rather liked the Orthodox, anti-Ottoman Tsar).
And their fate bears some uncommon parallels with the
Islamic State murderers of today. The Armenian men were massacred. The
women were gang-raped or forced to convert or left to die of hunger. Babies
were burned alive – after being stacked in piles. Islamic State cruelty is not
new, even if the cult’s technology defeats anything its opponents can achieve. http://link.brightcove.com
Iraq crisis: Yazidi nightmare on Mount Sinjar
And this is true. The West – that amorphous, dangerous
expression – has still not understood the use of this technology – especially
the use which the cult makes of the internet – nor have the Muslim Arab imams
who should be speaking about the fearful acts of Islamic State.
But most are not, any more than they denounced the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq war, when around a million Muslims killed each other. Because they
were on Saddam’s side in that war. And because the Islamic State’s ideology is
too obviously of Wahabi inspiration, and thus too close to some of the Gulf
Arab states.
The crimes of Islamic State are as brutal as any committed
by the German army in the Second World War, but Jews who converted were not
spared Hitler’s plan for their extermination. What the Islamic State and the
1915 Ottoman Turks have in common is a cruelty based on ideology – even
theology – rather than race hatred, although that is not far away. After the
burning of churches and of synagogues, the rubble looks much the same.
The tragedy of the Arab world is now on such a literally
Biblical scale that we are all demeaned by it. Yet I also think of Lebanon
where the old priest showed me his mosaic with the missing eyes and where the
Lebanese Christians and Muslims fought each other – with the help of many
foreign nations, including Israel, Syria and America – and killed 150,000 of
their own people.
Yet today, Lebanese Muslims and Christians, though still
politically deeply divided, are protecting each other amid the gale-force winds
around them. Why? Because they are today a much more educated population. It’s
because they value education, reading and books and knowledge. And from education
comes justice. Which is why, when compared to Lebanon, the Islamic State is a
nation of lost souls.
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