Will the Islamophobia never end? "Iraq: Christian killed in northern city of Mosul," from AKI, March 17 (thanks to C. Cantoni):
Baghdad, 17 March (AKI) - Masked gunmen on Wednesday shot dead an Iraqi Christian in the northern city of Mosul, the Assyrian Christian website Ankawa.com reported. The city has been at the centre of a number of attacks targeting Christians in recent months.Yaqub Adam, a 54-year-old father was hit by a hail of bullets fired from a pistol with a silencer. He was murdered near the shop where he worked as a glassmaker.
It was the first Christian killing since Iraq's national elections on 7 March and came less than a week after 122 Christian families returned to Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province.
Around 800 families had left their homes in Mosul in the past few months to seek safety in villages in the surrounding province, Mosul's bishop Monsignor Emil Shimoun Nona, told Adnkronos International (AKI).
Over 40 Christians have been killed in Mosul in the past three months in bomb and gun attacks in a resurgence of the violence which killed 40 Christians and caused more than 12,000 to flee in 2008....
Christians made up only a small percentage -- possibly 5% -- of Iraq's total population. But they constituted more than a third of its professional class -- doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs. This should hardly surprise. Now half of them have left, and they will not come back, for in Iraq Islam is unchained, and that always spells trouble for non-Muslims. It was chained not on ideological grounds, not by someone who, like Ataturk, recognized that Islam itself was holding down his country and its people. Saddam Hussein was "secular" only in the sense that his power base was in Tikrit, a Sunni town, and his regime was a Sunni despotism, disguised as a "Ba'athist" state open to all (and the odd Shi'ite, the odd Kurd, the odd Christian, could even rise high in the regime -- think of Tariq Aziz), for his most potent foes were in the Shi'a mosques.
Those Christians -- that is at least one-third, and possibly more, of the professional class -- are not coming back.
It's like what happened in Egypt, when Nasser got rid of the Jews, Greeks, Italians. Economically Egypt suffered; culturally, Egypt suffered. And a movie or two, such as "The Yacoubian Building," based on a novel by an Egyptian writer who, even though he is capable of acknowledging , obliquely, those resulting impoverishments, and who exhibits a nostalgia for the ancien regime he did not experience himself, will not make, anywhere in the Arab-ruled lands, for the outflow of its non-Muslims (the Jews left in a hurry, many decades ago; now, more slowly, it is the Christians). And the whole place, and Iraq, will be the poorer for it.
But the Americans, who did not think at all about what would happen to the Christians in Iraq, so uncomprehending are they both of Islam, and of the various complexities (how many Americans in the Green Zone, waited on by some of the very same Christians who had constituted the household staff of Saddam Hussein, understood how worried, and angry, those Christians were over the American toppling of Saddam and the handing over of power, as they saw it, to those they called and still call "the turbans" -- that is, the Shi'a who, they knew, for them spelled trouble.
The American government should have figured out what it would do to rescue the Christians. Years ago, at this site, I suggested an 'exchange of populations,' such as that which took place between Hindus and Muslims during Partition in 1947, in India, or between Greeks and Turks in the 1920s. And the 'exchange of populations' I had in mind was to offer the MuslimArabs in eastern Judea and Samaria (renamed "the West Bank" by the Jordanians) a chance to live in Iraq, a Muslim Arab polity that will soon be awash in oil wealth, and in exchange, Assyrians and Chaldeans (and the odd Mandean, or Yazidi) who wished to continue to live in security, in the MIddle East, could live in the newly-vacated villages and cities, that is Arabic-speakig Christians (but not Arabs) would change places, and live in security, protected by the Israeli Army, and offering themselves as a living Christian presence in what for Christians is the Holy Land, while the Muslim Arabs would be removed. Impossible? Only because the leaders in the Western world are unimaginative, and don't dare to think of schemes to protect either Christians (much less Jews) in the Middle East, or to establish a permanent Christian presence in the Holy Land, one that does not consist merely of "Palestinian" islamochristians who out of fear internalize, and repeat, the views of the circumambient and threatening Muslims among whom they must live.
Imaginative leaders would work to create and foster such a scheme. Christian leaders who actually cared about a real Christian presence, a permanent presence of those who were not willing tools of the Muslims, would lend their weight rather than spend time being inveigled by "Palestinian" islamochristians into denouncing or boycotting or vilifying Israel.
Too much to think about? Not possible?
Why?
This is an excellent way to solve this problem of ever whining arab muslims in eastern Judea and Samaria. This requires a big statesman not a ordinary muslim appeaser who has got a nobel prize for just giving long speeches with false facts.