The Christian Tragedy In The
Middle East Did Not Begin With Isis
By Robert FiskApril 06, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Independent" - 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.
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 in 1915,
believed to be victims of the Armenian Holocaust
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.
Kuwait last week, a good and thoughtful Muslim, an
American university graduate – within the al-Sabah family and prominent
in the government – shook his head with disbelief when he spoke of
Islamic State. ‘I watched the video of them burning the Jordanian pilot
alive,’ he told me. ‘I watched it several times. I had to, because I had
to understand their technology. Do you know they used seven camera
angles to film this atrocity? We could not compete with this media
technology. We have to learn.’