The War Against Christianity

Hussein Al-Alak, Friday 25 April 2008.

There is a war against Iraq’s Christians taking place, at the behest of two allegedly Christ-loving regimes and one supposed Islamic government, with one commonality being their need to hide behind the walls of Jericho to carry out the persecution of men, women and children.

How else can any one describe the systematic ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Christians, who were born and raised in the land between two rivers, the land which gave birth to the founder of the three major religions and whose lineage of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is now the land which being destroyed at the hands of “god fearing” heathens.

It has been five years and still silence is the golden fleece for Britain and America. They have chosen to ignore the murders - the beheadings, the attacks, the forced displacement and increases in taxation upon the Christians for refusing to convert, the intimidation by militias upon women for not wearing a headscarf .

Most Christians in Iraq are Chaldeans, members of an Eastern Rite denomination that recognizes the pope's authority. Other sizable denominations include the Assyrian Catholic Church, which traces its roots to the 1st century. Iraqi Christians are also affiliated with the Church of the East, the Anglican Church and other Protestant faiths. Pope Benedict XVI and President Bush said that in a meeting last week they discussed the "precarious state" of Christian communities in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The Bishop of Mosul reported in 2006 that a “fourteen year old boy was crucified in Al Basra” and how members of the US/UK trained Iraqi Police forces, have assaulted “civilian passers-by with anti-Christian and racist slurs” - grotesque acts which apparently Britain takes seriously within its own borders, when addressing “institutional racism” in the police force and cases relating to honour killings against its own civilians.

But how the West has turned the other cheek, when Paulos Iskandar the Syriac-Orhtodox priest was beheaded in October 2006, and how they failed to act when reports emerged from Iraqi newspaper Azzaman, when they reported that US troops were taking over churches and using them for military purposes, with over fifty percent of Iraq’s Christians having believed to have already fled.

In March this year, Paulos Faraj Rahho, archbishop of Mosul's Chaldean community, was found dead after being abducted. This month, Youssef Adel, an Assyrian Orthodox priest, was fatally shot in a drive-by attack in Karrada, one of Baghdad's safest neighbourhoods and home to Abdal's Holy Catholic Assyrian Church

Let's not forget the looting of churches, the bomb attacks carried out against congregations. Let's remember the priests, decons and other members of the Christian Church who have become the victims of sectarian kidnappings, and how militias have taken their hatred of a multi-national society and left their victims' heads on the doorsteps of God's holy “house“.

The Western response has been typically quiet, and in an effort to be emphasise its multi-cultural credentials, the Socialist Worker reported how the, “highlight” of one Stop the War Coalition demonstration in “Red” Ken Livingston’s London was Sheikh Zagani, foreign affairs spokesperson for Moqtada al-Sadr, who under the noses of New Labour, MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office announced to 100,000 non-Burkha-wearing British people that, “We are the voice of humanity,” but failed to mention the murders of Christians, Palestinians, Shiite, Sunni, the destruction of ancient sites, the collapse of the health service, the murder of academics, and growing illiteracy.

Asia News has also reported that the Iranian-backed Mehdi Army death squads, have been threatening women into the forced wearing of the “veil”, with IRIN reporting how the Mehdi have also been responsible for the “hunting” down of women for “religious reasons or because they had criticised the militants” or, as one resident put it, "They accuse them [the women victims] of different things such as prostitution, or of being informants for Iraqi and US forces, or of not wearing a headscarf or for wearing Western clothes,"

Al-Sadr’s forces have also been responsible for the murders of homosexuals, which they claim to be “sexual perverts”, along with having murdered members of Iraq’s Palestinians community. Unlike the Mehdi Army, which was brought to Iraq in 2003, the Palestinian community has been resident in the country since the creation of the state of Israel.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that the US and UK should fail to act upon the plight of the Christians, when most people in “liberated” Britain don’t even know that under Saddam Hussain, the various religions were celebrated and not persecuted, and that many in the US still think that Saddam was behind the 9/11 twin towers attack.

At present, Iraq’s Christians are one of the few communities left which do not have their own army to protect themselves, something that maybe the Christian community should consider as being essential, if only to assist and save the lives of religious minorities against slaughter in present-day Iraq.

Hussein Al-Alak is Chairman of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign.

The Road to Gendercide

Hussein Al-alak, The Iraq Solidarity Campaign (11 March 2010) 

It was Karl Marx who stated that men make history but not in circumstances of their choosing and if men are the ones who make history, then we need to have a serious debate about the contributions that women are making, especially when women are forced into action by circumstances not of their choosing. This debate has got to include just how far the occupation of Iraq is willing to turn the clocks back, on the rights and civil liberties of women in Iraq, where the displacement, poverty, the imprisonment and forced separation of families have become the weapons of choice to both humiliate and control Iraq’s female population.

The current situation faced by Iraqi women is a continuation of a “mediaeval tradition”, which is being enforced by “civilised colonialists”, a scene which is reminiscent of a description of life under the first British rule of Iraq in the 1920‘s, where Suad Khairi, in her 1982 essay explained that “under tribal laws women could be murdered and the murderer escape punishment”, with British colonialism seeing women as “deficient human beings”. Under the atmosphere of colonial repression, where “women suffered from the consequences of backwardness and dependency which the “colonialists strove to maintain”, Iraq’s women rallied to the cry of their nation and took an active lead in resisting the presence of foreign troops, by taking part in military campaigns and actively protesting for the release of Prisoners of War.

As early as the 1920’s, Iraqi women also took a leading role in resisting the ill treatment that was being forced upon them in the home, by mounting a direct challenge to the forced wearing of the veil and resisting the status quo by demanding a woman’s right to education. A story is often told, of a female Iraqi freedom fighter whose brother had been taken by the British authorities and confronting his captors, threw the veil into the air, and with her long hair flying loose, declared to the occupying power that she too, would fight for the freedom of Iraq. The traditions of resisting colonialism made history inside of the Middle East, when the revolution of 1958, finally saw the end of the British puppet regime of Nouri Saad and the birth of the new Iraqi republic, led by General Abdul Karrim Qassim.

Iraqi women started to write their own history when Naziha Dulaimi, the first-ever female cabinet minister was elected to a government post. Whilst progress continued to be made inside of Iraq, from 1958 Iraqi women saw many revolutionary changes in both the laws and their social standing, including the introduction of the personal status law, which allowed a women an equal share in property if ever she divorced. Women also saw advancements in career prospects, as a result of the nationalisation of the oil industry, which according to UNESCO “Iraq was one of the only countries in the world where, even if you were born in absolute poverty, with illiterate parents you could come out of the education system either a brain surgeon, archaeologist or whatever you wished to become."

Throughout the 1980’s, when women lost male relatives during the eight year war with Iran, female dependents were given recognition by the state, where even the Iraqi opposition welcomed provisions such as debt cancellation, land, secure homes, widows pensions and other necessities which were given to prevent women from falling into the poverty trap but such measures, also allowed Iraqi women to maintain their own independence as bread winners for the family. During the Iraq/Iran war, women also took a great leap forward, where similar to the British land girls in World War Two, Iraqi women took over the professional roles in society as a result of men being in the front line of combat. In effect women became the doctors, the architects, teachers, the engineers; infact they became the engineers and architects of Iraqi society itself.

The war against Iraqi women, did not start under the occupation of 2003 but infact began after the first Gulf War and through out the 1990's, until the Coalition forces of George Bush, Tony Blair and Ahmed Chalabi decided to invade, under the pretexts of liberating Iraq. The start of the Gendercide against Iraqi women, was demonstrated through the mass murder of over one million children, who lost their lives as a result of the UN imposed Sanctions, which also left Iraq unable to purchase basic items including tampons, pencils and medications such as Asthma inhalers. According to the UN, preventing items like pencils from entering Iraq was because the graphite was categorised as “Duel Use”, therefore it could allegedly be used in constructing Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction“.

Sarah Flounders, author of De-Linking Sanctions stated in 1997, that other items denied to the Iraqi people included; “batteries, X-ray machines, ambulances because they could be used in battle and enriched baby powdered milk,” which supposedly could be used in germ warfare. As Flounders also stated “many of the children killed by Sanctions died from diseases carried by impure drinking water", when before the first Gulf War, the vast majority of Iraqi people did have access to potable drinking water but “good drinking water needs pipes, pumps, filtration and chlorine. But Washington defines chlorine as a “Duel-Use” item, as it does the pipes that would be used to carry water.”

A study conducted by Harvard, discovered that after the Gulf War there had been a “fourfold increase in child mortality and a high incidence of health problems among women, including psychosomatic conditions such as sleeplessness and mental disorders.” In the early 1990’s Dr. Suha Omar also described how there was a dramatic increase in domestic violence, with “traumatised conscripts” returning to Iraq, who “would take out their distress and anger on wives, daughters, mothers and sisters.” In other words, “Women had to pick up the pieces” because the men were either mentally or physically damaged by the war, with the situation being exacerbated by the “drastically worsened economic situation, as victims of the pauperisation of Iraqi society.”

Andy Kershaw of the Independent described in the 2001 article A Chamber of Horrors, how a woman’s reproductive system had also become a victim of gendercide, where through the use of Depleted Uranium in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi women were giving birth to "congenital anomalies", where even at the authors own admission “were head-spinningly grotesque”. Through the use of Depleted Uranium, which has recently hit the headlines again in Britain, in 2001 the Basra Maternity and Children's Hospital showed the Independent how Iraqi children were being born, “with only half a head and nothing above the eyes“…“Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose.”

Even though in 1997, a UN weapons inspector declared “Iraq had been disarmed” in 1919, Woodrow Wilson described how effective “sanctions” could be, with the process being a “peaceful, quiet and lethal remedy”, which “doesn’t take a single human life outside of the country exposed to the boycott, but instead subjects that country to a pressure that, in my view, no modern country can with stand.” When Madeline Albright, then US secretary of state to Bill Clinton was asked on US television in 1996, wherever she believed the deaths of 6,000 Iraqi children per month, was an effective way to “contain” Saddam Hussain, her response was the same as those, who now see death, destruction and the full scale terror of Iraqi women, as being “a price worth paying“.

Also read Women’s rights are still the issue! by Hussein Al-alak which was published by Uruknet on November 13th 2009.