The Christian tragedy in the Middle East did not begin with Isis

ROBERT FISK
Sunday 5 April 2015

A hundred years on from the Armenian genocide, and a Christian
minority is again suffering

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.

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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.

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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 HolocaustBut
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.

In 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.’

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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.