THE ISLAMIC STATE, A NATION OF LOST SOULS
The Mercury (South Africa)
April 08, 2015 Wednesday
It is as brutal as the Nazi regime, though the cruelty is based on
ideology or theology rather than race hatred Comment
One summer’s day in 1990, I walked into a beautiful Crusader chapel
in Keserwan, a gentle mountainside district 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 al-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 mosaic.
I remember at the time – and often since – I would say to myself
that this was nonsense; that you cannot graft ancient history on to
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.
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 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 our worst
fears are turning 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 massacre of Christians and Yazidis by the Islamic State,
the burning of Mosul’s ancient churches or the destruction of the
great Armenian church of Deir ez-Zor that commemorated the genocide of
its people in 1915. Nor the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Not
even the latest massacre in Kenya where the numbers of Christian
dead and the cruelty of their sectarian killers is, indeed, of epic
proportions. Nor have I mentioned the ferocious Sunni-Shia wars which
now dwarf the tragedy of the Christians.
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 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. Their fate bears parallels with the Islamic State
murders of today.
The Armenian men were massacred. Women were gang-raped or forced to
convert or left to die of hunger. Babies were burnt alive. The Islamic
State’s 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 the Islamic State. “I watched the video of
them burning the Jordanian pilot,” 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.”
And this is true. The West 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 the Islamic State. But most are not, any more than
they denounced the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when about 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 are as brutal as any committed by the German army in
World War II, 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, we are all demeaned by it. Yet I also think of Lebanon, where
the old priest showed me his mosaic and where the Lebanese Christians
and Muslims fought each other – with the help of foreign nations,
including Israel, Syria and America – and killed 150 000 of their
own people.
Today, Lebanese Muslims and Christians, although still politically
divided, are protecting each other amid the gale-force winds around
them. They are a much more educated population today. And from
education comes justice. Which is why, when compared to Lebanon,
the Islamic State is a nation of lost souls. –