The text below is an excerpt of a longer post on Mideast Christians which originally appeared in full on The Stream. Read the complete version of the post here.
Earlier this month at a Canadian press conference, several Mideast Catholic bishops argued the USA was mistaken to have overthrown Saddam Hussein, and would be mistaken to remove Bashar al-Assad. Crux reported:
[Patriarch Joseph Ignatius III Younan of the Syriac Catholic Church] said that local dictators will try to succeed in governing their country “in a much better way” than any Western-exported democracy. He also believes that countries such as Syria and Iraq don’t have the basis for a Western-style democracy, the first being a concept of separation between religion and public life.
“In the Middle East, all the countries except Lebanon, have an amalgam of religion and government: Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Shiites in Iran, Sunni Muslims in others,” he said.
Younan said that less than two months ago he and other bishops visited Assad, who told them to ask the Christians to remain in the country, because without them, it wouldn’t be the same. Today, they represent close to six percent of the Syrian population, with most living as internally displaced refugees.
“Over a million Iraqis were killed by the US invasion [in Iraq] … and Assad is the monster?” he asked.
“We’re not siding with him, his party or his government. We side with the people,” Younan said.
The bishops have much about which to be aggrieved. But supporting or abetting vicious dictators like Saddam and Assad, both Baathists, is not an appealing or viable policy for USA interests, even if local Christians understandably preferred them to chaos or other unsavory alternatives.
To read the entirety of this post on Mideast Christians, visit The Stream here. More posts by Mark Tooley are also available on The Stream here.
Comment by George on August 24, 2016 at 9:20 pm
The assumption that American style governance would benefit the people in an Islamic/Arabic culture was incredibly naive and misguided. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Hafez al-Assad and now his son Bashar al-Assad all valued and protected their Christian citizens. These leaders were not religiously driven by Islamic commitment to religious conquest for Allah. Hussein and others employed Christians in positions of authority in government and security forces over Muslims. They knew Christians could be trusted more than warring, factional Muslims who are divided by tribe, family and even various parts within a family. They understood Christianity promotes forgiveness and self-sacrifice for others, while Islam promotes domination and revenge instead.
America’s presidents, being Western secularists, either didn’t understand or ignored these cultural and religious differences and helped to depose such leaders allowing them to be replaced with religiously driven Muslims who govern very differently and Christians and all Westerners as enemies of Islam and their countries and cultures, obliterating any practical appreciation of Christian characteristics. Christians, in their view, rather than trustworthy and useful are simply enemies of Islam.
We and the western world are now paying dearly for this proud ignorance and will likely do so for generations to come. We could have sought and heeded the experienced counsel of Israel, Russia and others who knew better…but no. And we’re still blundering our way on to disaster under the current administration which itself is filled with Muslims who, being observant, will not make any truly effective common cause with the West against Muslims. That’s my take on it.