Crusader Destroys Christian Community
The Polemicist
by Michael House
LONDON, England—(Weekly Hubris)—11/22/10—Iraq has one of the oldest and largest Christian minorities in the Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, they were protected, successful and prosperous. Saddam’s frontman to the West, Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, was a Christian. Iraqi Christians were not persecuted because Saddam, nominally a Muslim, had no interest in religion. That is why Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida hated him and were happy to see him overthrown, apart from the enormous recruitment advantages of unbelievers’ invading an Islamic country.
Then along came George W. Bush who, with unerring diplomatic skill, described his illegal invasion of Iraq as a “crusade.”
Literally, of course, he was correct in his description.
The original Crusades were simply exercises in land-grabs and looting undertaken by medieval robber- barons. That is how Greece came to be ruled for centuries by warlords from what are now France and Italy. For Guillaume de Villhardouan, Prince of The Morea, read the CEO of Halliburton.
But I digress.
There were a million Christians in Iraq before Daddy Bush’s invasion, 10 percent of the population. Baghdad had the largest Christian population in the region. Of the 800,000 left when the idiot son, W, went in, well over half have left the country. Dubya’s (stated) aim of replacing the tyrant with a peaceable, pro-Western, Arab democracy has had predictably disastrous consequences. He has created a highly-radicalized Islamic state in which it is open season on Christians.
The born-again Christian has made a killing-field for his co-religionists.
In the last fortnight, an attack on Baghdad’s main Catholic church left more than 50 people dead. Eight days later, Muslim thugs set off more than a dozen bombs in predominantly Christian districts of the city, killing four and wounding around 30. An al-Qaida offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq, has promised that Christians will be targeted “wherever they can be reached.” These maniacs promise to “open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of blood.”
Nice one, Dubya.
But what can you expect from a man who says that water-boarding is not torture because his bought-and-paid-for lawyers tell him it’s not? What about cutting off fingers and toes? Might avoid future terrorist atrocities. Every responsible source in the UK has denied W’s ludicrous claim that attacks were prevented as a direct result of water-boarding.
To his great credit, Christopher Hitchens, a cheer-leader for the War on Terror, volunteered to be water-boarded just to see what it was like for himself. He is in no doubt that it was torture. Perhaps Dubya might like to try? One can only dream.
(Apologies from The Polemicist for the paucity of posts over the course of the last few weeks: work has rather taken over my life, recently. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Meanwhile, watch the BBC website footage of Aung San Suu Kyi being released from house arrest. I defy you not to weep. There may be vermin scum like Bush in the world, but there are also people who make you feel good to be alive.)
Michael House
Michael House, FRGS was born, of rural, peasant stock, in Somerset, England. He read law at Exeter College, Oxford and was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1974, along with five colleagues, House started up a set of barristers' chambers in three little rooms in Lincoln's Inn, London, specializing in human rights and in representing the poor and dispossessed. The set now comprises 170 members and occupies a 17th-century building that was home to the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated (Spencer Perceval, 1812). In 1987, depressed by Mrs. Thatcher's third election victory, House fled to Greece for three years, where he was published in The Athenian and The Southeastern Review. He also there met his archaeologist wife, Diane. The pair returned to England in 1990 after a half-year, round-the-world trip, and settled in London and Northamptonshire. Since then, by way of escape from humdrum criminality, House has traveled in Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where only the stout walls of Galle Fort saved him and his spouse from being swept away by the tsunami. House returns to Greece, his second home, almost every year. He has written for, inter alia, History Today, the Universities Quarterly, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Rough Guide to Greece. House practices criminal defense law from Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in London, and hopes that if he keeps on practicing, he may eventually get the hang of it. His yet unachieved ambitions are: to farm alpacas; see Tibet liberated from the Chinese jackboot; and live to see Britain a socialist republic. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)