Christian families streamed out of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday after Islamist fighters said they would be killed if they did not pay a protection tax or convert to Islam.
“For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians,” Patriarch Louis Sako lamented as hundreds of families fled ahead of a noon deadline set by Islamic State for them to submit or leave.
The warning was read out in Mosul’s mosques on Friday afternoon, and broadcast throughout the city on loudspeakers.
Very, very sad. Mosul (=ancient Nineveh) was once one of the chief centers of Christianity. As Philip Jenkins has pointed out, there once were more monasteries in northern Iraq than there ever were in Ireland. But many centuries of slow attrition had weakened the main group of Christians in Mosul, the (Nestorian/Assyrian) Church of the East to the point where only about 30,000 of them still remained. But now they are all gone, driven out and into exile as refugees by the implacable, relentless hostility of ISIS.
This isn’t just sad, or tragic. It is an outrage. This is an intolerable crime against humanity. This is the religious equivalent of genocide or “ethnic cleansing,” i.e., religious “cleansing.”
ISIS and Boko Horam must somehow be destroyed, smashed, eliminated. They are a religious form of cancer, that must be attached and annihilated, using whatever means necessary. And I mean that literally.
It may be time for an Eighth Crusade. And I mean that literally too. Only this time, we can’t expect secular governments to support and underwrite the campaign. The Church is going to have to develop our own abilities to defend our own interests. I know how crazy that sounds. But it’s a crazy new world we live in, and the old rules don’t apply.
David Handy+