Thousands of Christians have fled their historic cities, towns, and monastic communities for safety in other countries outside the rule of the self-proclaimed Islamic “caliphate” of ISIS.
The Middle East’s ancient Christian communities are targeted by Islamic State violence and have suffered more than Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, Shi’a Muslims, Syrian Alawites, moderate Sunni Muslims, and Palestinian refugees.
One of the first Christian communities to the flee from the pseudo-Muslim ISIS blood cult was that of Raqqa, Syria.
Raqqa was the first major city to fall to ISIS after the Israel and the CIA permitted arms allegedly destined for the almost-nonexistent Free Syrian Army to fall into the hands of ISIS and their Jabhat al-Nusra allies.
Although Christians represented only one percent of Raqqa’s 300,000 population, almost all fled or were killed after ISIS burned down and defaced churches and imposed a confiscatory religious tax on Christians of 17 grams of gold from each Christian male.
In all, half a million Syrian Christians have had to flee their country thanks to Saudi, Western, and Israeli support for ISIS advancing in their new Toyotas.
Mosul, in Iraq was the first major Christian population center to fall to ISIS, prompting most of the city’s 80,000 Christians to flee the region. ISIS destroyed churches of the Assyrian Orthodox diocese in Mosul. The Assyrians speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has denied that Aramaic was Jesus’s mother tongue, maintaining that Jesus spoke Hebrew, but Christian scholars have proven Bibi wrong.
In July 2014, ISIS leaders proudly proclaimed that Mosul had been cleansed of Christians.
There were three large Assyrian Christian denominations active in Mosul before the city’s fall to the new cultists, and priceless religious artifacts were smashed and burned by the marauders.
There was nary a peep from Israel about the religious cleansing of Mosul even though its propaganda machine conveniently ensures that the Nazi cleansing of Jews from Europe receives front page attention every time Israel faces criticism about the Palestinians.
ISIS terrorists kidnapped 300 Assyrian Christians in Iraq in February – including many children – from their villages along the Khabur River. The kidnapping sent some 1300 additional Assyrians fleeing for their lives.
ISIS then detonated the 4th Century Mar Benham Christian monastery in Bakhdida, near Mosul. The 1600 year-old building was built by Assyrian king Senchareb and was a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site.
As ISIS approached the outer edges of Baghdad, many of the 100,000 Christians fled. Iraq’s Christians thrived before the US invasion and occupation. Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein, was a Christian.
The fanatically pro-Saudi CIA director, John Brennan, has, in addition to permitting weapons and financial aid to reach ISIS and allied forces in Syria and Iraq, provided intelligence, materiel, and propaganda support to the Saudi-led coalition battling Houthi and patriotic Yemeni forces in that nation’s multi-sided civil war.
Last month ISIS cemented ties with like-minded cultists in Libya, many of whom were propelled into power by the NATO intervention.
Thanks to the efforts of Israeli-French «philosopher» Bernard-Henry Levy, who shuttled between rebel-held areas of Benghazi and Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, the most radical Islamist jihadi factions took over power from Qaddafi in and around Benghazi.
These factions ultimately swore allegiance to the Islamic State, which, in February 2015 carried out the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian oil workers on a Mediterranean beach near Tripoli.
On April 3, 2015, Maundy Thursday, when Christians were celebrating Jesus’s Last Supper, cultists of the ISIS-aligned Al Shabaab group, stormed into the campus of Garissa University in Kenya and massacred 147 Christian students.
The attackers ensured that the Christians were singled out from other students before they were executed.
Pope Francis, in his Good Friday message, warned against the advance of ISIS: “We risk, all of us, the institutions and the people of the Western world, to be Pontius Pilate who wash their hands of such atrocities.”
Israelis, strangely, take pleasure in the fact that ISIS has declared Christianity, not Judaism or Shi’a Islam, to be its “Number 1 enemy”. This is spelled out in the ISIS propaganda booklet titled “Dabiq”.
ISIS says it will soon fly its black flag over Italy, Spain, the Balkans, and Austria.
