Posted by panch from customer-148-233-93-31.uninet.net.mx (148.233.93.31) on Monday, January 06, 2003 at 4:38PM :
Dear George...have you no shame?
He sent a letter telling the "truth" about Assyrians...then suggested we all do the same...so I did, in a lot better English than he can manage...told the editor to ignore George...that he and I are cousins and he was dropped on his head at an early age...that he imagines himself expert on all sorts of things when he`s just been yanked by the ears a lot.
His comments about how Assyrians are being mistreated by the Kurds in the north...who are as evil as Saddam, is a bit of nonsense in a letter full of it. It doesn`t take much for civilized people at the other end of these "informative and fact filled" letters we invent to put two and two together and come up with the accurate intellectual age of the vast majority of our experts. There was really no need to warn this person about George...the letter contains its own warning all over it.
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Dear Editor,
Today, I read with great disappointment your article of “Assyrian reliefs forebode Iraqi egomania” by Dan Bischoff. The writer, Mr. Bischoff, is a member of the staff of your newspaper as his title suggests in the article. As an Assyrian, I was very disappointed and offended to say the least when reading this article. Mr. Bischoff has shown that he does not know much about history nor the ancient Assyrians or even the fact that Assyrians are still a live culture. Depicting the Assyrians as a barbaric force is extremely inaccurate. Doesn’t Mr. Bischoff know that the ancient Assyrians were probably the most advanced civilization of its time? Over 2600 years ago, the Assyrians had created their civilization that surpassed any previous one and many civilizations to come in the world. Their inventions benefited mankind for many generations to come and we are still using and adopting scores of their inventions. Their architecture, math, arts, engineering, government administration, olive oil production system (which they installed in Israel), science, music, and other characteristics of civilization have benefited all other cultures of their time and all of the civilizations to follow. They were the sole protectors of the region from the invasions of the barbaric forces.
The Assyrians did not disappear off the face of the earth. Assyrians (who are also known as Chaldeans, Syriacs and Syrian Orthodox) are estimated at 4 Million around the globe with approximately 2 Million in Iraq, 350,000 in Syria, 350,000 in Europe, 300,000 in the United States alone and hundreds of thousands of others scattered in Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Canada, Australia, South America and the countries of the former Soviet Union. They continued to exist in the same region even after the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 612 B.C. They had even created a few Kingdoms after the fall of the Empire, such as the Kingdoms of Hatra, Adiabene and Osroene. The Assyrians were the first nation to adopt Christianity as a religion in the Kingdom of Osroene when the Assyrian King, King Abgar (Ukomo) V, had sent his artist messenger Hanania to paint the portrait of Jesus and bring it back to him, but instead, while he was trying to paint the portrait of Jesus, he was interrupted by Jesus, who wiped his face with the canvas and thus transferring His image to it. Then Jesus told Hanania to take it to his Assyrian King Abgar.
***OH FOR CHRISSAKES WILL YOU PEOPLE QUIT EMBARRASSING US!!!
The Assyrians are a Semitic group of people and speak a language which is a dialect of ancient Aramaic and some of the dialects spoken by certain Assyrian tribes today are probably the closest existing pronunciation to ancient Aramaic. They have continued to live under oppression in the region after the fall of their empire and kingdoms. Many Deportations, Massacres, Genocides and Holocausts have been inflicted upon the Assyrians since the dawn of Christianity. To mention only some of the more recent ones, in 1915, Assyrians had been a major victim in one of the world’s most horrific Genocides along with the Armenians and Greeks on the hands of the Kurds and Ottoman Turks. In the Genocide of 1915 over 750,000 Assyrians, 2 Million Armenians and 350,000 Greeks, were massacred and butchered to death. Then in 1933, the Monarch Arab regime of Baghdad committed multiple massacres against the Assyrian villagers in parts of their ancestral homeland in North Iraq, where the entire Assyrian population of those villages was wiped out and thousands perished. During Saddam’s Anfal campaign hundreds of Assyrian villages were plundered and thousands of Assyrians were massacred along with other Iraqis. And today, Assyrians continue to suffer under Saddam’s regime in central and southern Iraq and they are forced into denying their Assyrian heritage and claiming to be Arabs due to Iraq’s Baath regime’s Arabization campaign against Assyrians. Assyrians living in Northern Iraq are undergoing a systematic ethnic cleansing campaign by the Kurdish leaders who have been given leadership of the region in North Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991. The Kurds in the North are using similar tactics to those of Saddam Hussein. They are forcing Assyrians into Kurdification and are confiscating the Assyrian lands, in addition to the forced migrations, the terrorization of Assyrian civilians and the many killings and assassinations that have been conducted against the Assyrian civilians and politicians. Assyrians are being denied their identity and freedom of speech, yet you depict them as savages. This is very strange indeed.
Your comparison of the ancient Assyrians to the butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is extremely insulting. No nation in the world has suffered as much as the Assyrian nation and yet you compare them to the ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein. Assyrians today are fighting alongside of the United States in its war against terrorism and its future campaign for Iraq.
When a person is going to write something to publish in a newspaper, magazine or anywhere, it is important that he/she knows what it is they are writing about. It is highly essential that you do more research on the Assyrians in order to learn more and be able to write a better piece that depicts the accurate situation of the people whom you are discussing.
Thank you,
George Stifo
-- panch
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