Posted by panch from pool0123.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.250.123) on Wednesday, August 28, 2002 at 9:17AM :
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Written by Mark on 28 Aug 2002 06:04:32:
As an answer to: Re: Sunday Times (Saddam's Dam and the city of Ashur) written by pancho on 28 Aug 2002 05:01:02:
Puncho:
You wrote: Saddam has never said the ancient Assyrians were Arabs.
As usual you speak out of ignorance. Saddam Hosain and his baatti party claim that ancient Assryians and Babylonians were Arabs all the school books in Iraq have been rewritten to emphesise this very point.
+++See...this is what I mean. You try to inflame people, appeal to their ignorance and emotions...like Saddam is the only leader of a country who resosts to these kinds of things. before hyperventilating, if you could step back and see the larger picture...that all leaders whose hold on power is shakey, or who are being attacked by outsiders, or who just want uniformity within their borders...that all of them and throughout history have tried to remould their historical past into a homogenous myth...the better to rule over people's jealousies and claims to special status or indigenous "rights".
+++Of couse Saddam wants everyone marching in one direction...doesn't Bush? You think American history reflects the "truth"? In the last century the United States was still forcibly removing the children of native Americans from their parents and homes on the Reservations. They were sent to English only boarding schools schools miles away from family where they were made to forget their native languages and culture...and were forced fed a version of their own history that eventually wiped out any traces of what they once were... the fact that they were the rightful owners of the lands the white Europeans had stolen, even as they were now "stealing" the children to weaken their ties to their own culture...replacing their histories with a white man made one in which they were the losers and deserved to be.
+++These things aren't new, and if you live in the United States, or Australia, you have benefited from the robbery and rape of these people...and you are no more willing or likely to give anything back to the "rightful" owners as is any Muslim in Iraq, or any Jew in Miami Beach...or anywhere else.
+++If Saddam has cooked the books it is because ethnic factionalism and prior claims divide a country...make it easier for an external power to exploit those claims and hostile feelings to its own benefit...and you would have to admit the Christian West has managed to do that repeatedly...up till this very moment. Governments don't do what is "right"...they do whatever they need to in order to maintain their borders and make their people strong and unified.
+++We Christian Assyrians have a bad record of supporting outside powers in the fond hope that they will take care of us and reward us...you guys still wont accept any reponsibility for Simele, or anything else. You want the rest of the world to believe we were just picked upon for no reason at all by "evil" Islam. Fortunately the world knows better. No one believes these weepy eyed claims of ours. Bad things happen...they happen all the time...they are happening now in Iraq...it's just that you guys can barely hide your joy at the suffering being visited on the entire country...and the hell with whatever Assyrians are caught there. You sure you "love" Assyrians any more than Saddam does?
+++See, if it were my children facing this thing...I wouldn't care what religion we changed to, or whether I had to become Arab or American or Italian...I just want my children to survive, to not pay the price for someone else's stupidity. yeah sure...change us all to Christians or Muslims...wipe out our past histopry and give us a new one...what does it matter if they will just kill my children for insisting on staying Assyrians? How does it serve our National Question nonsense if our Assyrian children all get killed? When you're dead you don't "remember" who you were either. Why not ride the wave right now...survive...multiply, and wait for a new day? There is no way Saddam can re-write history anywhere else.
+++By the way...over 80,000 Assyrians in Chicago had the chance for the last 6 years to show how much their history mattered to them...to show the pride, the awful dedication you seem to think Assyrians have for their Heritage. All they had to do was insist the city install the Shumirum and they could have declared to the city and the world their "pride" at being Assyrian. In Iraq you claim the government is subverting Assyrian history. Well what happened in America...in Chicago? Where are the enemies there? Who stopped them from showing off to the world? No one except one old Assyrian fart and a lot of boredom and lack of interest from all the Assyrians there. You guys only "love" your Heritage when some Muslim comes around to besmirch it. Left to yourselves, with no "enemies"...you turn on each other or just plain don't give a damn. You've made bashing Muslims your definition of what it means to be Assyrian...without Muslims, you are nothing, you do nothing, you will do nothing. You lie there waiting for some news of a Muslim doing something "bad" to an Assyrian...then you rouse yourselves, put down your tea cups and fire off a "warning"...even Peter The Rabid finds some courage to denounce several Muslim countries, in "harsh" words too. Then it's back to your bottom lines and your bottoms.
Saddam Hossain and his Baatthi party has refused to count Assryians as citizens of Iraq forcing them to declare themselves either Arabs or kurds in the census records.
+++++All too often Assyrians have NOT considered themselves to be citizens of Iraq. Even on visa applications they have been known to write for 'country of birth"...ASSYRIA! You try running a country filled with dissent and envy and a passle of hill people making various claims and demands. It's easy to run a nation when you boil and homogenize and melt the people in a common pot. But even the United States is now finding out what it means to be filled with people who do NOT want to blended and stir fried...not so easy to do...as even we can't get three clubs agreeing with each other in one city!
Assryians have need to call themselves Arabs if they want to wrok in certain government jobs.
+++++Firas Jatou and Peter Jassim felt the need to change their names. No one "made" them do it...they just "freely" chose to make the changes, cause it would be "better". Which is worse...to change your name because someone witholds a job from you...or change it when you have a job and no one asked you to do it? Which situation is better to you?
Assryians just as Kurds have been driven out of Kirkuk and their property has been confiscated and sold to New Arab settlers.
+++You've just described the history of the United States whose lands came from stealing from the indigenous population and resettling them on Reservations...usually meaning on the worst possible lands...until the white man decided he wanted those as well and they were resettled again. It isn't "nice"...it isn't "right". But no one said there was justice in life. The Assyrians too resettled people.
Assryians have been forbidened from buying property in some cities. So why Saddam and his Baati party refrain from destroying any evidence of the ancient Assryian survival and their conversion to christianity.
+++As I remember it was Dr Ross, here in America...who said the only Assyrian worth anything was a Christian Assyrian...that before converting we were mostly barbarians and bloody savages. I also recall that four Assyrians showed up to the debate to challenge Ross. There are all sorts of ways to get screwed...sometimes others screw you...sometimes you screw yourself. In America we Assyrians are free to do what we wish to promote our Heritage...yet in America a Firas becomes a "Ross"...and a Jassim a "BetBasoo". In America we were free to install Assyrian monuments telling our neighbors who we were...in America Assyrians have been indifferent and uninterested in any of it. If Muslims had risen up in Chicago to block the installation of the Shumirum, you all would have howled like stuck pigs. And that's ALL you would have done. You have been critically and fatally crippled in your heads...that's why it doesn't matter where you live or how free you are there...you guys carry oppression and self-doubt and self-loathing around with you wherever you go. It's jujst that in Iraq and other Muslim states you have someone else to blame for your poor showing in the world...in America and other countries, where there is no one working against you...the awful, the horrible truth becomes clear...you HAVE no pride in being Assyrian. It is just a Christian persecution thing. Your churches have systematically robbed you of any pride as Assyrians, for all the lip service they pay to being Atourai! They have made you "meek" and "humble" and convinced you to emulate the actions of a Jew...who saw being crucified as the ultimate expression of his meaning on earth. Congratulations. And you wonder why we have nothing? rejoice...you damfool...we get the kingdom of Heaven! What do you want with Iraq...when you can have Paradise? And all you have to do is live a despised, humiliated life, replete with spittle and scourgings and martyrdoms. What the hell are you complaining about? Without Judas there could have been no Jesus...no "dying in order that you may live"...and without the Muslims who killed us, how could you get into heaven a martyr? You should THANK Saddam for persecuting you!!!
If this is not an attempt to destroy the christian Assyrian identity and Arabize them in the process I don't know what else it is?
++++America has now a more sophisticated way to "make" Christians and destroy people's identities and names. It forced "Ross" and "Betbasoo"...it just did it in a different way...by making them "want" to change. Here they are Americanizing our people...what's the difference. Does it matter how we lose our identity?
This is a dog eat dog world you better believe it . It always has been and it always will be anyone who thiks otherwise becomes dead meat.
++++Dogs think that way.
Puncho! you are a smart person why do you pretend to be an idiot when it serves your purpose?
++++Just stupid I guess.
Mark
-- panch
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