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that DID it!!!

Posted by parhad (Guest) - Thursday, April 1 2004, 22:11:06 (EST) from 148.233.93.149 - customer-148-233-93-149.uninet-ide.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

this piece of pure propaganda without a shred of information to back it up save what these people said about themselves...just brought out the Irish in me...whether anyone at the Tribune will bother with the letters I`m going to pepper them with..I`m at least going to DO it! Not only is this dead wrong...it adds more fuel to the fire back there and ALL newspapers in America have CIA plants working rhere...this article is nothing more than what several village priests would say...let`s see how the react or respond, if at all...to the letters THIS fool is going to write..the same damn fool who worked for 13 years using his own money to build THE SECOND ASSYRIAN MONUMENT IN AMERICA AND THE THIRD in the modern era...for CHICAGO...had it accepted gracipuslt by the city and then had THESE same pious Christians hoot it down because it doesn`t serve the church`s purpose. There`s a reason for most things and NOTHING is wasted...I won`t be posting the letters here because I want the boys to write willy nilly warning the Tribune that FLASER TRAITRORS are SEELING OUT ASSYRIA...and the rest of it...later though..when either the smoke has cleared or nothing comes of it I will. The rest of us have been far too complacent...while we try to behave the civilized part and be circumspect these idiots are spreading what is essentially the same biased religious tripe in the guise of history that the extremist Muslims are...enough is enough...if anyone REALLY believes in thei Heritage NOT as a doormat for Christians as they try to shore up their sinking fortunes in Iraq..a land they have CONTINUOUSLY betrayed to enemy forces for the last century at least...than it`s time..if an Aprim has the golf balls to write and the rest of them too...then I can match them balls for balls...and mine are STILL THERE! [ Post Response ] [ Read Prev Msg ] [ Read Next Msg ] Article on Assyrians in Today's Chicago Tribune 04-01-2004 Posted By: Ramsen (wabod01s03.t-mobile.com) Date: Thursday, 1 April 2004, at 2:23 p.m. By Stephen Franklin Tribune staff reporter Published April 1, 2004 BAGHDAD -- Odisho Malko reaches deep inside a living room cabinet for a bundle tightly bound in cloth. Carrying it ever so gently, he undoes the wrapping, revealing a large, timeworn book, bound in thick, dark brown leather that he carefully places on a glass table. Then Malko, a tall, soft-spoken, middle-age man with a pleasant smile, stands back, seemingly in awe. It is almost as if he has revealed an ancient secret in his Baghdad house. Handwritten by a priest more than 200 years ago in a lonely mountaintop village where his family once lived, it is an ancient prayer that is still part of the Assyrian liturgy. "This is very precious," he says, opening the book, a 13th Century prayer written in Assyrian, an ancient Semitic language that, like Hebrew and Arabic, sprang from Aramaic. Because Aramaic was the common language spoken at the time of Jesus Christ, Mel Gibson used it in his movie "The Passion of the Christ." Malko, a professional engineer by training, vowed years ago to help keep Assyrian alive, churning out books and poems and an Arabic-Assyrian dictionary that he keeps updating, dutifully jotting down in blue ink new words for an edition that he says will come out someday soon. It is the language that has bound the Assyrians in the 2,600 years since the fall of their one-time capital Nineveh and the collapse of an empire that had sprawled outward from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to ancient Egypt and the Caspian Sea. Assyrians in the U.S. have clung to the language through classes at churches and their own organizations. Just barely, however. "If there are no new waves of immigrants, our language would disappear (in the U.S.) in the next 60 years," says Edward Odisho, an Iraqi-born professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University. But the language's fate in Iraq is more hopeful. In post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, long repressed dreams have exploded with a fury among those who still have the spirit to dream. Kurds talk of their own region, safe at last from others' oppression. Shiites, Iraq's Islamic majority, talk of finally practicing their faith freely. Communists, Socialists, Islamic hard-liners, Democrats, feminists, human rights activists -- almost anyone with a vision for Iraq's future -- harbors a hope that they will get their day in the sun. And Assyrians dream of survival. Their numbers greatly reduced by centuries of exile, war and persecution, Assyrians' dreams are not that grand. Their goal is not to become another forgotten footnote to Middle East history, not to lose their foothold in the land, where once they ruled. Some Assyrians rage over how others treated them, questioning how they can live in peace in the new Iraq, and some more calmly hope for an Iraq where such furies are buried. Under Saddam Hussein, Assyrians were not allowed to study Assyrian in public schools. Nor were they allowed to register as Assyrians, a separate ethnic group. Rather they were pressured to take Muslim names. Most Assyrians in Iraq speak their ancestral language, but they learned it at home or at their churches. Only those Assyrians who fled north to the Kurdish enclave set up after the 1991 Persian Gulf war were able to freely study Assyrian in public schools. Wiped out Nearly 200 Assyrian villages in northern Iraq were wiped out in the government's long campaign against their neighbors, the Kurds. Likewise, Assyrians, who fought the government beside the Kurds were targeted and killed by the regime. Assyrians are Christians in a country where Christians account for only an estimated 3 percent of the population. They say they are not Arabs, a point that has added to theirpersecution. They were massacred by the Ottomans against whom they rose up at the end of World War I. And they faced slaughter in the early 20th Century in the newly independent Iraq, spurring Assyrian leaders to plea with the nations of the world in the 1930s for a new homeland for their people. But none reached out with an acceptable offer, and so many Assyrians continued to embrace a global Diaspora, which early on marked Chicago as a major sanctuary. More than 80,000 Assyrians today live in the Chicago metropolitan area, a place where they first sought sanctuary in the late 19th Century with the help of Chicago-based missionaries, churches and seminaries, and where Mar Dinkha IV, the patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, is based. How many Assyrians live today in Iraq is not clear, nor does everyone agree on who is an Assyrian. A mass exodus More than a dozen years ago there were as many as 180,000 Assyrians in Iraq, say Assyrian leaders. But many fled as a result of the wars and other misfortunes, and there has been no official census since, they say. Across Iraq, just 30 Assyrian churches remain, six of them in Baghdad. There are only 12 students in the one seminary run by the Assyrian Church of the East. Early converts to Christianity, Assyrians embrace Eastern Orthodox traditions, unlike Chaldeans, fellow Iraqi Christians, who follow the Vatican, and whose ancestors broke from the Church of the East in 1522. The division came up recently when Chaldean church leaders, saying they represent most of Iraq's Christians, protested the lack of a Chaldean on the 25-member Iraq Governing Council. The U.S. led occupation forces chose the council to temporarily rule Iraq and its sole Christian member is Yonadam Kanna, an Assyrian. To Archbishop Gewargis Sliwa, head of the Church of the East in Iraq in Baghdad, Chaldeans are members of a church, while they and many other Iraqi Christians spring from the same Assyrian roots. "Let us all live together as Assyrians," says Sliwa, a short, silver-haired man from an office in his church headquarters on a busy Baghdad street. There is no heavily armed presence at the headquarters, an unusual sight in a sometimes terrified and well-armed city. There is only a guard who opens and closes a large metal fence. But the Archbishop does not fret about Assyrians' safety as do others, citing attacks against Assyrians. "As Christians, we do not have to be afraid to live among Muslims," he says. As an example of his confidence, he recalls a meeting in Najaf recently with Islamic leaders there after several Christians, who sell liquor were gunned down allegedly by Islamic hardliners. It was one of only a few meetings that he has ever had with clergy in the city sacred to Shiites and the Muslim leaders welcomed him as well as his plea for them to urge understanding among their followers. "We said, `let's show these fanatics that we embrace each other,'" he recalls. So, too, Kanna, the Governing Council's sole Christian, counts himself as an optimist when it comes to Assyrians in a new Iraq. An outspoken liberal, he talks not only ensuring the rights for Assyrians and Christians, but Iraqi women. Given a death sentence by the government in 1984 for his role in Assyrian politics, Kanna, who was trained as a civil engineer, lived underground until 1991, when he moved to the newly independent zone in northern Iraq set up by the Kurds after the gulf war. There he was a minister in the government created by the Kurds. He is the head of the Assyrian Democratic Movement. The largest of several Assyrian factions, it has temporarily taken over a motley-looking military compound formerly used by the fedayeen or volunteer fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein. And like many political parties, security is tight when entering its compound. "Yes, there have been some small incidents. And yes, there are some people who have tried to stop us, but these are problems in the short term," says Kanna, who goes on enthusiastically about the Governing Council's decision to institute Assyrian language classes in some schools next year. But there's a limit to his optimism. Because he doubts that Iraqis are ready to embrace a full-fledged democracy, he wants some legal guarantees that Assyrians will hold government jobs and elected positions in the future. "If my rights are not guaranteed now, they'll never be," he says, predicting that it will take years before Muslims vote for and support Christians in government positions. Odisho Malko has similar doubts about what Iraq's Assyrians will face unless the Americans exert a guiding hand to ensure their rights before the slated end of the occupation on July 1. Commitment to Assyrian But his first interest is furthering the Assyrian language and culture, an effort that he vowed years ago to nurture despite hefty business commitments. He even signed up for university anthropology classes in Baghdad several years ago, so he could become more of an expert on Assyrian history. He lives in a mostly Assyrian neighborhood, where neighbors know precisely where each family lives, and where guests for a wedding at the whitewashed, two-story Assyrian church down the street bring the neighborhood to life on a darkening, late afternoon. Though most Assyrians trace their roots to northern Iraq, decades of violence and difficulties led many to move to Baghdad. On a cluttered living room table in Malko's home are notes for his latest work. It is his first book in Arabic as compared to his others that were written in Assyrian. This way, he explains, all Iraqis will be able to learn about Assyrians. His title: "Assyrians Today." Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune Password: --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: that DID it!!! parhad - Thursday, April 1 2004, 22:11:06 (EST) Re: that DID it!!! parhad - 04/02 11:07

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