The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Burden of Lies....

Burden of Lies....
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, February 9 2009, 21:28:57 (CET)
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....Heritage of Untruths.

The history of most peoples is filled with distortions, omissions, embellishments, myths, legends and out and out, bald faced, lies. Ours is no different.


“We are the lineal and direct descendants of the ancient Assyrians.”

Anyone claiming direct descent from ancestors who lived 2500 years ago is on weak ground. There is absolutely no way to verify such a relationship. We righteously claim direct descent from Ashurbanipal and yet would look askance at someone claiming to be the lineal descendant of Socrates....especially if, on that basis, he claimed land in downtown Athens where Socrates once lived.

“We always knew we were Assyrians.”

We called ourselves Suraye for most of modern existence, never Ashuraye. We made the change from Syrian to Assyrian only after excavations by Europeans mistakenly identified us as the descendants of the ancient Assyrians simply because our villages were near the excavavtions...till then we made no such claims. The national movement at the end of the First World War made us think we could get a nation if we identified ourselves as Assyrians. Something we couldn’t demand as merely Christians.


“We speak the Assyrian language, therefore we are Assyrians”.

The language is not Assyrian, it is Aramaic. The original Assyrian language was Akkadian, written in cuneiform and died long ago. Aramaic was the common language of many people back then including Hebrews and Egyptians. People can learn to speak any language. Learning French will not get you French ethnicity or citizenship.

“It is ridiculous to claim, as Assyriologists do, that the ancient Assyrians were completely wiped out and disappeared.”

No reputable Assyriologist has ever made such a claim. Of course Assyrians survived the destruction of their empire. They “disappeared” only in the sense that they forgot their native language and next their history. The surviving Assyrians, like the surviving Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrians etc. intermarried and mixed with succeeding conquerors and immigrants as has been the history of the various peoples and cultures of “Cradle of Civilization”.

“Throughout history there is mention of ‘Assyria’ and ‘Assyrians’, therefore we survived intact all those centuries.”

The region was long remembered as the land of the Assyrians. That doesn’t mean people born there were ethnically Assyrian...just as the child of British parents born in China does not become ethnically Chinese. One can be born today in the “land of the Navajos” without becoming ethnically Navajo for being born in Phoenix.


“We were the first converts to Christianity and this saved us as Assyrians.”

Whether we were first or not matters little. The fact that we intermarried with only each other is also in doubt. Those who marry non-Christians do not stop being Assyrian...likewise if they marry non-Assyrians. What we call an Assyrian Heritage is in reality a Christian heritage with the name “Assyrian” imposed on it only recently.

“Our Church is an Assyrian (or Chaldean) Church.”

The term “Chaldean” was first applied by Catholic missionaries to distinguish those Nestorians who returned to the Roman ritual. The church they built was called “Chaldean” because its main structure was built in the region known as Chaldea. This did not mean that those Catholics were ethnically Chaldean. Likewise with the “Assyrian” church, although no church in Iraq was called Assyrian until the 19th century.

The name “Assyrian” only appeared over the word “Nestorian” in our churches in 1976. For 1400 years we were known as Nestorians or Jacobites. A church built in what is still recognized as once being Assyria doesn’t make its members ethnically Assyrian. ...any more than an “Anglican Church of Beijing” means that the ethnic Chinese who attend services there become Anglo-Saxon...or that the Anglican faith is originally Chinese.


“Only Christians can be true Assyrians.”

Religion is not ethnicity, not any longer. We confuse Christian ritual with Assyrian “Heritage”. Many Assyrians converted to Islam...as did many Christians. If being Assyrian is a matter of ethnicity or genetics then that doesn’t change with a change in religion. Americans and Italians and Germans come in all sorts of religious packages.

“Islam and the Arabs greatly reduced our numbers.”

Christianity reduced its own numbers by early beliefs of the Church frowning on marriage and child rearing....as well as the growth of monasticism....also many converted to Islam, as they once had to Christianity. Christians forbade polygamy which was practiced by both Jews and Muslims with the offspring all being legitimate. In fact the execution of heretics stopped with the Arab Conquest.

“Muslims killed us because of our Christian religion.”

There is no evidence for this anywhere. Christians were killed either as enemy soldiers or rebels. Islam respected and defended Christians. It was the Christian Romans, not Muslims, who killed Christian “heretics”. The Arabs were welcomed as liberators by half the Christian population who were glad to be saved from Byzantine persecution. The Arabs also saved the Jews from Christian persecution.

“Muslims forcibly converted us on pain of death”

There is no evidence of this anywhere. History shows that this, and the previous charge, were true of Christianity, not Islam. Had Islam been guilty of these charges there would have ceased to be Christians in the MidEast long ago. Rather they remained free and safe from persecution, by each other...after all, no one has killed more Christians than Christians themselves.

“Muslims hate us and our heritage and won’t allow us to teach our language.”

The Muslims of Iraq know they are descended from all the people of BetNahrain plus the Arabs who conquered the region 1400 years ago being simply one more desert tribe who moved into the settled towns...as had Sargon the Great and Hammurabi before them. The Aramaic language is alive and well in Iraq....it is dying out in the West, not in BetNahrain. Muslims are infuriated by sedition practiced and preached by our nationalists...often the language is used as an excuse to spread sedition and treason. It is not the language but what is done with it they find objectionable...likewise they have nothing against Christianity as a religion but only with the illegal actions of Christians.

“The Muslims of Iraq are not the indigenous people...only we are.”

We may use the English language, but we are not competent to define its words and meaning. According to the United Nations any people who’ve occupied land for 400 years or more are indigenous. By that definition the Arabs, as well as Kurds, are more indigenous to Iraq than are Europeans to North America. Our claim to being Assyrians fools no one in the MidEast. It is a feeble pretext to claim rights to the land as the original owners.

“We must be given land of our own because we are the indigenous Assyrians.”

Even if we were and could prove it, there is no reason for anyone to give us anything. People seize land and make a country of it...as did the Europeans and ancient Assyrians. Let Assyrians in the United States show themselves willing to give their homes “back” to the indigenous Native Americans and we might have a leg to stand on. Otherwise it is an empty argument.

“We can always hope...look at Israel”

The position of Jews throughout history is very different from what we claim to have suffered. We suffered no Holocaust and no Diaspora and neither have we been victims of genocide. Assyrians are welcomed in every western Christian, industrialized, nation on earth. Jews not only found welcome nowhere, except among Muslims, but were actively hounded by the Church. Jews were not allowed to assimilate anywhere, Assyrians have been welcome everywhere. The existence of the state of Israel proves that nations are seized through force, not “given”. The Palestinians did not give Israel to the Jews, neither will any Iraqis give “Assyria” to anyone. If we can seize the land and keep it, power to us...but merely complaining and wailing and begging will get us nothing but more contempt.

“The blood of our martyrs will win us a homeland.”

This is the most cynical claim of all. The people calling for direct action in Iraq to get a region or territory are all safely in the West. They have been unable to move any of the democratic governments they live under to do anything for the Christians of Iraq, yet they expect and demand that the harassed Christians of Iraq “DO SOMETHING”. Additionally, it seems that only those Christians killed by Muslims qualify as “martyrs”...the thousands of Iraqi children, 30,000 of whom were Assyrian, killed as a result of Sanctions imposed by Christian countries do not qualify as martyrs...because Christians killed them...and they are never mentioned or wept over. It seems the only strategy our nationalists have is to make sure Christians in Iraq do not settle down and live in peace with their Muslim neighbors...that trouble will rear its head, and that, preferably, Muslims will kill Christians thereby increasing the toll of “martyrs” with which they think they can gain the world’s pity and interest.



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