The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> First Stab at a Summary...overlong.

First Stab at a Summary...overlong.
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Wednesday, March 28 2012, 16:23:37 (UTC)
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Summary

Using sources from various time-periods Dr. Joseph has shown when, how and why the Eastern Christians, known later as Nestorians/Arameans/Syrians came, after the 1840s, to add the names Chaldeans and Assyrians to that list. A brief glance at the political aspirations of modern Assyrian nationalists will help answer the “why” of it all.

Speaking of the post-World War One years, Dr. Joseph writes;

“We have already noticed the national self-consciousness that the Nestorians gradually developed as a result of the missionary focus on them and the interference of Western powers in their behalf. During World War I, and the years immediately following it, they were attracted by the notions of national self-determination discussed above; like other minorities of the Ottoman Empire, they were allured by ideas of autonomy and national unity. In the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, nationalists-turned-historians were rediscovering their ancient ancestors and resurrecting the heroes of a distant past, elevating them into symbols of the fatherland. In the case of the Nestorians, the remains of ancient Assyrians were literally dug out of the ground, exhibited to the dazzling eyes of the world, and the Christians surrounding the excavation sites were proclaimed to be the only human remains of those ancients. These Christians’ nascent nationalistic feelings were intensified by their latent sense of insecurity; a poor people traumatized by the terrible times they had just passed through, were susceptible to movements that promised cohesion and backing. Romanticism and an appeal to past glory filled the gaping void in their national life. During the First World War, as the ‘smallest ally’ of Great Britain, they were encouraged to make nationalistic demands. Arnold J. Toynbee aptly referred to the nationalism of such small minorities as ‘a will-o’-the-wisp enticing them to destruction.”

The self-destruction Toynbee referred to has taken the form of relying on the hope(and working for), that Western Christian powers, at first Russia, then Great Britain, and now the United States, all of them fellow-Christians, would step in to create a “homeland” in Iraq for the “indigenous Assyrian people”. This claim that their ancient homeland had been “usurped” by the Arabs and was illegally “occupied” by them, had led them to commit what to them seemed like “national work” but was in reality acts of sedition and, in time of war, treason. Certainly this was how the Iraqi government viewed the matter. While Assyrian nationalists, many of them jailed and some hanged, believed they were being persecuted for their religion if not their supposed Assyrian ancestry and "national demands", they were in reality being prosecuted for breaking the law, as sedition and treason are treated harshly by all nations, even those with ethnic minorities with more recent and more legitimate land and treaty claims than the Nestorians.

The two pillars upon which the modern Assyrian nationalists’ claims must rest; the demand that they deserve and, for their own safety, must have their own homeland, in northern Iraq, the site of ancient Nineveh are;

1. That they are indeed the true , lineal, and sole survivors of the ancient, indigenous, Assyrians.

2. They have been ruthlessly persecuted, massacred and disenfranchised by their Muslim neighbors and Islam in general so that they can never live safely and securely among them.

The difficulty with the first proposition is that Assyrian nationalists will only accept Christians as legitimate Assyrians. This has led their opponents to claim that this is nothing but a political ploy, demanding a homeland as a “national” group where they could not do so as what they really are; a minority Christian sect. A corollary of this position has been the accusation that Iraq has tried to “arabize” Assyrian history, turning Assyrians into Arabs in order to negate their legitimate "Assyrian" identity and aspirations to nationhood. This accusation came about because all Iraqi Muslims see themselves as also descended from the Assyrians as well as Babylonians and all other ancient peoples of that land. To the Assyrian nationalists Muslims in Iraq are “Arabs” from “Arabia” and therefore cannot be of Assyrian descent and, moreover, anyone converting from Christianity to Islam automatically stops being "Assyrian". A position which only re-enforces the belief that this is nothing more than a "national disguise", a political gambit, by a Christians sect which cannot very well demand a "nation" on the basis of its religion.

In addition, the idea of who is indigenous to Iraq cannot be settled by religion because Christianity is as much a "foreign" religion, to Iraq, as is Islam. If all Muslims in Iraq must be Arabs from Arabia who more properly belong in that country, then all Christians in Iraq are really Hebrews who should move back to their "home country of Israel". Also the United Nations has defined "indigenous" to mean any people who have continually inhabited a location for at least 400 years. By that definition, accepted by all nations, the Qurds of Iraq, another group accused of being non-indigenous, turn out to be as indigenous as the ethnic Arabs, Greeks, Turks, and Persians, among all the people who've settled in Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia...and all of them are more indigenous to Iraq than are the Europeans to North America, who only recently barely qualified.

The second claim, that Islam has systematically persecuted Assyrians just for their religion and “ethnic identity”, is also shot through with inaccuracies and downright distortions. There is no historical evidence, not counting highly biased religious tracts, that Islam and the conquering Arabs ever forcibly converted any of Christians on pain of death…none has ever been presented. On the contrary there is numerous testimony, and most of it by Christian historians, that it was not Muslims but Christians who forcibly converted Muslims, Jews and others , on pain of death, when they didn’t just kill them outright. The Christians of Iraq have never been persecuted or prosecuted for what they are, the have been at times prosecuted because of what some of them have done. There are Christian churches all over Iraq today, as there have been since the Arabs first came. Had the Arabs ever wanted to destroy Christianity they had the power and the time to do it, at their leisure. In addition all Iraqis have a profound respect for their ancient past and all the peoples who inhabited the land, wherever they originally came from.

The difficulty comes when modern Assyrian nationalists claim an exclusive right to one of those identities (the Assyrian) and on top of that, make the Christian religion the determining factor of legitimacy. One cannot be "Assyrian" without also being Christian and, to some, a specific sort of Christian. But the crowning error, as far as Iraqis are concerned, is that this Christian minority uses a very dubious land claim from 2000 some years ago, based on an exclusive right to an ethnic identity all Iraqis claim, to try to get Western powers to cut away a section of the country, when the entire country as is as much “theirs” as it is anyone elses, provided they obey the law of the land.

Dr. Joseph’s interest in this subject is as an historian, a scholar and academic and also as a member of this very community. This writer's interest is narrower than that. The clamoring for a homeland of their own only has traction if the necessity for one, as well as the legitimacy of the claim, can be made, loud and clear. The vast, in fact the sole, source of these nationalistic demands come from outside Iraq, as they must since to do so from within would not only be unwise but illegal as well. From the safety and comfort of America, Europe, Canada and Australia, Assyrian nationalists, many of whom have never seen Iraq, clamor and rail about Muslim “atrocities”, thus handily playing into what seems to have become a Western trope. This has always brought reprisals against whatever Christians were nearest at hand (as we have seen in recent years attacks in the West against the closest thing resembling an “Arab”, simply because of proximity.).

Dr Joseph has shown that there is no historical basis for the claim that Nestorians are the sole and, “Christian’s-only-allowed”, survivors of the ancient Assyrians. And, aside from their own unsubstantiated claims, there is no evidence of widespread, historic and systematic persecution and abuse of Christians in Iraq, unless for the same kinds of reasons any distrusted minority suffers within a nation under attack by foreign powers allied to that minority by religious or other ties. It is still true that, historically, no one has killed more Christians than other Christians and that among the Muslims was the only safety and security for both Christians and Jews when the major Christian powers were either slaughtering their own Muslim and Jewish populations (and their own) or forcing them to convert on pain of death. In other words there is no truth in either the modern Assyrian identity or claims of such vast and coordinated abuse of Iraqi Christians as would require, or be solved by, tearing away a part of Iraq to create what would amount to a Christian enclave, surrounded on all sides by Muslims and landlocked as well, as a final measure.

This would not lead to their safety but rather a continued and drawn out war they could not hope to win, even with Western backing. The other reality is that while Jews, a people Assyrian nationalists like to cite as equal sufferers, actually had nowhere else to go, once their own neighbors in Europe turned on them and tried to wipe them out, so that their own homeland was the only option Western Christianity left them with, the Christians of Iraq have been welcomed and have prospered in all the industrialized nations on earth, all of which happen to also be Christian…so that the likelihood of any of them uprooting their families from California or Melbourne and Paris to go live in a now impoverished "homeland" so fraught with unending dangers and few amenities and opportunities for generations to come is highly unlikely as well as completely unnecessary.

The ongoing problem and only result of these continued “ethnic” claims and allegations of persecution, has been to make life more difficult and dangerous for those remaining few Christians who wish to stay in Iraq, or can’t afford to leave. The Assyrian nationalist “movement” has not succeeded in winning any concessions from either Iraq or the West it tries to appeal to…all it has managed to do is make the few remaining Iraqi Christians more vulnerable to retaliation they don’t deserve…no more than Iraqis deserved to be targeted for what 19 non-Iraqis did on 9/11.



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