By Robert Fisk
"I have usually found that the closer a religious Christian, Jew or Muslim comes to the Middle East, the madder they become..... that crazed, glazed, faith-based lunacy that must have inhabited the eyes of the Crusaders when they slaughtered their way across the Holy Land, dropping off near modern-day Homs in modern-day Syria to consume – literally – some of their Arab enemies.....
Was I the only one to react with a total lack of surprise to the news that Muslim Afghan soldiers are fighting Muslim Taliban fighters with a coded inscription on their rifle sights from the Bible's Book of John?.....
Not since the Serbs and Lebanese Phalangists set off to massacre and rape their Muslim enemies over the past three decades with pictures of the Virgin Mary on their rifle butts has there been anything so preposterous......Indeed, 'twas I who first spotted two American M(12A)1 Abrams tanks parked in central Baghdad in 2003 with "Crusader 1" and "Crusader 2" painted on their barrels. But since the man who sent them there – check out Bush's lunatic conversation with Chirac – believes in Gog and Magog, what's new? Don't tell me no one in the Pentagon (or the British Ministry of Defence, which has an order in for another 400 Trijicon sites) didn't query that weird "JN8:12" on the equipment.
No wonder then – and here's a real tragedy – that Christians are in a state of perpetual exodus from the Middle East.....
Courtesy of that great Bible-reader George W Bush, the Christians of post-invasion Iraq – one of the oldest sects in the world – are still fleeing sectarian violence for the West. They've been murdered and burned out of their homes. Why, even the head of the superior Islamic council of Iraq, Ammar al-Hakim, turned up in Beirut this week to tell the Maronite Catholic patriarch of Lebanon that he was doing "all he could" for his Iraqi Christian brothers and sisters......
The Christians of Lebanon would say the same, forgetting their own murderous militias of the civil war.....of Malaysia, where Christians are now under attack for being allowed to call their God "Allah". The fact that Muslims and Christians both believe in the same deity has no apparent value. Indeed, in God's name – quite literally – the very name of the very patriarch of the Lebanese church is Nasrallah Sfeir – the "allah" bit meaning exactly what it sounds like. Ye Gods, I suppose we must say!
But I was heartened to read a fine article by my wise old journalist friend Jihad Zein in the Lebanese newspaper An Nahar last week. He believes that governments in the Muslim world have been repressing societies but – and I hope I have grasped his complex argument correctly – repressed societies are now repressing minorities.....
The British tolerated – and in some cases actually covered up – the genocide of Assyrians in northern Iraq by their installed Iraqi monarch's army in 1933.....In any event, the Zein thesis is that Middle East governments have abandoned the idea of cultural authority in the interests of safeguarding the security of their political society. The Fisk thesis is that minorities don't count any more.
But don't bet on it. Was it not the army of Israel which named its 1996 bombardment of Lebanon "Grapes of Wrath", an operation which included the atrocity at Qana, when 106 Lebanese civilians, more than half of them children and including mothers and old men, were torn to bits by Israeli shells? And did not Grapes of Wrath take its name from chapter 32, verse 25 of the Book of Deuteronomy in which it is said that "the sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of grey hairs". All in all, a good description of the massacre at Qana. Or of those innocent Afghan villagers torn to bits in Nato's heroic air strikes. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that DY32:25 is inscribed on Nato's bombs. Work that one out."
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