Barack Obama’s Letter to Protect Iraqi Christians
Barack Obama wants
answers. He wants to know what the State Department is doing in
coordination with the Iraqi Government to protect Christians and other
religious minorities in Iraq. The Brody File has a copy of the letter
Senator Obama sent to Secretary State Condoleezza Rice. You can read it
here.
The percentage of Christians living in
Iraq is low (about 4 percent or so) but they have come under persecution.
Read below from Nina Shea, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on
International Religious Freedom, an independent government agency:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
argues that reducing violence will help all Iraqis, but non-Muslims may
have been purged from Iraq by the time the dust settles. It could
already be too late for the Mandeans, followers of John the Baptist who
have roots in ancient
Babylon.
A spokesman of the sect told the commission that only 5,000 Mandeans
remain.
Priests have been beheaded; churches
bombed; unveiled women burned with acid; men killed for operating
theaters and barbershops; children murdered for wearing jeans, for
mingling with the opposite sex or simply for being seen as symbolizing
the infidels in some way. Criminals find members of religious minorities
to be easy prey. During the buildup of U.S. forces this spring, a Sunni
mosque in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood issued a fatwa demanding that
local Christians convert to Islam or pay an Islamic tax; thousands fled.
Read here whole Washington Post editorial
here. The paragraphs above sure don’t get the
headlines. The talk centers on Shiite and Sunni violence and
understandably so. But they’re not the only ones under attack.
September 17, 2007 - CBN.com