Syria: Islamic jihadists blow up church dedicated to victims of Armenian Genocide

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 Syria: Islamic jihadists blow up church dedicated to victims of Armenian Genocide
Robert Spencer/Jihadi Watch
Nov 12, 2014

Christian leaders in the West pursue “dialogue” with Muslim leaders, who smilingly tell them that they condemn the Muslim persecution of Christians, and that is that. The Muslim leaders don’t actually do anything to stop their coreligionists from committing acts like these, but everyone has a nice dinner and some coffee, and goes home feeling great. Not a thing is accomplished, of course, except the complicity of those Christian leaders, who happily accept the line that to speak out against this jihadist savagery would be “Islamophobic” and harm the “dialogue.” And so they stay silent, and forbid any honest discussion of what leads to incidents like this, and to the Muslim persecution of Christians in general.

 A great many bishops have a great deal to answer for. All too often in the Church in the West these days, many bishops and priests are coddled, cossetted boys who have never held a real job, never had any real responsibility, have no idea of hardship, and are interested above all not in truth or self-sacrifice but in maintaining their comfort and privileges. They are soft, cowardly, weak, ignorant, and regally immune from being challenged in any way. They are as far from the Christian leaders who became saints and martyrs in the times of persecution as it is humanly possible to be. “Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history,” by Robert Fisk, the Independent, November 10, 2014 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

 In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, which is dedicated to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian Holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins. This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.

 Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “Holocaust”….