The article about the massacre of Christians in Syria posted below was published in November 2013. Nothing has changed since that moment. And while the world is talking about MH17, the Ukraine, ISIS and the Middle East, the massaker of Christians in Syria is silently going on, and nobody talks about it. The “ethnical cleansing” also concerns the Assyrians.
Is it political correctness that prevents the media from talking?
If you search the Internet, you find little news about the ongoing horror except a few notes about ISIS forcing Christiansto accept their rules.
Assyrians and Christians are under attack in Syria
With extremists battling for control of Iraq’s largest oilfield on Tuesday, upping the stakes in a burgeoning war against the central government in Baghdad, Iraq’s Christians once again find themselves at risk.
Over the past 10 days, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a fundamentalism jihadist group, has streamed across the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq from its bases in eastern Syria, capturing a line of towns and cities, including several with large Assyrian and Chaldean Christian populations.
Some 160 Christian families have fled Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, for Christian-inhabited towns and villages in northern Iraq over the past week, according to Associated Press.
Hundreds more have left seeking safety in the autonomous Kurdish region to the east. Mosul was home to about 130,000 Christians before the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq and following last week’s Isis takeover, is reported to be almost empty of Christian families.
Assyrians are one of the oldest indigenous communities in the region. Their roots in what is today northern Iraq and eastern Syria go back over 2,000 years, with the latter stages of that history increasingly marred by bloodshed.
During the dying days of the Ottoman Empire as the first World War unfolded, about 750,000 Assyrians were killed as part of the broader slaughter of Christian Armenians and Greeks in modern-day Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
Then in 1933, about 3,000 Assyrian Christians were killed by Iraqi soldiers and Kurds in the northern Iraqi town of Sumel, leading to mass migration across the border to Syria.
Hellish time
More recently, Christians in Iraq have experienced a hellish time. On Christmas Day last year, 37 people were killed in a series of car bomb attacks close to churches in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. 
The wave of kidnappings, bombings and assassinations following the 2003 invasion saw many of the city’s Christians flee to northern Iraq where they have lived in relative safety, until now. As a result, Iraq’s Christian community is today thought to number just 40 per cent of its pre-2003 figure, and today, in the face of the Isis assault, is on the move again.
“Each day we went to bed in fear . . . In our own houses we knew no rest,” a Christian woman from Alqosh in northern Iraq told reporters, speaking of the threat from jihadists.
The danger to Christians in northern Iraq appears not only in the form of jihadists. With Isis viewed as likely to encounter difficulty in holding on to territory in the face of an impending fight-back from better-equipped government forces, a long-standing threat to the slivers of territory in northern Iraq inhabited by Christians has appeared.
Kurdish militias
According to the Assyrian International News Agency, a total of 14 Assyrian towns and villages in the north have in the past week fallen under the control of Kurdish militias.
Iraq’s Kurds have their own designs of expanding territorial control across the north, including to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk which Kurdish peshmerga control since late last week.
The peace and stability enjoyed in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in the north of the country and home to the country’s five million Kurds, has proved a rare bright spot in Iraq’s recent history.
“The Kurds control now most of the disputed territories,” said Wladimir Van Wilgenburg, a columnist with Al Monitor and an expert on Kurdish affairs. “They now almost have their national desired borders, only in Diyala [province] there is still a border with the Iraqi army, the rest of the 1,000km is with the Isis.”
Syrian threat In Isis-controlled eastern Syria, Christians have fared little better. Last March, the jihadist group announced Christians there must convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death. Churches have been damaged and crosses, paintings and statues burned in Raqqa, a city in Syria’s east. Several Syrian and foreign priests have been kidnapped and killed by jihadists in Syria over the past three years.
But Christians are preparing to fight back. Their militias today form an important cog in the Syrian regime’s fighting force in the shape of National Defence Forces – groups of civilians armed by the Syrian regime.
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has called on civilians to take up arms and fight against Isis; reports say about 600 Christians in the town of Bartella, 20km from Isis-controlled Mosul, are defending their homes with machine guns and other light weapons.
With the US and other Western governments slow to become involved in another Iraq quagmire, the threat to Christians and other minorities is set to mount.
Manipulation: This picture of a toddler threatened with guns has been posted again and again to support the rage against the issues mentioned above. But it is not a Palestinian, nor a Ukrainian child. This is a scene from Syria where during “ethnical cleansing” guns are put at the head of a Christian child in Syria. (article)
Article from November 2013
One of the worst Christian massacres—complete with mass graves, tortured-to-death women and children, and destroyed churches—recently took place in Syria, at the hands of the U.S.-supported jihadi “rebels”; and the U.S. government and its “mainstream media” mouthpiece are, as usual, silent (that is, when not actively trying to minimize matters).
The massacre took place in Sadad, an ancient Syriac Orthodox Christian habitation, so old as to be mentioned in the Old Testament. Most of the region’s inhabitants are poor, as Sadad is situated in the remote desert between Homs and Damascus (desert regions, till now, apparently the only places Syria’s Christians could feel secure; 600 Christian families had earlier fled there for sanctuary from the jihad, only to be followed by it).
In late October, the U.S-supported “opposition” invaded and occupied Sadad for over a week, till ousted by the nation’s military. Among other atrocities, 45 Christians—including women and children—were killed, several tortured to death; Sadat’s 14 churches, some ancient, were ransacked and destroyed; the bodies of six people from one family, ranging from ages 16 to 90, were found at the bottom of a well (an increasingly common fate for “subhuman” Christians).
The jihadis even made a graphic video (with English subtitles) of those whom they massacred, while shouting Islam’s victory-cry, “Allahu Akbar” (which John McCain equates to a Christian saying “thank God”). Another video, made after Sadad was liberated shows more graphic atrocities.
Here are the words of Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan of Homs and Hama (another detailed account, with pictures, appears here):
”What happened in Sadad is the most serious and biggest massacre of Christians in Syria in the past two years and a half… 45 innocent civilians were martyred for no reason, and among them several women and children, 
many thrown into mass graves. Other civilians were threatened and terrorized. 30 were wounded and 10 are still missing. For one week, 1,500 families were held as hostages and human shields. Among them children, the elderly, the young, men and women…. All the houses of Sadad were robbed and property looted. The churches are damaged and desecrated, deprived of old books and precious furniture… What happened in Sadad is the largest massacre of Christians in Syria and the second in the Middle East, after the one in the Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Iraq, in 2010.”
In the Iraqi attack of 2010, al-Qaeda linked jihadis stormed the church during service killing some 60 Christian worshippers (see here for graphic images of the aftermath).
While the archbishop is correct that this is the “largest massacre of Christians in Syria,” it is but the tip of the iceberg of the persecution the nation’s Christian minority has suffered—including beheadings, church bombings, kidnappings, rapes, and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Christians—since the war broke out (see Syria entries in monthly persecution series).
A month before Sadad, another ancient Christian region, Ma‘loula, one of the world’s very few regions that still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus, was besieged by the jihadis, its churches bombarded and plundered, its inhabitants forced to convert to Islam or die. The last words of one man who refused were: “I am a Christian, and if you want to kill me for this, I do not object to it.”
The archbishop concluded his statement concerning Sadad by asking: “We have shouted aid to the world but no one has listened to us. Where is the Christian conscience? Where is human consciousness? Where are my brothers? I think of all those who are suffering today in mourning and discomfort: We ask everyone to pray for us.”
Serge Trifkovic—who hails from a European region especially acquainted with Islamic jihad—responds to the archbishop as follows:
_”That no “human consciousness” is to be found in the White House, or in the editorial offices of the leading Western media, is now a matter of well-established record. Just try searching for “Sadad” (or alternatively “Saddad”) on the websites of the Department of State or The New York Times. Ditto the leading European dailies, the CNN/BBC/RTF, the human-rights defending “NGOs” et al.
“The problem, of which Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh appears unaware, is no longer in the Western elite’s mere indifference to the impending demise of Christianity in the lands of its birth, but in its active, ongoing, and open contribution to that demise. Cyprus (1974) and the Balkans (1991-9) provided the test, Iraq (2003-today) the conclusive proof. In Syria the Obama administration remains committed to supporting the rebels—ah, yes, only the “moderate” ones, like the Christian-murdering “Free Syrian Army” (discretion advised again), not “even though” the result will be the same, but precisely because it will be.”_
In one of the Arabic videos documenting the aftermath of the Sadad massacre, as the mutilated bodies of one family are drawn from a well (around :30 second mark), a middle-aged male relative, in tears, says:
”The most precious in the whole universe [his family], are now gone, leaving me alone, but thank God I am still surrounded by these loving people who remain. I want to say, let people [the jihadis] return to their minds. The problems of the world can only be solved by knowledge and brains. Enough insanity, the nerves of the people are shredded. Enough, enough—return to your minds; you people, you humans—return to your humanity, enough crimes.”
As a sign of the times, here is a Syrian, an “easterner,” evoking rationalism and humanity, products of the Christian West, at a time when the post-Christian West is governed by anything and everything—propaganda, emotionalism, mindless indoctrination—but the twain.
Original article by: Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians
The Blog of Mystica 
