We cannot ignore this genocide
By Lord Alton of Liverpool, Catholic Herald:
Until the murderous persecution of Christians by ISIS is recognised for what it is, its perpetrators cannot be brought to international justice.
Just before Christmas 75 parliamentarians, from both Houses and all parties – including the former head of our Armed Forces, the ex-head of MI5, and former cabinet ministers – wrote to David Cameron urging him to declare the atrocities being committed against Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria and Iraq as genocide.
Poignantly, the letter, which I also signed, was delivered as the world commemorated the centenary of the Armenian genocide, in which between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Assyrian Christians lost their lives. It is impossible not to see today’s events as anything other than a continuation of that shocking story.
I recently read Franz Werfel’s harrowing and prophetic novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933. It was based on a true story about the Armenian genocide. His books were burnt by the Nazis and banned in Turkey, no doubt to try to assist in the process of collective amnesia. (In 1939, the eve of the Holocaust, Hitler famously asked: “Who now remembers the Armenians?”)
Werfel – a Jewish writer who converted to Catholicism and also wrote The Song of Bernadette – tells the story of several thousand Christians who took refuge on the mountain of Musa Dagh (Moses Mountain). The Armenians were a remnant who fought back against the genocide and, without the dramatic intervention of the French navy, would have perished on the mountain.
An Armenian priest, Fr Bezdikian, whose grandfather had been involved in the siege, later remarked: “Franz Werfel is the national hero of the Armenian people. His great book is a kind of consolation to us – no, not a consolation, there is no such thing – but it is of eminent importance to us that this book exists. It guarantees that it can never be forgotten, never, what happened to our people.”
But how quickly we did forget the massacres, rapes, robberies, forced labour, desecrations, and deportation on death marches of women, children, the elderly and infirm – all of which has an eerily and uncannily familiar ring to it today, as do the heartbreaking reports of Christian children starving to death.
See also: The European Parliament recognises the Islamic State as guilty of genocide, and invites Member States to fight against it. From European Centre for Law and Justice:
See also: Islam’s sword comes for Christians, by Raymond Ibrahim, Gatestone Institute
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