ICC Note: The martyrdom of Christians in the Middle East today has shocked the world as we’ve witnessed people brutally executed for their faith. The reality is that this is not a new atrocity, but one that has a legacy stretching back hundreds and even thousands of years. Many of the same families that today have been driven from their homelands just a century ago had many of their own family executed for identifying as Christians in a world that was committed to seeing them erased from the earth.
By Juliana Taimoorazy
05/17/2015 Iraq (NY Post) Woody Allen once joked that sterility is hereditary: If you don’t have any children, you won’t have grandchildren either. In my family, we pass down a different condition: martyrdom.
My great-grandfather and my great-uncle both were murdered for their religion in 1915. Decades later, my own immediate family had to flee Islamist harassment in Iran.
My colleagues’ cousins even now are hiding from ISIS in isolated villages and on mountaintops. This is the heritage of all Assyrian Christians.
The butchery last month of Ethiopian Copts in Libya was not some new kind of atrocity. It’s the latest incident in 100 years of Islamist religious and ethnic cleansing all across the Middle East.
The first genocide of the 20th century was launched by the Ottomans and the “Young Turks” against Assyrian Christians in Mesopotamia. The next victims were Armenians and Greeks. For nine long years the slaughter went on, ending only in 1923 after claiming 2.5 million victims. The Ottomans “cleansed” Turkey, and much of Iraq, of their Christians. In November 1916, the Atlantic Monthly reported:
‘“Within six months they [Young Turks] succeeded in doing what the Old Turks were unable to accomplish in six centuries . . . Thousands of Nestorians and Syrians [Assyrians] have vanished from the face of the earth.”’
For many years, my mother stayed silent about the genocide. But one cold night in Tehran, in 1985, as we huddled around the space heater, she finally opened up. She told me how Nana (her grandmother) was awakened in her little clay house by violent knocks. Nana’s nephew George burst in. He threw himself down on her sickbed and wept for a solid minute. Then he reared up and whispered the news: “Nana, they killed Uncle Augustus. Those merciless animals cut his body into pieces and made me bring it home in a rice bag — our ration bag.”
At the news that her son was dead, Nana collapsed. Her cries filled the cold, desolate room. Nana’s husband, a priest of the Ancient Assyrian Church, had been murdered the year before — dragged behind his horse by Muslim neighbors. The following year, another family member would be shot by his Muslim servant.
I breathed very slowly, committing to heart my mother’s every word. She ended with this: “Juliana, you need to know stories like this. Someday, you must share them with your children. It was not only our family who gave martyrs for our faith in Jesus Christ. There are hundreds of thousands of families like us.”
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