ICC Note: The unfortunate but real message conveyed by experts on Iraq is that unless something drastic is done, Christianity has no future in the ancient homeland. But then what is to happen to the thousands of Christians that lived and still live there? According to Nina Shea, director of the U.S.-based Center for Religious Freedom, relocation is the only viable answer seeing that Iraq’s army has done little to protect them.
06/15/2015 Iraq (BosNewsLife): Is it now time for Christians to accept defeat in the face of the Islamic State group’s genocidal onslaught in Iraq, and admit that our faith has no viable future – in the short term, at least – in that country? Certainly – and sadly – that’s the message that is increasingly being heard from experts.
Nina Shea is an international human rights lawyer and director of the U.S.-based Center for Religious Freedom. She has an impressive record of fighting, peacefully, on behalf of Mideast Christians. But now she is bluntly calling for “a new strategy.”
Shea has a plan. “The only achievable strategy under the current circumstances is to prepare for an orderly resettlement of these Christians (and Yazidis) in the West,” she writes in an article at National Review Online. “It is a bitter development for the Church and for them, being discarded after 2,000 years of history, through no fault of their own,” Shea admits. “But it is the most humane of the alternatives. Otherwise they face indigence and exile or, worse, slaughter at the hands of jihadists.”
Iraqi Christians can’t expect protection from Iraq’s army. Barry Posen, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program, has published a story on the Defense One website titled: “The Iraqi Army No Longer Exists.”
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