Tomorrow the Church celebrates the birthday of Our Lady, the patron saint of a number of parishes in Malta and Gozo. Tomorrow is also one of Malta’s five national feast days; another example of the synergising, for historical reasons, of the sacred and the secular.
The celebration of Our Lady’s birthday became enmeshed with Malta’s history and the child Madonna became the Lady of Victories who, in line with the rhetoric of the day’s speeches, helped our forefathers to banish from Europe the Ottoman Empire and prevent an invasion by the infidels, the Muslims, and our fathers from the European barbarians from Germany and Italy.
Such rhetoric works like water on the grinding stone of popular sentiment, which is expressed on Facebook by such phrases as “threat of invasion” or “being overrun” by the irregular immigrants who are, in the majority, both black and – horrors of horrors – Muslim. The narrative continues by indignantly stating that “we give them safe haven in Malta, ‘they’ are killing ‘our’ people in Iraq and Syria.”
I do not wish for a millisecond to lessen the seriousness of the barbarities and the crimes against humanity that are being perpetrated by the adherents of the so-called Islamic State in northern Iraq and parts of Syria. Those who follow my blog on timesofmalta.com know that I have often condemned the brutality they engage in.
Unfortunately, whenever we think that the fundamentalist savages have hit the bottom of depravity we immediately find out that they had started digging all over again. The videos circulating on the social networks of merciless crucifixions and of gruesome beheadings are shocking the world. On top of that there is a constant flow of news reports about assassinations, rape, selling women and girls as sex slaves, amputations and stealing of property. You name it, and you find out that the savages are doing it.
Men, women and young children do not escape the depravity of these godless people, who ironically and blasphemously say that they engage in these horrific acts in the name of God. Speaking to a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN in Geneva, condemned their actions as “brutal, barbaric, and uncivilised behaviour” – very grave words, particularly when used by a diplomat of the Holy See. Mgr Tomasi then rightly described them as “criminal groups”, denuding them of any attempt at respectability by describing them as Muslims.
Christians living in northern Iraq have been bearing the brunt of this savagery. Christians in the region have for a very long time been suffering many indignations. But the setting up of the Islamic State made their sojourn there impossible.
In today’s ‘News and Quotes’ (see page 28) I refer to the martyrdom of Salem Matti Kourki, a resident of the town of Bartala, in the Nineveh Plains. He was arrested, beaten, and tortured because he would not embrace Islam. The Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate of Baghdad saluted Kourki as “another martyr, a victim of extremist folly”.
Pope Francis has spoken many times about this persecution. His pincer strategy appeals, on one hand, to the international community to do something concrete to stop the barbarities of the Islamic State, while on the other hand repeatedly supports the Iraqi Catholics. Last Wednesday he assured them that: “You are in the heart of the Church; she suffers with you and is proud of you; you are her strength and the concrete and authentic witnesses to her message of salvation, forgiveness and love.”
While keeping all this in mind we should also remember that the adherents of the Islamic State have targeted the Yazidi community with similar ferocity and cruelty. Even Muslims are being persecuted. Some 15,000 minority Shia Turkmen were besieged in Amerli and would have been massacred had Iraqi forces not rescued them .
Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera clearly states that “the Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of [the northern region of] Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims”.
The attempt to use the savageries of the Islamic State to bolster the thesis of a perpetual enmity between Christianity and Islam does not correspond to facts and is counter-productive. The terrorists would achieve a double victory if, besides setting up a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, they succeed in fomenting more hatred between Christians and Muslims.
A few examples of the complexity of the situation suffice. Lebanese Archbishop Paul Sayah recently told Vatican Radio that despite its sectarian clashes, his country still stands as testimony that Christians and Muslims can live together in peace. In Jordan, Christians and Muslims demonstrated together to show their determination to live in peace together.
Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in the country, has said the militant groups Islamic State and al Qaeda are “enemy number one of Islam” and not in any way part of the faith. Other Islamic authorities condemned them, although unfortunately they took their time to do so.
The history of humanity is unfortunately littered with men’s inhumanity and intolerance towards other men and women
I have just watched once again, Intolerance, D. W. Griffiths’ groundbreaking film of the silent era. He clearly shows that intolerance knows of no race, religion, or political creed. The history of humanity is unfortunately littered with men’s inhumanity and intolerance towards other men and women. Griffiths’ three-and-a-half hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: (1) the ruining of the life of marginal Americans at the hands of capitalists; (2) Christ’s mission and death; (3) the events surrounding the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572; and (4) the fall of Babylon as a result of intolerance arising from a conflict between devotees of two rival Babylonian gods – Bel-Marduk and Ishtar.
Intolerance was made partly in response to criticism of Griffith’s previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was criticised as perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Griffiths could have easily included the genocide of the Latin American indios by their Cattolicissimi rulers. Had Griffiths lived till today he would have probably included the barbaric ethnic cleansing carried in the Balkans in the 1990s, the main victims of which were the Bosnian Muslims.
Intolerance is combatted not by the perpetuation of emotive stereotyping of groups and situations. If while discussing this issue you find yourself using ‘we’, ‘they’ and ‘ours’, remember that your stereotyping leads only to the death of rational analysis of this situation, which is complex and volatile. Such an attitude helps no one except the extremists.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt