Just five years ago, Islamic State (IS) came into Mosul—Iraq’s third largest city—and began its attempt to rid it of its ancient Christian community. Now, two years’ after Mosul’s liberation, its Christian population has been reduced from about 15,000 to a little over 40, with large numbers having fled the region. Giulio Meotti writes:
This cultural genocide, thanks to the indifference of Europeans and many Western Christians more worried about not appearing “Islamophobic” than defending their own brothers, sadly worked. Father Ragheed Ganni, for instance, a Catholic priest from Mosul, had just finished celebrating mass in his church when Islamists killed him. In one of his last letters, Ganni wrote: “We are on the verge of collapse.” That was in 2007—almost ten years before IS eradicated the Christians of Mosul.
Traces of a lost Jewish past have also resurfaced in Mosul, where a Jewish community had lived for thousands of years. Now, 2,000 years later, both Judaism and Christianity have effectively been annihilated there. That life is over. . . . In Mosul alone, 45 churches were vandalized or destroyed. Not a single one was spared. Today there is only one church open in the city. . . . The fate of Mosul’s Christians is similar to those elsewhere in Iraq.
Shamefully, the West has been and still seems to be completely indifferent to the fate of Middle Eastern Christians. . . . As the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf noted, “People accuse the Occident of wanting to impose its values, but the real tragedy is its inability to transmit them. . . . Threats to pandas cause more emotion” than threats of the extinction of the Christians in the Middle East.
Read more on Gatestone: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14691/extinction-christians-middle-east