Digg Townhall Tonight!
Tune into the live Digg townhall tonight at 5:00pm PST/8:00pm EST.
For Iraqi Christians, Money Bought Survival
nytimes.com — ...for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation. as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow
petsheep- 122 diggs
- digg it
- petsheep, on 06/28/2008, -1/+11"Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money...That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February...Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul...Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya, and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians." (from the article)
- lucy22, on 06/29/2008, -1/+10Pretty sad what christians have to do to survive in a hostile country. It is extortion.
- life38, on 06/29/2008, -2/+2The Bush administration adopted the same policy to stop insurgents and Sunnis from killing each other and Americans. Bush is only using the surge of troops as the reason since Americans would be BullS__T if they knew that the USA was paying terrorist millions to not kill. Sounds like ransom and blood money to me.
- EIderofzion, on 06/29/2008, -1/+4when do the Athiest clue in that there is on JyZia for them (only death) and when do the "wiccans" clue in that they are still being hung in SA?
- SheilaNoya, on 06/29/2008, -1/+4I'm surprised that there wasn't an outrage from the Christian community after Bush invaded Iraq. Prior to Bush's invasion, there were 800,000 Christians living peacefully in Iraq. Christians made up 3% of Iraq's population BEFORE the war. Saddam's own Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was even a Christian. Saddam Hussein was an *****, but Iraq had many different religious groups living side by side before Bush went in and created the mess we have now.
Now, instead of the former moderate and secular Iraq, we've created the Islamic Republic of Iraq, led by Shiite religious fanatics and Mullahs. Most Christians have been forced to flee for their lives, yet the religious right seemed oblivious to what their fellow Christians in Iraq were going through as a result of Bush's invasion.
http://www.christiansofiraq.com/flee.html- str3ama, on 06/29/2008, -0/+1It was more secular, and people could actually traverse the marketplace. But it's not all about Christians, the life of a Muslim, a Christian and an atheist are all the same - they have all been forced to flee the country if not in fear of the sectarian violence then with the fear of the Army and military contractors who are pretty much doing whatever the hell they want (all at the American taxpayer's expense).
- str3ama, on 06/29/2008, -1/+1Ok I admit this is bad, but Christianity has long used its own form of extortion - missionary and relief aide. All those donations and care packages get sent to developing countries where Christianity isn't the dominant religion. The relief aide is given out only to those who come to the local church or venue of the missionaries. They're expected to attend and sit through long sermons about how they're all going to hell, and how they worship pagan gods and so forth. At the end they distribute some relief aid to those who sat through it all, and then they use guilt to push everyone there into converting to Christianity using the relief as a bribe and that they will get more relief provided they switch. A lot of times they don't even give the relief aid, unless they join.
We naively give money to charities that engage in these practices readily, we're lead to believe that these groups act rationally and actually want to help when in fact they're more committed to using that relief aide as a tit-for-tat. Most Christians think of Missionary work in a good light, thinking it's legitimately helping people when in reality it goes against a lot of their own doctrine or at least the teachings of Christ.
Check out the new & improved 
© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is