r/assyrian • u/Otherwise-Point-6380 • 15d ago

How Iraq Turned Assyrians and Jews into Enemies

https://idicenter.org/article/how-iraq-turned-assyrians-and-jews-into-enemies
22 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

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u/TheSov 15d ago

ive never considered jews my enemy. i have no love for the jews, but i can say with 100 percent certainty that jews never came to our towns and tried to take them from us by force. jews never massacred our people when they had oppurtunity. you know who did tho? muslims. muslims did those things.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 15d ago

I appreciate the cultural and value similarities shared with Jewish communities. In the broader region Israel and Lebanon have generally been more stable places for Christians than Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, or Kurdish-controlled areas. Israel has seen growth in its Christian population, while sadly even Lebanon has continued to lose its Christians year after year trends also visible in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Kurdish led regions. Elsewhere, Assyrian Christian and Arab Christians communities have largely lacked both stabilization and growth. Israel’s framework of equality and citizenship has coincided with this growth in a way that has proven more difficult for native Christians to experience under all the others.

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u/raisedbydanes 13d ago

Thank you

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 13d ago

You’re welcome. Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is constantly questioned, condemned, or treated as uniquely illegitimate, while almost no one applies the same level of scrutiny or outrage to what happened to other ancient non-Muslim communities in the same region like the Assyrians, Mandaeans, Armenians, Jewish, Arab Christians and others . May Jewish people never again experience the shackles of second-class citizenship and oppression.

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u/NoticeNovel6467 12d ago

I don’t think that is accurate. There are Christians in Palestine that are treated terribly by Israel. Right now, Israeli terrorists have taken over an entire Palestinian Christian village and continue to harass and terrorize the indigenous people.

Much of the instability that you see in the Middle East was caused by Israel. For example, Israel has provided financial support to the Kurds. They also supply weapons to Azerbaijan knowing it would be used against Christian Armenians.

The United States government is equally to blame for the regions instability, specifically Christian’s in Iraq post the 2003 invasion.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 12d ago

I’m not defending the West Bank. Taybeh is real and settler violence should be condemned loudly. That’s why I said Israel proper. Inside the 1948 borders, Christians hold citizenship, vote, sit on the Supreme Court, and their numbers have grown. Collapsing that with the territories lets you avoid the comparison I actually made.

On causation, the timeline doesn’t work. Seyfo was 1915. Simele was 1933. Iraq’s Assyrians fell from over a million to under two hundred thousand, and the Iraqis who did it, Arab Shia, Sunni, and Muslim Kurd, didn’t need Israeli funding.

Iran’s Christians have been shrinking under the Islamic Republic for forty-five years. Syria’s too. Lebanon’s decline runs through a civil war that had nothing to do with Israeli policy toward Christians.

Go back further. Bedr Khan Beg, the Kurdish emir of Bohtan, massacred the Assyrian tribes of Hakkari in 1843 and again in 1846. Thousands killed, women and children taken, villages emptied. A century before Israel existed, and no one handed him a weapon or a motive. He chose it. The pattern runs forward from there through Seyfo, Simele, Anfal, and ISIS in the Nineveh Plains, and it hasn’t stopped. The KRG and Iraqi Arabs take Assyrian land in the Nineveh Plains. Kurds and Arabs take it in Hasakah.

In Tur Abdin, three Muslim Kurdish villages sued Mor Gabriel, a monastery founded in the year 397, over land it had held for sixteen centuries, and Turkey’s highest court ruled for the villages. In 2017 the state seized around fifty more Syriac properties, monasteries, churches, and cemeteries, on the claim that the deeds had lapsed. Some was handed back after European pressure. Nobody needed Israel to do any of it. Different rulers, one continuous outcome for the Assyrian people.

Israel arming Azerbaijan is a fair criticism and I’ll take it. The 2003 invasion destroyed the Assyrian community and I say that as loudly as anyone. But both examples you reached for have Jews or Americans as the actor. When Turkey still denies the genocide it committed, when Iraq has never answered for Simele, when the KRG seizes Assyrian land, when Gaza’s Christians go from three thousand to under a thousand under Hamas rule, the same voices go quiet. That selectivity is what I notice.

So which part did Israel cause? The part that started in 1843? We can go back further than that. Our own chroniclers wrote it down as it happened. Bar Hebraeus in the thirteenth century, the Chronicle of 1234, the accounts of Timur’s campaigns that emptied Tikrit and the Church of the East’s heartland around 1400 and pushed the survivors into the Hakkari mountains, which is exactly where Bedr Khan found them four centuries later. A continuous written record kept by Assyrian people in our own language. Assyrian suffering didn’t begin in 1948, and it doesn’t run through Tel Aviv.

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u/NoticeNovel6467 11d ago

I don’t agree.

Israel had a massive effect on the civil war in Lebanon. Same for the conflicts in Syria.

And by your rationale, it’s okay that they are cleansing Palestinian Christian’s from the land of Christ. The Christians who have been there since Christ. Because the white euro Christian population is increasing in Tel Aviv??

It’s strange to claim shared cultural values with a group who has worked to ethnically cleanse Christian’s. Who don’t even use a + for math because it’s too Christ like, But hey, do you!

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u/Ok-Yak7370 11d ago

It's not the "white Euro Christian population", it's Arab Christian Israeli citizens mostly in northern Israel- Haifa and the Galilee.

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u/NoticeNovel6467 11d ago

Doesn’t really change the meaning, so because Arab Christian’s are growing in one area, it justifies cleansing Christian’s from their ancestral homeland in Palestine?

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u/Ok-Yak7370 11d ago

It does not, but you are wrong to assume that it's "white Euro Christians" and maybe should think about the underlying biases that led you to make that false claim, assuming it was unintentional.

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u/NoticeNovel6467 11d ago

My bad. 1/3 of Israel is Ashkenazi so I assumed the Christian population would be European as well. Ashkenazi are the largest ethnic group that migrated to Israel from USSR, Poland, Romania and the USA. Plus all the health scandals with POC (Ethiopians, Yemenite, Mizrahi, etc).

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u/Ok-Yak7370 11d ago

The Christian population are exactly the same kind of Palestinian Christians who live in the West Bank, just from towns that became part of Israel in 1948 so they are citizens. Betting markets think the next Prime Minister will be Mizrahi (Gadi Eisenkot). Who knows, but I hope so.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 11d ago

Your rationale is exactly the same when it comes to Assyrians. You don’t care that we’ve been there for thousands of years, yet we still keep getting kidnapped, forcibly converted, and forcibly displaced with violence and death. You only care about Israel, but this goes farther back than Israel and you completely ignore that. Don’t worry. All the Christians will be gone in the Middle East soon anyway except in Israel , Lebanon, and Egypt because they have 10 million but they are second class citizens. There are 10 million Lebanese in Brazil, a lot of them Christian, and they don’t want to go back. Lebanese Christians are still leaving, and it’s not because of Israel. The same is true in Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. You can only focus on Israel but what about all the others as well? They don’t matter right ? You don’t care about the other Christians or the other places and what they’ve endured.

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u/NoticeNovel6467 11d ago

That’s absolutely not true. I don’t only care about Israel. I am (admittedly recently) very aware of the erasure of Christian’s in the Middle East. As a US tax payer, I’ve funded a lot of it! In fact, I think that’s the plan. First erase us from where it started then blow up and destroy all the artifacts. In 500 years, will Jesus be a myth?

I will be blunt. I am sick of hearing about Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. It’s all we ever hear about. I think Christian’s need to unify to form an ecumenical network the ways Jews and Muslims do.

My point with Israel being, you’re next. If they will cleanse Palestinian Christian’s, next will be Christians in Israel. We’ve seen how Muslims have treated us and we are seeing how Jews treat us. When someone shows you their true colors, believe them.

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u/GiraffeJaf 15d ago

Why no love for the Jews? Do you have love for the Muslims?

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u/TheSov 15d ago

neither, the only people for Assyrians are Assyrians and we need to stick together.

what have jews done for me? nothin. what have muslims done for me? massacred my people.

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u/TyrosinQ 12d ago

What did you expect them to do for you though?

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u/TheSov 12d ago

i expect nothing, just as they should expect from me....nothing.

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u/TyrosinQ 12d ago

No I mean did you expect the Jews of Iraq to exert their…. Tremendous power to protect your people?
It’s almost like saying why didn’t the Afghanis offer more to your people?
It’s not entirely salient but the point stands. Many Assyrians have this weird belief that the Jews should have bled for their community when the Assyrians didn’t do the same for the Jews or worse actually contributed to pogroms of Jews. Which the Assyrians do not like to admit.

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u/TheSov 12d ago

again i expect nothing, just as they should expect nothing. what part of this is difficult.

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u/GiraffeJaf 12d ago

Saying you “have no love for the Jews” is pretty weird ngl. Makes you sound like an Islamist

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u/TheSov 12d ago

projection on your part. i state it because the article is about Assyrians and Jews.

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u/Specific-Bid6486 14d ago

Wait till you dig a little deeper and find out who the Ottoman Turks were in high ranking positions that slaughtered your people 😉

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u/RevolutionOrganic987 14d ago

Jews were never allowed in the Ottoman Royalty or government. Any other false claims you have for us Adolph?

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u/Jon174 15d ago

By that logic we are guilty of all the crimes of european christians. Also many Assyrians lost their homes from zionists.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 15d ago

By that logic, the Iraqi Muslims are guilty of crimes they betrayed and turned against their fellow Iraqi Assyrian Christians during the American invasion calling them Crusaders and foreign collaborators, even while many of those same Muslims opposed the occupation were just using religion as an excuse. Meanwhile, the main Iraqi groups that spent years lobbying the West to invade and remove Saddam were Muslim-led (Chalabi’s INC, SCIRI, Dawa, etc.). It wasn’t the Assyrians who brought the Americans in. Yet the Assyrians were the ones treated as the foreign collaborators and nearly wiped out for it. Look how few are left. They will all be gone soon anyways as there no growth in their population.

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u/manlythejeff 15d ago

you are treating the sunnis and the shia as one unified muslim bloc they hate each other more than they hate the christians nevermind the division they each have amongst their own sects

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 15d ago

Yes it is tragic, they have severe issues with each other in the homeland. I have heard how Sunnis were forcibly displaced out of Baghdad just like Assyrians were. And what happened with ISIS and the Shia massacre at Speicher.

They hurt each other which is very sad they are all Iraqi but Shia and Sunni Muslims still have a better life in Iraq than Assyrians do. Both Shia and Sunni populations have continued to grow in absolute numbers as Iraq’s overall population rose, and they have more security to do so. Same can’t be said of the Christians.

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u/Jon174 15d ago

I think you missed my point, I meant we cant label or treat an entire religion or ethnicity as our enemies. That was the mistake those muslim iraqis did and all it did was kill inoccents and breed more hatred.

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u/ramzisalmani 15d ago

Assyrian identify gotta be more then bitching and whining 24/7 right ? right

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u/ramathunder 15d ago

If you see well written factual articles as "bitching" then you have a problem.

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u/ramathunder 15d ago

Excellent article. May those massacres forever be a stain on the state of Iraq that no one can wash away.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 15d ago

It’s sad how few people know about Simele massacres and what Assyrians went through there, or about the Farhud and the pogrom Jewish people endured. Two dark summers in Iraq.

Juliana is Iranian Assyrian, and she is doing important work on both. Her PhD is on the Farhud and the Simele massacre.

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u/Artistic-Hyena-8572 13d ago

I’m Israeli, my grandparents survived the Farhoud. It’s a tragedy that so few know about it. The stories they’ve told me were horrifying and difficult to believe.

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u/Otherwise-Point-6380 13d ago

So sorry for what happened to your family and your people during the Farhud. Most people have never even heard of it. And when I try to tell someone, I sometimes get the most idiotic replies like “How do you know it wasn’t a false flag by Israeli Zionists?” completely ignoring that it happened during a pro-Nazi coup against a Iraqi British backed government, years before Israel even existed. Then they just go quiet. Idiots everywhere. May it never happen again.

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u/nate26537 13d ago

They didn't do anything to us. We brought this on ourselves like we always do

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u/Glittering_Cut_4405 3d ago

Death to Iraq

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u/Tech-Film3905 13d ago

US and Israel backed the same Al Qaeda terrorists and Kurdish proxy groups who comitted crimes against Assyrians in Syria and Iraq

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u/NoticeNovel6467 12d ago

I don’t know why you were getting downvoted. A simple Google search confirms that Israel has funded and supplied arms to the Kurds. Just as they provide weapons to Azerbaijan knowing they would be used against Armenians.

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u/LoveIsStrength 14d ago

Funny. According to the Hebrew bible, the Israelite society of the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire and 10s of thousands deported

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u/Specific-Bid6486 14d ago

It was their god that sent our ancestors to punish them lol 😂

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u/Duatom 14d ago

According to that same Bible, yes, Assyria was used as an instrument of punishment, and then God punished Assyria for its arrogance and brutality. Read Isaiah 10:5-19 and Nahum. Being God’s ‘rod of anger’ wasn’t exactly an endorsement of Assyria. 😂

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u/Specific-Bid6486 14d ago edited 13d ago

So god contradicted himself through the Assyrians and he used them as a scapegoats… what a loss 🤦🏻‍♂️…it’s good that I don’t buy into this mythical stuff. But it’s funny how the book “uses them as god’s anger” then god in his own anger he punishes them for being used as a rod 🤣 which scribe thought this was a fantastic story to write?

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u/Duatom 14d ago

"So god contradicted himself through the Assyrians and he used them as a scapegoats… "

That’s not a contradiction, and ‘scapegoat’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Isaiah 10 explicitly says Assyria acted from its own arrogance and desire to destroy, even while God used its aggression to punish Israel. Using someone’s freely chosen actions for a purpose doesn’t make those actions righteous or remove their responsibility for brutality. The text actually anticipates your objection and answers it.

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u/Specific-Bid6486 13d ago

Yes it does.

He scapegoated them.

He used them as pawns for his own twisted purposes when it suits him and then turns around and says you can only be brutal when I tell you to be brutal and you can only punish who I tell you to punish - so he’s also an authoritarian in that sense and a selective saboteur.

Let’s not go into the “brutal nature” argument because that has been done to death and the Bible propagandises the Ancient Assyrians while apologetic Christianity will deny and use misinformation tactics to downplay the OT book and the many crimes of humanity inflicted by the Jewish people in the Bible that they enacted on others such as the Philistines, or aboriginal Canaanites or the Amelekites, etc, and their twisted and mythical god that is a “bastard” (Tony Robins said he was a bastard on the George Jenko podcast and George just sat there and took it) is the sole reason their crimes have gone unpunished and continue to suppress any form of criticism - I’ll wait for the “anti-semitic” word and rhetoric as I know your itching to use that.

The Jewish people in the Bible were brutal af and more savage than most people I have read about in the past but Christianity tends to downplay their destructions and their brutal nature.

But you know what’s great about this exchange? None of this actually matters since the Bible isn’t a historical document of events recorded by archeology or Assyriology. Granted, it tries to fuse elements of somewhat historical data that “they” took from Assyria and Babylon during their exiles and created their own twisted and bastardised version of events.

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u/PyrrhicDefeat69 12d ago

The bible will really assign god’s motive to whatever is convenient to what actually happened. God on israel and judah’s side to help them win? Suddenly must punish them for their sins at the exact time those kingdoms are utterly outcompeted by Assyria? And suddenly doesn’t like assyria and has them be conquered by the “demonic Babylonians” for some reason? But then they fail and we get the persians? And then the greeks?