Right Voices

H/T to Logan for the story of Canon Andrew White. He sat down for an interview with Scott Pelley. The left is having a field day with this..”See the surge didn’t work”, but if you follow the links, the interview doesn’t pass the smell test:

“You were here during Saddam’s reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?” Pelley asked.

“The situation now is clearly worse” than under Saddam, White replied.

“There’s no comparison between Iraq now and then,” he told Pelley. “Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They’ve never known it like now.”

“Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years,” Pelley remarked.

“Yes,” White said.

“And it’s now the worst it has ever been,” Pelley replied.

To understand the history of Iraqi Christianity, start with the Last Supper. One saint to the right of Jesus is the Apostle Thomas, who took the gospel and headed east after the death of Christ.

In modern times, under Saddam, Christians were treated much the same as Muslims; Saddam’s right hand man, Tariq Aziz, was Christian.

Before the war, it’s estimated there were about a million Christians in Iraq. They were a small minority, but free to worship, free to build churches, and free to speak the ancient language of Jesus, Aramaic. But, after the invasion, Muslim militants launched a war on each other and the cross.

Let’s go back a year to an interview with him:

There were churches [in Iraq] bombed this last weekend [January 28-29, 2006], including my church as well. And I have had four of my lay leaders probably killed in the past few months. They disappeared on the 12th of September, and I haven’t seen them since. But the real issue is that all religious communities are under pressure and have to deal with increased violence. The greatest number of attacks have actually been on Shia mosques, and the only reason there has not been a war between Shia and Sunni is that Ayatollah Ali Sistani has really tried very hard to prevent the Shia from reacting. But all of the religious communities are under increased pressures — Sunni, Christian, Shia, and Kurdish.

Our church [St. George's Memorial Church in Baghdad] was reopened after the war, and we thought initially predominantly it would be a church for the expatriate congregations. But the congregation has grown very rapidly. It’s now over 800 in number and there are no Anglicans there, apart from a little baby I baptized the other day, named after me and the bishop. So there are two Anglicans in Iraq, both of them named Andrew. But the sad fact is that the church and most of its members that are not Anglican are coming because they are too afraid to travel to their own churches, which may be over a mile away. That distance to travel has become increasingly dangerous. The bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf who covers Iraq has said very clearly that he hopes that eventually people will go back to their own churches. But we don’t have that happening yet or any chance of that happening. The congregations are all Iraqi, apart from the congregation in the International Zone, which is almost exclusively American, with just a few English.

Let’s look at his writings:

Not surprisingly, White’s apparent closeness to the Saddam regime meant he was criticised in the West as a dupe, a stooge for an evil regime.

He admits now that his critics had a point: “Initially I was naïve in my assessment of what was happening. The atmosphere of oppression was obvious from the start. The Iraqi people were in a terrible state. But I didn’t quite appreciate just how evil the regime was and how they were using sanctions for their benefit. It took me a while to realise they were very, very bad people. But as I went back to Iraq on a regular basis and people started talking to me in private, I began to realise what was going on.”

Canon Andrew White: The Vicar of Baghdad Part 3- In this interview, from just last month, he does’t make it sound anything like he did on 60 Minutes..could it be that 60 Minutes got the results it wanted to show you?

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