Category Archives: Syria

One Step Closer to Armageddon

With two wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western governments are apparently intending to continue their folly by meddling in Syria. Eighty people die there every day, as thousands of foreign Sunni mercenaries massacre the Christian, Alawite and Shia population. The terrorists are financed by Sunni Saudi Arabia and Qatar and trained by the USA, Britain and France. Now the West has fabricated ‘evidence’ of the use of chemical weapons – just as it fabricated ‘evidence’ of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq.

Iraq itself is now divided into three and racked by terrorist bombs; full-scale civil war draws ever closer. Iraqi deputies have asked for the heads of state of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to be tried at the international court in the Hague for supporting extremist terrorists and their unspeakable atrocities, notably in Iraq, Syria and the Yemen. As for Turkey, along whose borders there are training camps for the terrorists in Syria, trained by US, UK and French ‘Special Forces’, it has now too been racked by civil revolt.

The Jordan, once virtually a British colony and now a US protectorate ruled by King Abdallah II, nicknamed ‘Play Station’, has allowed hundreds of tons of arms and munitions to be transferred to its territory at the behest of the dictatorships of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Arms shipments have been organised by the CIA, notably from Croatia. As a result, Jordan is now facing the same unrest as has broken out under the dictatorial regime in Turkey and may yet face territorial division.

Meanwhile, Egypt faces economic and constitutional chaos with daily demonstrations. The persecuted Copts are leaving in their tens of thousands, just as 80% of the Christians had to leave Iraq. In Libya, tribes and militias have divided the country into three and massacre one another daily, not least in Tripoli. Towns and cities of Tunisia are under curfew every evening and Tunisian soldiers are fighting Islamist terrorists near the Algerian border. As for Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Yemen and Bahrein, they are all in a state of unrest.

Two lost, bankrupting and disastrously disturbing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left NATO forces fleeing for their lives (with ‘exit strategies’) from the hornets’ nests which they have stirred up through their meddling. However, the whole Middle East is now in a state of chaos after the Islamist winter, so absurdly called an ‘Arab spring’ and so encouraged by the mixture of purposeful cynicism, self-righteous naivety and stupid greed of Western governments. The Middle East is moving one step closer to Armageddon.

Today China, Tomorrow…

The visit of His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill to China is over. He has travelled widely, celebrating notably in Beijing and in the Cathedrals in Harbin and Shanghai, remembering the work of the Russian and Chinese clergy and faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia there, notably of St John of Shanghai. Thus, the groundwork is being laid for the restoration of the national Chinese Church, dependent neither on the Catholic Vatican nor on Protestant America.

Professor Yury Kosov, Dean of the Faculty of International Relations of the North-Western Academy in Russia, commented today: ‘Not so long ago I was attending the defence of a doctoral thesis at the Faculty of International Relations in St Petersburg, entitled ‘Orthodox spiritual mission in the context of global processes of modernisation’. ‘Today we see that the Orthodox mission of the Russian Church is spreading the faith not only among Russian citizens, but worldwide. The Russian Church is active in furthering the spread of Orthodox values wherever it is possible…We must understand that in our world politics and spirituality are interconnected. If we do not defend national sovereignty…it is hard to keep spirituality in a country’.

The Russian Church also has a role to play in freeing bankrupt Cyprus and Greece and NATO-occupied Serbia. It is also active in Syria. Here it seems that the attempt to seize power by mainly foreign Islamist terrorists, financed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and backed by Western Special Services in the Jordan and Turkey, and armed even with chemical weapons to commit their atrocities, is failing. What they achieved with Western backing and arms in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt is perhaps not going to succeed in Syria. What the Islamists achieved in Iraq, with 80% of the Christians now expelled, and what they are trying to achieve in Egypt with the expulsion and massacre of the Copts, may not work here. The Patriarchate of Antioch, its flock often in exile in the Lebanon and Europe, may be reformed under the Russian Church.

Whatever criticisms may be levelled at the Russian Church inside Russia and its unworthy representatives outside Russia for their compromises in the past, it has to be recognised that with its canonical territory of 26.2 million square kilometres, between one fifth and one sixth of the world’s land area, and with that population, 1.755 billion, exactly one quarter of the world’s population, the Russian Church as a global power must now be recognised. In the last forty years we in the Russian Orthodox Church have come a long way, even from only a few years ago, when we were still a persecuted minority, mocked, buffeted and spat upon by all and sundry, both locally and globally.

Terrorists in Syria Kidnap Patriarch’s Brother

22 April 2013

Near the city of Aleppo, armed terrorists have kidnapped the Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan Boulos (Paul) al-Yazigi of Aleppo and Iskanderun and a Syriac Metropolitan Ibrahim. According to details relayed to the an-Nahar agency by concerned sources, Metropolitan Boulos was on the Turkish side of his archdiocese, which extends from Aleppo to Antakya (Antioch).

Along the road on their return to Aleppo, an armed group stopped them before they could arrive in the city, murdering Metr Ibrahim’s deacon-driver and kidnapping the two metropolitans. The Orthodox metropolitan’s office relates that the two metropolitans were not injured. Metropolitan Boulos is the brother of Patriarch Youhanna (John) of Antioch (Damascus). Additional information came into an-Nahar indicating that the kidnappers include individuals from Chechnya.

This event is a challenge to Western countries, especially the USA, Great Britain and France. In camps in Turkey and the Jordan they are training, financing and arming the Sunni Islamist terrorists of 22 different nations who are operating in the war against Syria. Now that the Patriarch’s brother has been kidnapped (and is probably being held to ransom), will the West retract its support for Al-Qaida terrorism and support the native Christians of the Middle East? Or will it do as in 1054, 1204, 1453 and on countless other occasions since, and once more betray the Church of God?

The Odour of the Apocalypse

Tsar Nicholas III, in a recent speech in St Petersburg, called for the right of all sovereign peoples to determine their own futures without outside interference…Imperial Russian Armies have now crossed the Caucasus and are heading in a two-pronged attack towards Constantinople and through Turkey and Syria towards Jerusalem.

From It’s Later than You Think, July 1991, from Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition

Introduction

Yesterday’s bombing in Boston was appalling and evil. Innocent bystanders, children included, were killed or maimed. However, there are events going on in the world today that are worse even than this. The difference is that those events are hardly reported by the Western media, which often appear to have little but contempt for those who are not included in its ethnocentric navel-gazing.

The Middle

Yesterday’s bomb in Boston is what Iraqis have had to put up with, only on a far worse scale, every few days for the last ten years. A million or more are dead, their country ravaged and in part destroyed, families maimed and killed, even water, gas and electricity in this once rich country are not available all the time. Sometimes, in this oil-rich land, no petrol can be had for cars. The result is that all who can are getting out and that half of Iraq’s almost bimillennial Christians are living in refugee camps and in exile, their lives ruined by a thoughtless and selfish invasion and occupation, which has brought little but misery.

Then there is the war in Syria, largely an invasion being waged by foreign mercenaries against the Syrian people on behalf of powers playing a great geostrategic game to divide and rule the Middle East, whose centre is in Jerusalem. Tunisia, Libya and Egypt have already been destabilised by those powers, their Christian inhabitants the first victims. The terrorists in Syria are fanatical Islamists, their ideology invented by the CIA. They are financed and armed by Afghan drug money, greatly increased since the invasion of Afghanistan, and by the despotic but oil-rich, feudal Islamist monarchies of the Gulf.

These have airlifted in thousands of tons of arms, mainly from Croatia and the Ukraine, to the terrorists who are being trained by US, UK and French Special Forces in the Jordan and Turkey. At stake are the huge untapped gasfields in the Eastern Mediterranean and pipeline routes to Europe. Turkey, for long a puppet, but once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, eyes territory and reserves. The Lebanon quakes, fearing the spillover into its territory. Israel hopes but trembles, seeing opportunities but also threats. The victims are the millions of Christians and other minorities, who mostly live in and around Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.

The West

Meanwhile, the Western world is riven by the problems which it created in 1917, when it exported an ideology of hatred to destroy the Russian Empire, the sole remaining bastion of the Orthodox Christian world, the Orthosphere. Since the fall of that Christian Empire, the world has known only instability. Over the last ninety years, the West has attempted to destroy the soft underbelly of the Orthosphere, installing its candidates as Patriarchs of Constantinople and attempting to undermine the other Greek Patriarchates in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Local Churches in Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

In the last twenty years the Western world, directed from Washington or from its puppet in Brussels, has tried to further undermine those and other parts of the Orthosphere. First, it attacked Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo in a divide and rule policy, bombing Belgrade for Easter, deforming Serbian babies with ‘uranium-enriched’ warheads in Nazi atrocities. Then, having bribed Greece to join the EU, it bribed Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States, so bankrupting them. Finally, the West set about destabilising the Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and, last year, the final bulwark, the Russian Federation.

Western people are many-layered. In order for them to rebecome Christian, they have to remove every layer of their anti-Christian culture, which they deludedly imagine to be Christian. The layer of modern secularism has to go, then that of 19th century imperialism and rationalism (in fact anti-rationalism), then the darkness of the ‘Enlightenment’, then the protest of the Reformation (as if you could understand the Scriptures without the Holy Spirit), next feudalism, scholasticism and the crusades all have to be removed. Sadly, few are able to cleanse themselves of all the delusions of these layers of proud cultural prejudice.

The East

At the other end of Asia to the physically and spiritually bankrupt ‘Judeo-Christian’ West, there is the East. Today, this means the threat from North Korea, a gigantic Stalinist concentration camp, ruled by madmen, who appear to have nuclear weapons, like India, Pakistan, Israel and perhaps Iran. Yet, it is doubtful if this North Korea could exist without Capitalist-Communist China, which is so hard-working and therefore so rich that it also owns much of the Western world. Yet, paradoxically, it may be that it is this part of Asia which may bring solutions to the current world crisis of this time before Antichrist.

Two prophecies tell us that salvation will come from the East. St John of Kronstadt (+ 1908) prophesied that the deliverance of Russia would come from the East and, ten years later, St Aristocleus (+ 1918) prophesied that the real end of Russia’s errings would come through China. And errings there are. In Russia, which stretches from the East to the West and whose canonical Church territory includes China, current dissatisfaction is real and exists because of ingrained and systemic corruption. It is this dissatisfaction, in itself justified, which is so easily exploited by the dark forces of the West which seek to destroy Russia.

If we are worthy of these prophecies, Russia will be restored and with it the rest of the Orthosphere, which for now is captive to German economic power (able even to steal from private bank accounts) and American military power (able even to steal from private computer accounts). If we are worthy of these prophecies, we may yet also be able to gather together the remnants of the peoples of the whole world into the Church before the end. If we are worthy of these prophecies, it may be that the peoples of the East and West will be reunited once more, not by Babylon, but by Jerusalem.

Conclusion

The Christian Russian Empire, heir to the Christian Roman Empire, was crucified in its Golgotha of 1917. After three ‘days’ (generations) it rose from the dead. The giant is now beginning to speak to the world, East and West alike, of the Resurrection and what it saw when it went down to hades. Will the world, seemingly unaware of this odour of the Apocalypse, listen? We can only pray.

Note:

1. In 1973 the Abbess of the Convent at Gethsemane, Mother Barbara (Tsvetkova) spoke of the prophecy of Elder (now St) Aristocleus of Athos (1838-1918), who was then living in Moscow. The Elder told the future Abbess, then a young student, that ‘regeneration in Russia will begin after a most powerful explosion on the bank of a big river’. When in 1986 the atomic catastrophe occurred at Chernobyl, this prophecy came true.

Christians Become Preferred Target in Syria’s Civil War

Posted GMT 4-2-2013 18:58:12

http://www.aina.org/news/20130402135812.htm

Christian Syrians have become a special target of violence and attacks in the ongoing war in Syria, according to Swedish freelance journalist and author Nuri Kino visited refugee’s in Lebanon late
December 2012. Kino filed a horrifying report of killings, kidnappings and rape of Christian Syrians, who are now forced to flee their country, even as the ongoing war in Syria affects every citizen, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

But the situation of the minorities is often neglected in media reports. Nuri Kino visited Lebanon together with Ninson Ibrahim, chair of the Swedish Syriac-Orthodox youth organization UI
(Ungdomsinitiativet). UI organized a charity concert before Christmas in Stockholm to support Christian Syrian war refugees. The purpose of the trip was to investigate the needs of the refugees
and to distribute help. Kino met with Christian refugees, priests, and smugglers.

Back in Stockholm, Kino said that Western media’s report on the war in Syria is too black and white. “Of course, there are exceptions. But one must always try to be aware of the context when there is a
news flash,” Kino said. Kino’s report tells the story of Christians being victims of attacks both from criminals and from terrorists. In some villages there are no Christians left as all have been forced to leave, like in the village of Rasel-Eyn. “I felt I had to contribute to make the voice of the Christians heard. My knowledge should be used,” Kino said, who is himself a Christian from Turkey. “I have an advantage in that I know the language and the culture. I also have a network in Syria.”

Churches and monasteries in Lebanon are trying to register the refugees as they arrive, but so far there are no reliable statistics on how many Christians have fled Syria. Hundreds of refugees seek asylum in Lebanon, some try to go to Germany or to Sweden. Many
Syrians/Assyrians live in Södertälje, a suburb south of Stockholm. Around 30 Christian refugees from Syria arrive every week in Södertälje, according to Kino. They are all Assyrians/Syriacs by ethnicity, as 20,000 inhabitants already living in Södertälje.

Nuri Kinos’ report “Between the Barbed Wire” tells about Christians being victims of harassment, theft, rape, murder and kidnappings. In the Syriac League Institute in Beirut, Nuri Kino met with a widow
who lost both her husband and her son in a murder. “They were brutally killed, both shot in the head by terrorists, Islamists”, she said. “Our only crime is our Christian faith.”

Approximately twelve per cent of the inhabitants in Syria are Christians. Many of them will try to leave the country, Kino said. The larger portion of Christian refugees go to Lebanon, but some seek asylum in Turkey. During the war in Syria, the rebels have become steadily more influenced by Islamists, says Kino, who
believes 70% of the attacks on Christians are carried out by rebel Islamists.

“The revolution started by youngsters writing graffiti. It was not an Islamist movement at all. The revolution has been kidnapped. Today, violent forces have taking over parts of the revolution and
publishes videos where people are being decapitated,” says Kino.
Kino points out that there were Christians among the rebels from the beginning: “Oh yes! And there were legitimate claims for the revolution. There was religious freedom in Syria before the war, but no political freedom. But the revolution was kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists,” says Kino.

However, later development of the revolution has resulted in a situation where Christians are being targeted. And Kino is pessimistic about the future. “I don’t think there is still a possibility to change this revolution into something good,” he says.
In the report, many Christians voice disappointment with “the West” and the US, and with media’s reporting on the war. “You must understand that this is being done deliberately. They want to clear the country of every non-Muslim. And in the West, you are just watching it going on. It is as if the US and all other countries
have become blind or mad. Do you really want an Islamist state instead of the Assad regime? Is that better?” said a man in a café at the Assyrian/Syriac association in Beirut to Kino.

There are also claims that Saudi Arabia is involved in the conflict, sending weapons and money to the revolutionary forces. Christians inside Lebanon are trying their best to help Syrian refugees. In the
report Nuri Kino tells about a visit to a monastery. Here, there are more than hundred refugees seeking asylum, a place to live and a job. Every week new refugees arrive. One of the Church representatives in Lebanon, the Catholic Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Josef III, has earlier criticized the EU for being passive about the situation. “At the moment we have 300 families who have fled Syria. We are trying our best to help them. There are no refugee camps here. Two, three families live in a flat of two or three rooms. But there are few flats available, and we have turned a school into a refugee camp,” the Patriarch said to Kino.

Many refugees have paid substantial sums of money to smugglers to be able to leave Syria. Kino tells the story of Jacob, who ended up in a boat to Italy. He survived the trip, but many of other passengers
did not. Jacob’s story is a horrifying story about people being packed together like cattle in a small boat with no water or food supply for days. Jacob is now in Sweden, very traumatized. During the interview, Kino picks up the phone to call him to see if he has received asylum status in Sweden. “In Sweden, these refugees get a temporary asylum for three years. As Syria is in a war, there are no problems in getting asylum,” Kino said.

After the visit to Lebanon in December Kino went back to Turkey to interview other refugees about the situation for Christians in Syria. “The situation now is even worse than in December,” Kino said.
“This time I met with 21 young Syrian soldiers who fled the governmental armed forces of Syria. Their stories touched my heart. It demands a great courage to leave the army. They are just young boys, and they became tools in the war,” says Kino.

The report on the situation of the Christian minority has reached international attention. Kino hopes that it will change the view of the war and also make the world aware of the situation for non-Muslims in Syria. “Assyrians and other Christians in Syria have been part of the country for 2000 years. It would be devastating if the majority of them would be forced to leave the country such as in Iraq,” says Nuri Kino.

By Inger Alestig
http://themediaproject.org

The Patriarchate of Antioch is facing oblivion in its homeland

Most Orthodox Christians in Syria live in the westernmost parts of that country. It is from here that most of the Christians have been forced to flee for their lives, mainly to the Lebanon. Catholic sources now say that 65% of the natives of Aleppo, once the largest Christian city in Syria, have fled, that every single parish both in the city centre and in the suburbs of Homs, the third largest city in Syria, has been devastated, and that in Damascus itself most parishes have closed and the enthronement of Patriarch John took place in a half-empty Cathedral; it was necessary to hold another enthronement in Beirut. After the Golgotha of Iraq’s Christians, Syria has followed. The Patriarchate, forced out of Antioch (in Turkey), may now be forced out of Damascus in turn. Two news reports follow.

Syria: Muslim Militia Forces Christian Exodus

Posted GMT 3-2-2013 7:12:8
http://www.aina.org/news/20130302011208.htm

Syria’s 2,000-year-old Christian community is being devastated by the country’s civil war.
A Swedish journalist interviewed more than 100 Syrian Christian refugees in Turkey and
Lebanon. They say Muslim rebel militia are driving them out because of their faith.
One woman said her husband and son were shot in the head just because they were
Christians.

Syria’s population of 2 million Christians is the second largest in the Middle East after Egypt,
and now whole villages are disappearing when Islamist rebels arrive. Every week, hundreds of Syrian Christians arrive in Lebanon. A Lebanese Patriarch said it is a ‘great exodus taking place in silence.’

CBN Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell spoke with Lela Gilbert, co-author
of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians, about the persecution of Christians
in Syria and the Middle East.
Watch more of Mitchell’s interview with Gilbert.

Number of Syrians in Lebanon Reaches 920,000

http://www.aina.org/news/20130302011551.htm
Posted GMT 3-2-2013 7:15:51

According to Lebanese government sources, more than 920,000 Syrians (both migrant
workers and persons displaced from the war) are now in Lebanon. The security problems are
getting worse in many areas in Lebanon because many of these Syrians are armed. Western
diplomats in Lebanon have praised the Lebanese government for its cooperation and for not
closing the Lebanese-Syrian border, just as they have praised the Lebanese people for
hosting displaced Syrian families.

But some Western ambassadors have begun to warn Lebanese officials that the displaced
Syrians now constitute a ‘powder keg’, especially since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s
opponents have started thinking of forming armed militias in Lebanon, risking a war between
them and the Lebanese. (There are precise figures about the armed Syrians, which show
they are all over Lebanon, including the capital.)

According to Western circles, the gravity of the issue is pressuring the Lebanese government
to keep a close eye on displaced Syrians in Lebanon. These Western circles told As-Safir
that the Syrian crisis could spread to Lebanon.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati is consistent with the Western officials he meets (most
recently, British Foreign Secretary William Hague when he visited Lebanon, and UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in Davos). He has given Western countries three options: to
close the border with Syria, which is impossible for practical and geographic reasons,
especially since 80% of the Lebanese border is shared with Syria; to transfer some of those
displaced to other countries or for Lebanon to be quickly given material aid as its
humanitarian burden grows.

Of course, the third option is preferred by Western countries and the UN, even though they
are very slow in providing the funds promised at the conference for displaced Syrians in
Kuwait.

Circles close to Mikati told As-Safir that ‘the disbursement of funds is very slow. Lebanon is
in immediate need of $370 million but all we have received so far are promises’. The two
countries that generally keep their promises of money are ‘Kuwait and the UAE, which are
giving large amounts of money for the displaced’….

By Marlene Khalifeh
AL Monitor
Translated from As-Safir (Lebanon).

From Recent Correspondence and Conversations – March 2013

Q: What dangers should those new to the Church especially try to avoid?

A: There are many dangers, just as many as for those of us who are not new to the Church, but the dangers are different ones. Those new to the Church are neophytes and that psychology, common to neophytes of all nationalities and in all religions, is particular.

For instance, I remember about 30 years ago meeting a young Irish woman who had converted to Judaism on marrying a Jew. She had taken up her new religion with all the zeal that you used to associate with Irish Catholicism. She was completely over the top, did not use birth control, wore rather strange clothes, had to eat kosher food, was incredibly pro-Israeli, read a lot etc. Her husband, who was a real Jew, could not have cared a less about any of this and had probably never read a book about Judaism in his life. She was the one who imposed Shabbat on him. In other words, there was no theology there, just the obsessive psychology of insecurity – she felt she had to prove herself by being more Jewish than the Jews. I suspect it all had to do with competition with her mother-in-law, rather than her husband.

Q: What can this type of neophyte insecurity lead to?

A: To extremes – and I think, essentially, the neophyte, like all of us, should avoid extremes. I would take as an example the late French convert, Olivier Clement. In his youth, he tried to be more Russian than the Russians, busying himself with wearing ‘Russian’ clothes and other externals and reading a lot, which he thought would make him Orthodox. Realising that this was absurd, he then went to the other extreme and began writing against the Russian Church, adopting semi-Catholic views and even taking communion in the Catholic Church. These same convert extremes can be seen in other personalities who in their youth were over-zealous, then became over-lax. In this country, for instance, I can think of cases of going from being more Greek than the Greeks to being more Anglican than the Anglicans

Q: How can you fight against such temptations?

A: Keeping a sense of reality. For example, this tendency to a lack of balance is greatly reinforced among intellectuals who do not have their feet on the ground in parish life, so that they have no living examples before them. The Church is not about reading, but about experience of real life. This is why mixed parishes with mixed languages are so vital. Little convert middle-class hothouses, passing themselves off as ‘Orthodox’, or even ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, often trying to impose their own strange or eccentric agendas on the Church and always collapse.

In such groups ‘foreigners’ and ‘foreign languages’ are usually despised or made to feel not at home. Such inward-looking communities are just as much ethnic, ‘phyletist’ ghettos as immigrant or exile groups in big cities – but with a difference. Those groups are at least authentic, but the neophyte groups are pretending or playing, starting ‘beard competitions’, so beloved of ex-Anglicans, for example. This is because they have no roots in Orthodox reality, often, sadly, fleeing that reality. You really either have to get on the Orthodox train or else get off the tracks. If you do not, you will be run over – and it will be your own fault.

Q: Are there other consequences of such insecurity?

A: Yes, judgementalism. Censorious convert conversations like ‘this bishop does that’, or ‘that priest smokes’, or ‘there is a scandal there, so I cannot belong to that Local Church’ always display the same negativity. For example, I know a priest of the Antiochian jurisdiction who gives communion to anyone, Orthodox or not. Does that mean that I am not in communion with his Patriarch or all the many serious bishops and priests of his Church? Of course, I am.

Such conversations are very depressing, because they do not focus on reality, but only on the negative. Did the Apostles focus on Judas? No. So we too should focus on the 100 parishes where life is normal or even thriving and forget the one where there is some sort of scandal. This is not even a case of seeing a half-full glass as half-empty, this is a case of seeing a 99% full glass as 99% empty. The demon plays with our sense of reality and, sowing illusions in our minds, creates depressions, schisms and lapses. We do not lapse because of some scandal; a scandal should bring us zeal. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’, is what we should be saying. That is what the Apostles did after Judas. They had no illusions, but they also rejoiced in the Faith.

Q: What can we do to counter such thoughts?

A: Depression comes from pride. Be humble. Life is beautiful – God made it, not death. We should not expect others to be saints, when we ourselves are not saints. We should condemn only ourselves, others we should always find excuses for. We are responsible only for saving our own soul. Stop interfering, looking at your neighbour. Until we have learned this, we are not Christians, we are only sources of pride, for whom nothing is ever good enough. This is where neophyte idealism is dangerous. As they say: ‘If the grass is greener on the other side, start watering your own side’. We must stay with the mainstream and flee the fringes and margins around the Church. Of course, if we ourselves are asked to compromise, that is a different matter. But that is rare.

Q: How do we avoid compromising ourselves in such cases?

A: I remember a priest at a Diocesan Pastoral Conference in Frankfurt some years ago, asking what would happen when ROCOR and the Patriarchate of Moscow were in communion again, because he knew a particular Patriarchal priest who did totally uncanonical things and the priest who asked the question did not want to concelebrate with him. Archbishop Mark answered very simply and I think with great surprise at the strange question: ‘Then do not invite him to your parish. Then you will not have to concelebrate with him’. It is the same with those who use the Catholic calendar. We have no obligation to go to their parishes and concelebrate with them. But they are welcome to concelebrate with us and we invite them to. In that way they return to the calendar that the Church uses, for a day at least.

An example is from the contemporary OCA, where some ordinary Orthodox are at last revolting against certain converts who have tried to impose Evangelical-style right-wing censoriousness on them. Rooted Orthodox do not want hothouse politics and pseudo-Orthodoxy, they want real-world tolerance. But they do not want lax practice either, which is the other side of the extremist coin. They have suffered from this for over forty years and that has led to the present crisis in the OCA, which means that it has been isolated from World Orthodoxy and few concelebrate with it, as we saw at the recent enthronement of Patriarch John of Antioch.

With all its financial and moral scandals the OCA is suffering from the sort of problems that the Roman Catholics are suffering from – and for the same reason – loss of faith. But that does not mean that everyone there is involved. That is why we must pray for it especially now. It is always a noisy minority that compromises the outward life of the Church. But the angels are still here, in spite of us. Never forget that. We serve God, not man. The Church is God’s, not ours. As for us, today we are here, tomorrow we are gone, but the gates of hell will not prevail. The Church does not need us, we need the Church.

Q: Where can Russian Orthodox in the West go for training at seminary? Would you recommend the new seminary in Paris?

A: Definitely not Paris. It has failed to meet our hopes on all counts and is notoriously ecumenist, as everyone knows and as we have told the authorities in Moscow face to face. It is amazing to us that in Moscow they still naively think in pre-Revolutionary categories, that the Catholic Church is utterly serious and is not subject to the Protestant-style freemasonry, homosexuality and pedophilia that entered it massively after the Americanisation of the Second Vatican Council.

In Russia they never went through the 1960s, so in that sense they still largely retain the freshness and also naivety of the 1950s. However, by compromising themselves by fraternising with Catholics, as they do in Paris, they are also compromising themselves with pedophiles. They do not consider this. It is a great shame that in Moscow they still do not listen to us in ROCOR about such matters. We are the Church Outside Russia, we were born here, we live here, we are aware, we talk to Catholics every day as neighbours and we know what goes on there. There are plenty of ordinary, decent Catholics who look to the Orthodox Church to free them from such tyranny and deformations. But be patient, give them time in Moscow and they will learn.

To answer your question about seminary training today: Seek a blessing to go either to Jordanville or else, in certain cases, to the seminary at Sretensky Monastery in Moscow. One day Paris will be cured. It has only just started.

Q: What is our view today of Metropolitan/Patriarch Sergius (Stragorodsky)? In 1930 over 30 bishops rejected administrative submission to Metropolitan Sergius, disputing his compromise with the atheist authorities. Metropolitan Sergius found himself in isolation, face to face with an atheist orgy, that took on a larger and larger scale. Do we still agree with what Fr Seraphim Rose wrote in his book ‘The Catacomb Saints’?

A: I think our view of Metr Sergius today is very much what it always has been. We do not agree with him, but also we do not condemn him – we never went through what he had to go through and were never faced with the choice between martyrdom and compromise. Having said that, it is true, for example, that Fr Seraphim Rose’s book, ‘The Catacomb Saints’, reflects some of the unnecessarily negative polemics of the Cold War 1970s, but that book is still fundamentally right, despite the sharp language used in it sometimes and its strange title.

In Russia today there is still a hangover from the Soviet period and deSovietisation has not run its course completely. It will take another generation for deSovietisation to be completed. For this reason there are still those there who praise Metr Sergius. However, we should not feel superior, in the West we also underwent the censorious and condemnatory, judgemental pharisee attitudes of ‘ColdWarisation’. But I think most have been able to rid themselves of that alien influence quicker than they have in Russia. Those who did not rid themselves of such attitudes have left us.

Q: What do we make of Metr Sergius’ role in rallying Russians during WWII?

A: As for rallying Russians in World War II, it could easily be argued that the Church survived DESPITE Metr Sergius. Stalin realised he could not win the war without the Church. The Nazi attack on the Russian Lands, on the feast day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, 22 June 1941, was, paradoxically, what freed the Church, not the compromises of Metr Sergius. And from then on, until Stalin’s death and after that, the Church was not decimated as before 1941. True, Stalin and Khrushchev after him did of course close many, many churches which Stalin had allowed to reopen and still sent many to camps and prisons, but there were no longer the mass shootings etc.

We, who never had to go through Sovietisation, should concentrate on the New Martyrs themselves, on the canonised, for example, on the holy Metr Kyrill of Kazan, and not on such divisive and controversial figures as Metr Sergius. I know that in Russia they are already heading the same way and Metr Sergius is being forgotten by the faithful as, if anything, an embarrassing compromiser. Leave him to the dusty tomes of historians. Let us keep our eyes on the saints, not on the non-saints.

Q: Why does the Church of Constantinople use lots of clerical titles? I know of several bishops and even a metropolitan who are only glorified hieromonks. And the titles of protopresbyter and archimandrite are becoming meaningless as they have become so common there.

A; I think it is quite unfair to say that it is only the Patriarchate of Constantinople that gives out such titles so freely. True, the title protopresbyter seems now to be given there to any priest who has a doctorate and archimandrite is rather used as ‘hieromonk’ is used in the Russian Church. On the other hand, in the Russian Church ‘Metropolitan’ is sometimes used in a titular way as ‘Cardinal’ in the Catholic Church and there is a system of awards in the Russian Church that is often abused. So I cannot see that this is any better than in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Some people are a little vain and like titles and can be bought with them. Sadly, people have their price and in a world where many priests are not paid in money, they can get paid in titles.

Q: As Orthodox what should we think of Eurasianism?

A: There is something called the International Eurasian Movement, which is Russian-based and developed after the fall of Communism in 1991, though on the basis of a pre-Revolutionary movement. On the surface, Eurasianism has links with Orthodoxy, whose emblem is the double-headed eagle, looking east and west. The Church of God, Orthodox Christianity, has the task and mission of uniting the world, east and west, Europe and Asia, in unity in diversity. (This is quite unlike the Vatican sense of unity – inherited also by the Protestants – which allows little diversity and imposes a totalitarian unitary model on all. This we can see in the EU model, which is a secular form of the Vatican model, and in the US model, which is a secular form of the Protestant model. Such people look at the diversity of Orthodoxy and call it disunity! This is only because they are used to such monolithic, totalitarian heterodox styles).

Generally speaking, Eurasianism sees the modern West (not the historic Old West) as having taken a destructive path, especially since the Reformation and especially since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’. Western culture today has been spiritually emptied, it has lost its soul, abandoning its roots in the Christian Orthodox first millennium, decadently reverting to barbarianism. In other words, behind incredible Western economic and technological sophistication, there is spiritual barbarianism, as can be seen in the Western promotion of sodomy and other politically correct but spiritually pernicious views.

Eurasianism sees the future in Russia, not in the West, which in its decadence ever more resembles the Western Roman Empire just before it fell over fifteen centuries ago. Insofar as this is self-evident, we as Orthodox agree with Eurasianism. However, the problem is that Eurasianism is essentially politics, another ism or ideology, not the Church.

Q: Who founded this Eurasian movement?

A: The founder of modern Eurasianism is the Russian Orthodox philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was born in 1962. Typical of the post-Communist generation, at first, in the 1990s, he tried to reconcile Bolshevism or Stalinism with Orthodoxy. In so doing he also got caught up with post-Soviet right-wing nationalist movements like ‘Pamyat’. His Eurasianism developed out of this spiritual impurity. He has since moved on somewhat and begun to free himself, expressing more traditional Orthodox views, though still remaining a nationalist. However, what is written about him on Wikipedia is probably the work of a CIA hack. There is little truth in that.

I met Alexander Dugin at a Conference in London about eight years ago and had a clear impression of him. He is intellectually clever, but still suffers from spiritual confusion. This is why he mixes Orthodoxy with politics of all sorts, though particularly with right-wing views. His closest disciple is a young intellectual called Natella Speranskaya, who heads the Eurasian Youth Movement, but she also suffers in the same way as Dugin. Dugin is linked with the Greek Orthodox intellectual Dimitrios Kitsikis, an elderly geopolitician of the previous generation. Although also a friend of the Orthodox Tradition – Kitsikis wants the Greek Church to return to the Orthodox calendar – he too suffers from spiritual and nationalist confusion and has been closely linked with Maoism!

What is interesting with both these Orthodox thinkers is that they have both been inspired by the father of geopolitics, the Non-Orthodox English geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder. Mackinder called Eurasia (basically Russia and the Orthosphere, or the Orthodox civilisational world), what we call ‘the Centre’, ‘The Heartland’. This is what Kitsikis calls the Intermediate Region and, I suppose, if we use Tolkien’s terminology, we could also call it ‘Middle Earth’.

In other words, there is no doubt that all three geopoliticians, Englishman, Greek and Russian, completely agree that he who controls Russia / Eurasia controls the world. This is why the territory of the Russian Empire, or Soviet Union, or Russian Federation, whatever the name, has been so much attacked down the centuries – because of its geostrategic significance.

Q: What is happening in Syria?

A: I am only an observer. It is difficult for me to say anything. However, I cannot help observing certain public tendencies in US policies since Mr Obama was re-elected last year. Until then his policies seem to have been Republican and Bushite.

First of all, the US right-wing hawk General Petraeus who wanted to invade Syria and perhaps bomb Iran was sacked, having been compromised, and perhaps framed, in an affair. There followed a root and branch change in US foreign personnel. Most notably the hawkish Russophobe Hillary Clinton was replaced as Secretary of State by John Kerry, formerly a personal friend of President Assad of Syria. Clinton had been blamed for the death of the US ambassador in Benghazi in Libya, killed by Islamic terrorists, armed to the teeth with weapons allowed to them by the US. I think that the US administration realised that it had been arming its enemies. This was seen in Mali too, which Islamists had been conquering with weapons stolen as a result of NATO bombing in Libya. I remember the old saying: ‘Do not spit in the sky, it will fall back on your face’.

Then there was the appointment of the new US Defence Secretary, Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and hero, who called the bankrupting invasion of Iraq one of the greatest blunders in US history. It had completely destabilised the whole region, creating a whole chain of liabilities for the US. This involved Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey (where anti-US attacks have taken place), the Kurds, the Jordan, the Lebanon and the money-pit of Israel – the US had lit a fuse on a powder keg and is now trying to extinguish it before it is too late.

Thus, the realisation that many of the foreign mercenaries fighting President Assad’s government in Syria are terrorists seems at last to have come to the US. From what I understand, I have the impression, and it is only an impression, that the US may have realised that the real danger from its point of view is China and that perhaps it had better leave the Middle East to Russia. It cannot fight both at the same time. Even tiny but incredibly wealthy Saudi Arabian and Qatari dictatorships, which financed and armed the tens of thousands of Sunni Islamist mercenaries in Syria, are worried now. The genie was let out of the bottle. It has to be put back. I think only Russia, which has over one million Russian speakers in Israel and influence in Syria, can do this. Someone has to clean up the mess the West has made.

Q: What are we to think of Columbus?

A: I think he was an Italian sailor who got lost at sea, thought he had found India, but in fact had found some Caribbean islands. So he landed in someone else’s country and decided to steal it by massacring and enslaving the inhabitants.

Quo Vadis, O Vaticane?

There are many views of Pope Benedict’s recent shock resignation. Some see just an old and failing man who cannot go on any longer, who is exhausted by ‘the heat of the day’. Others see more sinister forces at work. Some believe that his resignation came about as a result of pressure from various international groups, political and financial lobbies or pro-homosexual and pro-contraceptive lobbies. They believe that the Pope, ‘the infallible Vicar of Christ’, was forced to leave his post because he was resisting those secularist lobbies. There are after all groups who are working towards the New World Order, in which there is no place for sovereign institutions such as the Vatican, or indeed anyone who shows spiritual independence from the financial domination of a future Global Government. If this is all so, at present, it seems, these powers are operating a two-pronged attack, financial and political.

Firstly, they are setting the stage for a World Bank, required because of the present purely artificial financial crisis, a worldwide manipulation which is now in its sixth year. This was caused by indebtedness, which was long promoted by Western governments and banks, Secondly, these powers are sowing chaos in the Arab World, taking back Arab countries to the Middle Ages. The influence of these powers in Rome seems to be clear from the Vatican’s silence on Libya and its apparent abandonment of Egyptian and Syrian Christians, like Christians in Iraq before them and Christians in Serbia before them. Already on 5 September 2011, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself of Jewish descent, openly announced to the Roman Catholic Maronite Cardinal of Antioch that, with the coming to power of Western-backed Islamists in Syria, Christians there would have to flee to Europe.

Interestingly, the Western Roman Catholic Press attacked this same Roman Catholic Cardinal’s denunciations of the West for its support of Islamist terrorism in Syria. The Vatican’s silence and even encouragement of Western interventionism, exactly as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, suggests that it may already have become the puppet of the New World Order project, which only further weakens its spiritual authority. The global elite behind the New World Order project is not so much saying, ‘If you do not go along with us, your country will descend into chaos’, but rather, ‘If you do not go along with us, we will ensure that your country descends into chaos’. It has already happened in fragmented Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now it is happening in Syria, with its ‘Somali-isation’, that is, division by bandit warlords into rival fiefs.

If all this is so, then the Cardinal-electors of the new Pope face a stark choice. Are they going to assert their independence from the New World Order, or are they going to fall for globalism and ‘global governance’, as it is called? This is very much their last chance to choose. After a thousand years of compromise with this world, this may well be the Vatican’s final choice. In today’s terms, it means a choice between the continued desacralisation of protestantisation and secularisation, begun fifty years ago with the Second Vatican Council, and spiritual resistance to secularisation by siding with Non-Western countries. Undermined and discredited by the pedophile scandal, which was completely of its own making, the Vatican may well choose secularisation. That would make it popular with the highly-controlled Western media. But that would also be its suicide, the end of the road.

The crisis in Rome is nothing new. In the past the Papacy has continually been manipulated by foreign and often atheist powers, from Medieval Monarchs to Napoleon and from Republicans to Fascists. Thus, only recently, there was a Polish Pope, elected to destroy Communism. And the present German Pope reflects the Western Schism of 1054, which occurred as the result of another carefully chosen German Pope, Leo IX. However, if the present crisis is the final crisis, one of its results will surely be the exile of Orthodox refugees from the West to Russia. After all, in her time Catherine II gave refuge to Serb, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox from Turkish oppression and Tsar Nicholas I gave refuge to French citizens from Revolutionary oppression. Some of their descendants fought for Russia against France during the allied Western/Ottoman invasion of Russia known as the Crimean War.

Although the Russian Federation and Church seem to have defeated last year’s orchestrated media attacks from the West, the rest of the Orthodox world is in chaos, not least in the Ukraine and Georgia. The four Orthodox countries that were seduced by Western money to join the EU are now in crisis: Greece has gone bankrupt and Cyprus is going bankrupt amid elections; the Bulgarian government has just resigned amid demonstrations; poverty-stricken Romania is on the verge of bankruptcy – as also the depopulated Baltic States with their Orthodox minorities. Orthodox Syria is being divided and returned to the Middle Ages by 65,000 foreign Islamist terrorists, financed largely by Qatar and flown there by the USA under its divide and rule policy. The only light is the sight of Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and Africa aboard a Russian warship in Dar es Salaam on 17 February.

Little wonder that eyes are turning with hope to a future when a restored Orthodox Russian Federation could once more become the visible centre of the Orthodox and so Christian world. At this moment when we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov and the 1700th anniversary of the Incarnational Edict of Milan, our prayers turn to a new Tsar, who could renew the monarchy of St Constantine. Soon the Orthodox Patriarchs will be gathering in Nish in Serbia to commemorate the Edict. As Orthodox, we should beware, however, of extremists on the left (disincarnate, liberal, ecumenist and modernist) and on the right (sectarian, nationalist and zealous not according to knowledge) fringes of the Church who have tried, try and will try to stop the restoration of Orthodox Russia to her inter-Orthodox calling. Only the Royal Way, the Tsar’s Path, will save us from such temptations.
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The Roman Catholic Crisis and the Orthodox Future

On July 18th, 1870, the (First Vatican) Council met for the last time. As the first of the Fathers stepped forward to declare his vote (on papal infallibility), a storm of lightning and thunder suddenly burst over St Peter’s. All through the morning the voting continued, and every vote was accompanied by a flash and a roar from heaven.

Lytton Strachey, on ‘Cardinal Manning’ in his ‘Eminent Victorians’

The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI last week shocked many, not least Roman Catholics. Conspiracy theories are rife, all the more so since on the evening of his resignation a violent thunderstorm erupted over Rome and, dramatically, lightning struck St Peter’s Basilica. Some of these theories assert that the Pope of Rome is dying of cancer and has not long to live, others that he resigned in order to escape a deepening of the pedophile scandal, or else a financial scandal. Others believe that the next Pope will be the last Pope and will call a Third Vatican Council, which will be the end of millennial Roman Catholicism.

According to these crisis theories, this last Pope will either be a saintly man or else a profoundly evil one, and that either the Vatican will come under persecution and disappear, or else that a new Church will replace it. In the latter case, for us, this can only mean a Western European Metropolia under the Russian Orthodox Church, the only multinational Local Church, and the only Local Church large enough to establish such a Metropolia. One wonders if this Friday’s meteor that appeared over Russia and then exploded just south of Ekaterinburg, the place of martyrdom of the Royal Martyrs in 1918, is not linked with this.

Against this background do we not see the genocide of Orthodox Syria, organised and financed by the anti-Christian Western Powers and their Islamist allies? It is written: ‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…land fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven…’ (Lk 21, 10-11). However, let us remain sober. What practically are the prospects for such a Metropolia to come into being? The Orthodox Diaspora seems to be divided into narrow ethnic ghettos, generally unable to see beyond temporary nationalistic or political interests. Such ghettos have only one destiny – to die out. They are history.

A great move forward occurred six years ago, when the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church were reunited, after it had been proved that the Church inside Russia was free of State interference. Now together and growing with 824 parishes and monasteries in countries of the Diaspora, Russian Orthodox churches outside Russian Orthodox canonical territory are clearly a vital part of Orthodox life in the Diaspora. It is obvious then that no Metropolia can be built on political division, or on groups used for Cold War purposes and financed by Non-Orthodox Powers, who are at present orchestrating the destruction of Orthodox Syria.

The regular meetings of all local Orthodox Bishops in different countries or groups of countries (North America, Latin America, France, Great Britain and Ireland etc) only became possible after this reuniting of both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2007. Until then the Russian Church of the Diaspora was excluded for political reasons and so any meetings were unrepresentative, political manipulations. The next step is an inter-Orthodox step to unite the Diaspora in regional Metropolias. Such regional Metropolias, in Western Europe, in the Americas and in Australasia, cannot be built on the lowest common denominator.

The fact is that Metropolias, the essential basis for new future Local Churches, will be built on the maximum of Orthodox practice, not on some artificially contrived minimum and compromise. The concept that a Church can be built on the lowest common denominator of different Orthodox dioceses (so-called ‘jurisdictions’) is surreal. It must be built on the maximum and only then can economy be applied. Any other ‘solution’ would be a grave mistake. Indeed, it was tried experimentally in the USA during the Cold War and has been a moral and financial fiasco. This is an experiment not to be repeated.

For example, all Local Churches believe that there are no sacraments outside the Orthodox Church; however, all regularly apply economy in their reception of heterodox. All Local Churches agree that there is only one Church calendar. However, all apply economy, that is allow temporarily for pastoral reasons, the use of the secular calendar for the fixed feasts, to those communities which are not spiritually strong enough to live the Orthodox calendar. Similarly, all Local Churches clearly need traditional monastic life, as with the Greek Archdiocese in the USA, which has been saved by the monasteries of Fr Ephraim.

Of course, all can also agree that some extreme practices are simply unacceptable, even out of economy. We can think of intercommunion, the abolition of fasting and confession, cremation, or other strange practices of small marginal convert groups, who have never integrated the Orthodox Faith. These of course we exclude. The time is coming when new Orthodox Metropolias, composed voluntarily, will be born. Orthodox need them so as to be stronger together. But also the failing heterodox world, which is clearly in crisis, needs a canonical Church with a married priesthood and sacraments. It has only one choice.

The Silent Exodus of Syria’s Christians

Posted GMT 2-9-2013 4:10:
http://www.aina.org/news/20130208221023.htm

In Syria’s rebellion, no religious or ethnic group has been spared horrific levels of loss and suffering, but its 2,000-year-old Christian minority is now facing a distinct persecution.

Under the cover of war and chaos, this group, which alone lacks militias of its own, is easy prey for Islamists and criminals, alike. These assaults are driving out the Christians en masse. This 2,000-year-old community, numbering around 2 million is the largest church in the Middle East after Egypt’s Copts, and it now faces extinction. Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East, despite recent heart surgery, is now constantly on the road in Lebanon and Iraq trying to cope with the refugee crisis. He wrote to me today:

“We are witnessing another Arab country losing its Christian Assyrian minority. When it happened in Iraq nobody believed Syria’s turn would come. Christian Assyrians are fleeing massively from threats, kidnappings, rapes and murders. Behind the daily reporting about bombs there is an ethno-religious cleansing taking place, and soon Syria can be emptied of its Christians.”

Official information and media reports about the Christians’ fate has been sparse. A new report yesterday, by Nuri Kino, a Swedish journalist of Assyrian background, sheds valuable light on the atrocities visited upon the Christians inside Syria, and their ordeals in attempting to escape, relying as they must on exploitative human-trafficking networks that have sprung up. Entitled “Between the Barbed Wire,” the report resulted from a trip sponsored by a Swedish charity, the Syriac Orthodox Youth Organization, to assess the needs of refugees. It is based on over a hundred interviews this past Christmas with Christian refugees in Turkey and Lebanon. The refugees and the Lebanese bishops whom Kino and his team interview relate that Christians are leaving in a torrent. Once they cross into Lebanon, guided by Middle Eastern versions of “coyotes” through a harrowing series of checkpoints
guarded by various sides in the conflict, they mostly seek out the local Christian communities for help. A clearly overwhelmed Archbishop George Saliba, on Mount Lebanon, says about the refugees: “I want to help as many as I can, but it is not sustainable. We have hundreds of Syrian refugees who arrive every week. I don’t know what to do.”

Elsewhere in Lebanon, St. Gabriel’s monastery has opened its 75 unheated rooms to over a hundred refugees. In another Lebanese Christian town, the Syrian Catholic patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Josef III has converted a school building into a shelter for the hundreds of refugees there now and the others constantly arriving. The patriarch describes it as the “great exodus taking place in silence.” He also says he houses Christians who fled several years ago from Iraq. All of the Christian towns visited for the report are scrambling to keep up with the influx of Syrian Christians. Church
leaders were grateful for the beds, washing machines, heaters, and medicine brought by the Swedish visitors.

Some of the Syrians say they plan to stay in Lebanon until Syria “calms down” and they can return to their homes. Many others say going back is “unthinkable” and are making plans to try to get to Europe either on valid visas or by paying smugglers the going rate of $20,000. They are largely small-business owners and skilled
professionals — an engineer and his family, a jeweler and his, a hairdresser, a medical student, etc. Many hope to be smuggled to Sweden and Germany, where they can receive some state subsidies until they find work.

The town of Sodertalje seems to be a popular destination, with 35 new Christian families arriving from Syria each week. Kino, himself a citizen of Sodertalje, relates that there are already many Syrian Christians living there, and Arabic is more common than Swedish. The refugees were panic-stricken, pointing to some horrifying triggering event that forced them out — a kidnapping of a relative, a murder, or a robbery. They feel they are targeted for being Christian, which means that militants and criminals can assault them with impunity. Some point to a government that fails to protect them; others to Islamists rebels who want to drive them out. A refugee tells Kino: “Two men from a strong Arabic tribe decided one day to occupy our farmland, just like that. When I went to the police to report, I was told there was nothing they could do. The police chief was very clear that they would not act, as they didn’t want the tribe to turn against the regime.”

A woman from Hassake recounts how her husband and son were shot in the head by Islamists. “Our only crime is being Christians,” she answers when asked if there had been a dispute. A father says: “We’re not poor, we didn’t run from poverty. We ran from fear. I have to think about my twelve-year-old daughter. She’s easy prey for kidnappers. Three children of our friends were kidnapped. In two cases they paid enormous ransoms to get the children back, and in one case they paid but got the child back dead.”

Another man attests: “In Syria, you don’t know who is your friend and who is your enemy. The wealthy have it the worst. Criminals wait in line to kidnap them.” The refugees all fear the Islamists. When the jihadi rebel units show up and take over a town, like Rasel-Eyn, it loses its Christian population over night. One man from there tells Kino: “The so-called Free Syrian Army, or rebels, or whatever you choose to call them in the West, emptied the city of its Christians, and soon there won’t be a single Christian in the whole country.”

There is no complete data on the number of refugees. How many Christians have fled is not known and escapees continue to come across the border each day. We are only beginning to understand the peril they face. Archdeacon Youkhana pleads: “The world must open their eyes to the plight.”

By Nina Shea

National Review Online

Nina Shea is director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (Thomas Nelson Publishers,
March 2013).