Tormenting the Souls of Religious Arabs: ‘Arab Spring’ Degrades into Sectarian Counterrevolution http://www.zcommunications.org/tormenting-the-souls-of-religious-arabs-arab-spring-degrades-into-sectarian-counterrevolution-by-nicola-nasser.html

Islamist Copy of Christian Inquisition 

The “Arab Spring” was optimistically named after a season in nature during which life is reborn and was supposed to promise a renewal of the stagnant political, social and economic life in the Arab world, but unfortunately it turned instead into a sectarian season of killing, death and destruction by counterrevolution forces nurtured financially, logistically, militarily and politically by the most conservative among the Arab ruling regimes in the Arabian Peninsula and their U.S. – led western sponsors and backers. The sectarian cleansing in Iraq and Syria committed by the exclusionist sectarian zealots has become an Islamist modern copy of the European Christian inquisition in the Middle Ages, with the difference that the old European one was more systematic and organized by the Vatican institution and its allied states while it is perpetrated by uncontrolled sporadic and shadowy gangs of terror in the modern Arab case. The fact that this horrible phenomenon came into life only with the U.S. – led invasion then occupation of Iraq in 2003 and exacerbated with the on - record U.S. campaign for a “regime change” in Syria could only be interpreted as an outcome of a premeditated policy to divide and rule in the Arab world. On last August 24, the Maronite patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai’e told the Vatican Radio: “There is a plan to destroy the Arab world for political and economic interests and boost inter-confessional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites,” adding, “We are seeing the total destruction of what Christians managed to build in 1,400 years” in terms of peaceful cohabitation and coexistence with Muslims. This interpretation is vindicated, for example, by the fact that both the sectarian ruling antagonists, who were brought to power in Iraq by the invading U.S. army, and the al-Qaida –linked protagonists, whose presence in Iraq coincided with the U.S. occupation of the country and who are waging a sectarian war of terror to remove them from power, were both U.S. – made warriors, the first as the “democratic opposition” to the national “dictatorship” of late Saddam Hussein and the second as the “freedom fighters” against the military occupation of Afghanistan by the former Soviet Union “empire of evil,” according to the U.S. propaganda terminology.  Singling out Plight of Christians Misleading Misleadingly or otherwise, the mainstream western media is singling out the plight of Arab Christians in this blind rampage, although their plight is incomparable to that of their Muslim compatriots neither in numbers and magnitude of the phenomenon nor in the resulting human, social, political, cultural and material losses. Writing in the Gulf News on this September 11, Dr. Joseph A. Kechichian said “it was impossible to separate the fate of Arab Christians from their Muslim brethren, a term used here in the sense of fellow citizens not necessarily brotherhood. Indeed, when Iraqi, Egyptian and now Syrian churches were/are destroyed, it is necessary to also note that Sunni and Shiite mosques were and are shelled on a regular basis.” In Iraq for example more than sixty churches were attacked since the U.S. invasion in 2003, but more than four hundred Muslim mosques were targeted. An estimate of two thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have been forced to flee the country, but four million Iraqi Muslims became refugees abroad and a few millions more were internally displaced as the result of mass sectarian cleansing campaigns. Patriarch al-Rai’e accused the international community of “total silence” over Iraq. The Cradle of Diversity and Coexistence The political degradation of the “Arab Spring” into a sectarian counterrevolution is best illustrated in Syria. The former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a recent UPI report described the current conflict in the country as a “Sunni confessional revolution” against a ruling regime supported by other religious minorities. Kissinger was not accurate. The majority of the Sunni Muslims in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, which together are the home of half the population, are against the sectarian “revolution” led by al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood, which are not considered representatives of mainstream Islam or Muslims.
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