Global hostility toward Christians coupled with a fear of offending Muslims is contributing to a modern-day Christian holocaust in the Middle East at the hands of the Islamic State, says the founder of an organization that aids Iraqi Christians living under siege by Islamist militants.
"There's an attack against the Christian church in the West and in the East, and this is why the world is silent" toward the Islamic State's atrocities against Christians, Juliana Taimoorazy, founder of the Iraqi Christian Relief Fund, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV on Monday.
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"We're too afraid to even offend Islamist extremists," said Taimoorazy, an Assyrian Christian who fled religious persecution in her native country, Iran, and resettled in the United States.
"Therefore, who pays the heaviest price?" she said. "Those innocent victims in the East, Christians and other minorities, like Yazidis."
Taimoorazy welcomed a "60 Minutes" feature on Sunday
about the plight of Iraqi Christians, whom she said are being "exterminated from that region" by the Islamic State (ISIS).
But she called the segment a rarity, and did not hesitate to compare the persecution of Middle East Christians today to ethnic and religious genocides of the past.
"The Assyrian Christian holocaust was 1914-1918 alongside of the Armenians and Greeks," she said. "Our 100-year anniversary is on April 15, 2015, and yet this is going on again in front of our eyes."
Taimoorazy is also executive producer of a short docudrama, "Sing a Little Louder," that draws parallels between Christianity in the Middle East today and the Holocaust, when Christians in Germany closed their ears to the suffering of Jews under Nazi rule — singing louder at church to drown out the cries.
She says the film is intended to "wake up America and the West," but acknowledged that some people she encounters remain indifferent.
"They say they [Christians] have lived with these atrocities for centuries; let them either leave their homeland or let them stand up and become equipped to defend themselves," she said.
Taimoorazy has found herself agreeing with calls for greater self-defense.
"We as Christians have always taken the love route, the passive route, but enough is enough," she said. "We have to be equipped to defend ourselves. The Kurds are equipped to defend themselves. The Iraqi military has weapons. Why shouldn't the Christians and the Yazidis be equipped to defend themselves?"
"If we don't stand up and defend ourselves, our language, which is Aramaic — and 4 million of us are left in the world — it will be extinct," she said. "And we, as an Assyrian people, will be extinct, and next you'll hear about us as Mayans and Incas."
Besides the killings and expulsions of Christians from their ancient lands in northern Iraq,
ISIS is also destroying Christian infrastructure.
"Our monuments were defaced, our thousand-year-old historical figures were all shattered," said Taimoorazy. "so what they're aiming to do, not only cleanse us religiously, they're cleansing us ethnically as well.
"This is where the women rights organizations have to stand up," she added, "because our girls are being sold into sex slavery. There are the human rights organizations that are silent, and the church is singing louder and louder through their choirs to drown out the cries of the Christians from the East."
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