Iraqi Christians

As if the past few days didn't contain their fair share of human misery, the accounts coming out of Iraq about the treatment of Christians at the hands of ISIS are harrowing in the extreme. I urge you to read Tim Stanley's account here, lightly inflected though it may be with problematic politics.

One paragraph mid-way through the piece merits attention here:

Yet, having been so intimately involved in the collapse of Iraq, the West is now bizarrely silent about events in Mosul. The streets of London fill with thousands marching against Israel’s military operation in Gaza; the West rails mightily against the Russian separatists in Ukraine. But of Iraq there is nothing. Why?

Unlike Stanley I don't think there is any such thing as 'the West' which has raged against Israel and the Moscow-aligned separatists. On the contrary, the rulers of some Western countries have focused on the latter, some (but not all by any distance) of the ruled on the former. Nevertheless, there is a fair question to be asked of the Left. What have we to say about the persecution of Christians by groups like ISIS? More pointedly, the question could be rephrased: why the silence?

Now, I think the silence has been well-motivated. Any case of Christians suffering at the hands of Muslims is, in the current climate, ripe for appropriation by the Islamophobic Right in the cause of a warmed-over clash-of-civilisations narrative. This whole area is made difficult by the fact that plenty of concern for persecuted Christians, and not a few agencies devoted to their relief, are tainted with this politics. The Barnabas Fund is an example of one British group this blogger would not touch with a bargepole.

It is tempting to think, therefore, that political discourse in this area is polluted beyond the possibility of emancipatory use. This is a temptation, however, and one to which we shouldn't succumb - it is an admission of intellectual defeat, and much more importantly a cowardly abandonment of innocent victims. Another reason for silence is more sophisticated: we make noise about Gaza because, as citizens of imperialist States closely aligned to Israel, our own ruling class is directly complicit in the attrocities there in a way they are not in ISIS. This strategy is compatible with the recognition of an indirect complicity in the actions of ISIS, which were - after all - a foreseeable probable outcome of the war in Iraq.

On this second point: the differing political relations between Western ruling classes and Israel, on the one hand, and ISIS on the other, constitute good reasons to treat the two cases differently. They are no reason to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians altogether. There are things we can say about their situation. We can, for example, make the connection between ISIS and the Iraq war explicit (there are more intriguing questions to be asked about Western support for ISIS' antecedents as well). We can actually condemn ISIS - it is amazing how this is a somewhat controversial position in some radical quarters. If there are ways of expressing solidarity with the victims of religious oppression and violence in Iraq, we should make use of them (and this is something I need to explore). The time will come, I fear,  when we are supporting some of these people against the UK asylum and immigration system. Perhaps the biggest debt we owe, though, to suffering humanity is not to forget it. Thus far, we have failed.