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| Map of the Muslim Population by Percentage in the World (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
All places with connection to Christian culture, like St. Elian's tomb, the monastery around it (Mar Elian Monastery), an ancient structure located just outside a Syrian town captured by the group earlier this month, got bulldozed down.
What began as demonstrations against the nation's Ba'athist president, Bashar al-Assad, has become a complex fight among the Syrian regime; moderate rebels; Kurds; and Islamists, such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Muslims made use of it to convert people to what they call the true Islam and to go and destroy all 'heathen' monuments.
Places where archaeologists have worked excavating and preserving like the site of Palmyra for 40 years are destroyed for being a witness in later centuries.
The torture and beheading of leading Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad had to be again one of the many killings to frighten people and to make them choose for ISIS.
Already hundreds of Christian families have fled central Syrian towns as Islamic State fighters advanced toward them. But also Muslims are looking for an escape of the terrorist so called Muslim fanatics. More and more Mohammedan people are daring to speak out that it can not be that those ISIS people would be real Muslims. Problem is that some Muslims are finding ways to accuse Israel of infiltrating and funding groups against Muslim groups so that the Muslim world would be destabilised. Some said to me that they had seen video where when zoomed in could be seen fighters wearing a David star. I myself did not see any proof of that yet and consider it propaganda material which is used to set one group of people up against an other group.
The Druze, a centuries-old Arab community and an offshoot of Shia Islam, is the latest religious minority in the Levant to suffer the wrath of Islamic extremists. Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliated group fighting the Assad regime in Syria, in June of this year killed nearly two dozen members of the Druze community in Syria’s northern region near the town of Idlib. Nusra, like the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) and other radical Sunni groups, views the Druze, much like the Shia, as “apostate” Muslims that should be killed. Islamic militants have already attacked Shia and Christian communities and their places of worship in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
In her thoughtful New York Times Magazine article, “The Shadows of Death,” Eliza Griswold has chronicled the plight of Christians in the Middle East and how attacks by radical Islamic groups have led to the Middle East emptying itself of Christians. This is a sad tale for the Christian community, for other religious minorities, and for the region as a whole. The Druze community in Syria is becoming understandably apprehensive about whether it would face a similar fate.
As the intolerance of religious minorities —Christians, Druze, and Shia— bubbles to the surface, the Sunni majority becomes more regressive. The artistic, cultural, economic, religious, and social diversity, which has been part of the multiethnic and multi-religious mosaic in the Levant and across the region, is rapidly disappearing to be replaced by backwardness and retrogression.
In the mean time those looking for a better place to live in Europe are considered by several Europeans a threat to their Judeo-Christian society with a danger of having Muslims infiltrating our Western culture, plus finding people who do not want to adapt to our Western culture, but making stronger groups of people they fear would become 'parasites' in our economy and having them wanting to have mosques build in our regions.
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