Archbishop in Jerusalem offers Obama perspective on who the enemy is
St. Mark’s Church
JERUSALEM – At tiny St. Mark’s Church in Jerusalem’s Old City, priests chant in Syriac among smoking, golden censors. It is a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and the oldest Christian liturgy in existence.
Archbishop Mor Severios Malke Mourad oversees the Syrian Orthodox Church in Israel, Palestine and Jordan. “Syrian,” in this case, refers to a common tongue, rather than nationality, which also lends the denomination the name Syriac Orthodox Church.
Mourad’s parishioners are either fleeing their homes or trying to help crowds of refugees from other places. After almost 2,000 years of surviving both turbulence and trials, the Syrian Orthodox Church across the Middle East is threatened with rapid annihilation at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Archbishop Mor Severios Malke Mourad
Archbishop Mourad has a solution to the slaughter, but it requires the West to do something it has so far failed to do: Understand what’s really going on in Syria and who the true enemy is.
“For three years and a half our Christian people in Syria suffer very much [the] massacres that are happening there,” the archbishop explains.
Christians in Syria are caught between what Mourad calls the “fanatics” (ISIS) and the “regime,” referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s administration. The raging war between the fanatics and the regime has spurred almost a third of the country’s Christian population of 1.8 million to flee (as of August 2014). Most are mired somewhere in Lebanon, but some find their way to Mourad’s doorstep.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/christians-under-isis-boot-cry-out/#agKAHusfQ08cL2Hl.99
