Canon Andrew White in Burlington

Canon Andrew White was at St. George’s, ANiC, this evening to baptise his grandson.

Bishop Charlie Masters was there:

_29U5130Along with Andrew White:
_29U5139 _29U5146 _29U5148 _29U5149-2 _29U5151 _29U5154 _29U5155Canon Andrew spoke about the situation in Iraq which has gone, he said, from very bad to very, very bad. He takes courage from the Christian children. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, ISIS demanded that a group of children convert to Islam and follow Mohammed. They all held hands and said: “no, we love Jesus”. One by one, they were shot in the head.

The Canon asks us to pray and pay. We can pray anywhere and pay here.

Canon Andrew White leaves Iraq

A report from the National Post tells us than Canon White has “has quit Iraq after death threats and the beheading of children attached to his church by Islamic terrorists.” Although Andrew White is travelling in the US at the moment, his Facebook page doesn’t mention anything about quitting – suggesting a permanent departure – Iraq.

Nevertheless, the article is interesting in that it has Andrew White placing blame for the present mayhem not on the initial invasion – something he supported – but on Obama’s premature withdrawal of troops:

Asked whether ISIS could be reasoned with, Canon White said, “No.” He added, “ISIS is driven by that passion that Iraq has gone very, very wrong. Among terrorists, often they have lost something big. And the Sunnis have lost ultimately their power, their responsibility and their significance. Under the Saddam Hussein regime they had essence; now they have nothing.

“We can kill a few ISIS people from the clouds; we can kill some of our innocent civilians; but we can’t really bring about change” until the ground troops enter the fray. “American ground troops,” he said.

Canon White said U.S. President Barack Obama made the mistake of pulling out of Iraq before the country could guarantee the safety of the people.

“ISIS are going around causing their chaos with American weapons, in American tanks, in American armored vehicles and their Humvees because that man Obama left us. And we are seeing our people killed because of that mistake,” he said.

In a Facebook post from October 16th Andrew White also reiterates that Saddam had chemical weapons; now ISIS has and is using them:

Chemical Weapons Did Exist
For years I had been saying that Chemical Weapons did exist. Even before the war in 2003 I was saying that Saddam had the weapons and was removing them to Syria. Now ISIS have done what the coalition could never do. They have found the weapons but they are using them. The battle has just begun, but there is know body fighting the evil. What do we do. Praying is half the battle but we have to keep the people of G-d strong and able to keep eating and coping and surviving with G-d’s help we can.

ISIS murders another US journalist: Steven Sotloff

From here:

The terrorist group ISIS released video that purportedly shows the execution of American journalist Steven Sotloff, according to the SITE Intel Group.

The two-and-half minute video shows what appears to be Sotloff, 31, in orange prisoner garb with a black-cloaked man next to him holding a knife in a desert landscape. Sotloff recites a statement in a strong, dispassionate voice towards U.S. President Barack Obama. Sotloff says he is personally “paying the price” for the United States’ foreign policy and intervention in Iraq.

An ISIS terrorist speaks near the end of the video, his voice apparently garbled by a voice shifter but with a slight British accent apparent.

“I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State … despite our serious warnings,” the terrorist says.

The terrorist drives his knife into the neck of the prisoner before the camera cuts to black. The video then pans to a shot of the decapitated prisoner’s head on his body.

The video ends with the terrorist holding what they claim is another hostage, Briton David Cawthorne Haines, and warned governments to “back off” against ISIS. It was not immediately clear who Haines was.

ISIS released the video, called “A Second Message to America,” on Tuesday.

I’m not posting the video for the obvious reason that ISIS would like it to have as wide a distribution as possible.

As for the “Second Message to America”, from a Christian perspective, one of the major functions of government it to protect its citizens from harm and evil. In this situation, I think the best way to do that would be for the US to send its own clear message: punish ISIS by killing as many of their members as possible. Any Westerners who have joined ISIS should, if caught, have their citizenship revoked and be tried as traitors.

Since the mainline churches are so keen on justice, perhaps we can look forward to their support for strong government action; perhaps not. And I am waiting with bated breath for the throngs of Canadian Muslims clogging downtown Toronto to protest what is being done in the name of their religion.

As individual Christians, let us pray for the victims of ISIS, for Christians in the Middle East and for the work of Canon Andrew White – who is speaking at an ANiC church in Burlington next Sunday. Update: Canon White has just been diagnosed with acute hepatitis, so the visit has been postponed.

Vicar of Baghdad calls for prayer, money and military action in Iraq

Even though military action is “a terrible thing to wish”, he wishes it.

Canon Andrew White writes:

I have just returned from a secret visit to Qaraqosh – once the largest Christian town in Iraq, but no longer.

Today, Qaraqosh stands 90 per cent empty, desecrated by the gunmen of the fanatical Islamic State terror group now in control. The majority of the town’s 50,000 people have fled, fearing that, like other Christians in this region, they will be massacred.

The militants, in a further act of sacrilege, have established their administrative posts in the abandoned churches.

My visit, under the noses of the gunmen, was frightening – but that is nothing to the terror of the poor souls left behind.

Since I went to St George’s Anglican church in Baghdad in 2003 – the only Anglican church in the city – I have seen countless terrible things. Many of my congregation have been killed or mutilated in the years of violence.

But I have never witnessed anything on the scale, or which has affected me quite so dreadfully as on this visit to the north of Iraq

In the nearby city of Irbil, I found many of those Christians who had fled. Some 30,000 refugees are packed into the Kurdish capital, forming a new Christian suburb.

I spoke to one woman who had survived the massacres in Qaraqosh. She had a bandaged left hand. When IS soldiers could not remove her gold wedding ring, they had simply hacked off her finger. She wept as she told me.

The refugees are now penniless, robbed of their homes and possessions. Christian houses were daubed with the letter ‘N’ for Nazere and given to Muslim families.

I met Hana, who used to be the caretaker of my church in Baghdad, and fought to stay dry-eyed as he told me the fate of his youngest son, aged five. The boy was chopped in half in front of Hana’s eyes during an IS attack.

[…..]

Where is their protection? It is a terrible thing to wish, but I now believe that military action of some sort is necessary, if only to reduce the movement of IS tanks, their soldiers, and their power and authority on the ground.

Even this is not the solution in the long run. We need money, and we need prayer. Without those we have nothing.

Those wanting to donate can do so at the website of the Foundation For Relief And Reconciliation In The Middle East: frrme.org

Andrew White was in favour of the US’s removal of Saddam Hussein even after the persecution of Christians had begun. It is to the West’s shame that what was begun in Iraq was not completed and that it has taken the horrors mentioned above to stir us into action again; I fear we will still lack the resolve to see it through to the end.

Vicar of Baghdad: “Child I baptised cut in half by ISIS”

Demonic evil at work.

From here:

The five-year-old son of a founding member of Baghdad’s Anglican church was cut in half during an attack by the Islamic State1 on the Christian town of Qaraqosh.

In an interview today, an emotional Canon Andrew White told ACNS that he christened the boy several years ago, and that the child’s parents had named the lad Andrew after him.

“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” he said. “I baptised his child in my church in Baghdad2. This little boy, they named him after me – he was called Andrew.”

Canon Andrew White interviewed by the BBC:

To donate go to Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

An Islamic State in Iraq

From the BBC:

Up to a quarter of Iraq’s Christians are reported to be fleeing after Islamic militants seized the minority’s biggest town.

The Islamic State (IS) group captured Qaraqosh in Nineveh province overnight after the withdrawal of Kurdish forces.

IS controls parts of Iraq and Syria and says it has created an Islamic state.

Meanwhile the UN says some of the Yazidi community, another religious minority in the area targeted by IS, have been rescued.

About 50,000 Yazidis are thought to have been trapped in the mountains after fleeing the town of Sinjar.

ISIS says it has created an “Islamic State”. The result is tens of thousands of Christians dying of thirst, a Christian family of eight shot in the face because they would not convert, and Christians beheaded, mutilated, raped, stoned and crucified – just for being Christians.

Is this what an “Islamic State” is supposed to look like? If not, I expect we’ll soon be seeing intervention from the real Islamic States.

Iraq wants Saddam Hussein’s buttock back

Yes, you’re right, I’m only posting this so I could write that headline.

From here:

More than five years after Saddam Hussein was executed, Iraq still wants a piece of its former president: his buttock, currently being held by an ex-UK soldier.

Nigel Ely, 52, grabbed a 2-pound piece of Hussein’s bronze statue – that made up part of his rear-end — when it was pulled down by Iraqis in 2003, the Sun reports.

Ely claims he is the legal owner of the buttock since he has turned it into a work of art. But the Iraqi government is demanding that he returns it or face possible theft charges, as it views the piece of scrap metal as a “cultural antiquity”.

I had thought that Iraq was sinking into barbarism but clearly I was wrong: it takes a certain degree of cultural sophistication to regard a buttock fragment as a “cultural antiquity.” This could never have happened in Afghanistan.

N. T. Wright on abortion, the death penalty, Iraq and 9/11

From here:

You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world. As far as they were concerned, their stance went along with the traditional ancient Jewish and Christian belief in life as a gift from God, which is why (for instance) they refused to follow the ubiquitous pagan practice of ‘exposing’ baby girls (i.e. leaving them out for the wolves or for slave-traders to pick up).

Mind you, there is in my view just as illogical a position on the part of those who solidly oppose the death penalty but are very keen on the ‘right’ of a woman (or couple) to kill their conceived but not yet born child…

From where many of us in the UK sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn’t see things in this horribly oversimplified way…

While we’re about it, how many folk out there were deeply moved both by the reading of the 9/11 victim names and by the thought that if they’d read the names of Iraqi civilians killed by your country and mine over the last ten years we’d have been there for several days?

To summarise:

  1. The execution by the state of a person guilty of the crime of murder is equivalent to the killing of an innocent baby for the sake of convenience. Therefore, the only consistent position is a polarized one where either abortion and capital punishment are both permitted or neither are permitted.
  2. The polarization of American politics is all wrong – except for point 1 above where it is obligatory because it is the Wright kind of polarization.
  3. If you are moved by remembering the deliberate murder of 3000 of your own countrymen, you must be equally moved by the wartime deaths of enemy civilians, even though you tried your best to minimise such casualties. This may appear to be a yet another polarized viewpoint, but it’s fine since it is an example of a number of issues piled into one great Wright-approved heap, not two.
  4. The rest of the world isn’t deceived by American Horrible Simplifications. That’s why, for example, UK sophisticates riot at the slightest pretext, routinely indulge in binge drinking and erect sharia controlled zones  –  all horrible, but at lease not horrible simplifications.

I get the impression that N. T. Wright doesn’t much like America; oops – that’s another hopelessly polarized opinion.