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Religious Freedom is Not Free: The Case of Iraq

The Gathering Storm, July 1, 2008

Rick Santorum

July 1, 2008

Andrew G. Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, has called our attention to the recent murder of Iraqi Archbishop Paulos Farraj Rahho and the ongoing persecution of the Iraqi Christian population.

Bostom refers to a somber piece in The New York Times detailing the kidnapping and murder of Archbishop Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in the ancient city of Mosul. Archbishop Rahho was kidnapped by Al Qaeda gunmen on February 29 after publicly denouncing the protection money he had been forced to pay on behalf of the Christian community to shield its members from insurgent threats.

These payments had been part of a larger, quiet resurgence in Iraq of the application of the jizya - the Koranic (Koran 9:29) poll tax on non-Muslims, whose etymology, according to Bostom, belies its origins: "the tax paid in lieu of being slain." In other words, for Jews and Christians, not to pay is to ask for death.

Historically, whatever tolerance Christian and Jews were granted in Islamic societies was conditional on the payment of this special tax. Islamic leaders made Jews and Christians an offer they couldn't refuse: pay the tax or be killed. It seems as though this Mafia-style extortion racket has been revived in Iraq.

Sadly, it seems to have been quite successful. According to the Times , the protection money is only "one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq."

Arhbishop Rahho was among the highest-profile Iraqi Christians to die in the war. He was mourned by President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI before his role as a conduit for protection money paid by the Chaldean Christians to insurgents became known outside Iraq. These payments, American military officials and Iraqi Christians say, peaked from 2005 to 2007 and grew into a source of financing for the insurgency. They thus became a secret, shameful and extraordinary complication in the lives of Iraq's Christians and their leaders.

You can read the complete story from The New York Times here, and I highly recommend Andrew Bostom's historical explication of the jizya and the larger issue of dhimmitude of non-Muslims. The tragedy in Iraq and the rejection of religious liberty throughout the Islamic Middle East suggests this is not merely a matter of historical interest.