Christianity is tolerance...but look at Northern Cyprus !

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Jan 27, 2006 at 17:53

Dear j.m., you wrote :

>From my understanding, Christ taught forgiveness. Any Christian shudders at the desecration of the Hagia Sophia and Alexandria, but above all, we teach forgiveness. It is easy to retaliate and to hate. However, violence begat violence. I believe the Catholics are right in there doctrine. We are not laying down and dying amidst the Muslim onslaught, and we are not retaliating. We are exhorting the good people.

>There are good people and there are the sinful anywhere. Sometimes it is easier to make generalizations about people and not just the religion. There are good people within Islam, good religious, God-fearing people. These people are not doomed to Hell (in fact there is none), just like Christians are not.

Thank you for your kind words about Christianity with which , although I am not a Chrsitian, I fully agree. The only problem for me is that forgiveness must work both ways. I forgive him who harmed me and expect he will not harm me again. What shall I do if he does, and even adds derision to physical harm?... I am not suicidal I cannot forgive my future torturer and murderer.
Do you know what has been happening in Northern Cyprus since 1974 , the island that takes pride to be one of the oldest provinces of the Christian world with unique Christian tradition and monuments?
Even if you can't you read modern Greek, you might still take a look at some pictures of desacration and destruction perpetrated there by the "moderate" , nay ! "secular" Turkish Muslims against our Christian past and present.

http://www.cyprus.gov.cy/moi/pio/pio.nsf/All/1BB86A77D9A1E8E5C2256D7A003C6DB5?OpenDocument

I can translate a few passages from this quite revealing report on how "secular", "modern", "moderately Muslim" Turkey is preparing to enter "Europe". Turkey's civilization test is there in Northern Cyprus!

" The annihilation of the cultural heritage

(...) more than 500 Greek Orthodox churches and chapels and 17 monasteries situated in the cities and villages of the occupied parts of our island have been robbed , wantonly destroyed or levelled to the ground . Today their ecclesiastical equipment and objects belonging to them , from which only portable holy icons amount to more than 15 000, are missing . The most important and precious ones have found their way to the auctions abroad where they have been sold by dealers of works of arts (...)
In further parts places and their monuments have been given Turkish names in the effort to dissociate them from their origins and immediate environement and in order to abolish or change their identity.
Besides robbing the museums in the occupied territories , illigally exporting the antiquities and selling the objects that once constituted unique collections of these museums or until now have been unrecorded materials of the collections of the foreign archaeological missions , the Department of Antiquities has got similar testimonies on Byzantine , ecclesiatical equipment, embroideries and wooden sculptures from the metropolitan seat of Kyrenias , on the theft of all the icons and manuscripts that had been kept until 1974 in the centre for Preserving Icons and Manuscrips in the monastery of St. Spiridon in Tremetousia.

A very disquieting aspect of the Turkish strategy in the occupied territories is the total contempt for places of Greek Orthodox worship and desacration of Christian monuments and objects.(...)
A large number of churches have been changed into mosques , stables, sheepfolds and at worst have been levelled to the ground , e.g. the temple of the cloister Avgasida in the province of Ammochostou going back to the 15th century which had been decorated with wall paintings from the same time. A Cypriote living ouside Cyprus visiting the village in 1989 witnessed the levelling to the ground of the temple. The fate of the wall paintings and the fine wooden iconostasis is unknown.
Precious and more important paintings and mosaics that decorated the exteriors of many churches are systematically destroyed and robbed . Together with objects from the plundered museums, churches and private collections are brought outside Cyprus to the markets of Europe ,America and even of distant Japan ."

You can easily forgive the barbarian Osmans their genocides. But don't you sense what is happening now in Northern Cyprus will happen tomorrow in the so called West ...on a much larger scale?..Are prepared to forgive future crimes or will you rather prefer to prevent them?

With best regards,
Jan

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