Tolerance Prize for Saddam?Maimon Schwarzschild

The Chaldeans, whom Shaun writes about below, do indeed use Aramaic in their religious liturgy — and some even speak it.  This gives the Chaldeans a special linguistic tie to the Jews, since the Talmud and  a lot of the classical rabbinic literature is at least partly in Aramaic.  Aramaic was the lingua franca in the middle east for more than a thousand years: hence Mel Gibson offering it at the local multiplex.  Aramaic mostly yielded to Arabic after the Muslim conquests in the seventh century, but it still flickers on — comparably to Latin in some ways — among religious Jews, and among the Chaldean Christians.

But were the Iraqi Chaldeans really better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now?  It is a fixed delusion on the “anti-war” left that Saddam Hussein was a “secularist” and therefore that his regime must have been innocent of religious persecution.  It is true that Saddam’s political party was the Ba’ath, which began as a secular-fascist movement in Iraq and in Syria in the 1930s and 40s.  But Saddam displayed his colours, literally, by inscribing the Islamist war-cry “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”) in green script on the Iraqi flag.  His nightmare regime included plenty of religious persecution, including repression, torture, and murder of Chaldeans.  Here is the Latin-rite archbishop of Baghdad, rebutting the idea that Saddam presided over a secular idyll.  Here is International Christian Concern on the same theme.  Saddam had extensive links with Islamist fanaticism, both within Iraq and abroad.  There may be a few Chaldeans with a good word to say for Saddam Hussein.  But I don’t think there are many.