"Come home"

Michael Yon attended mass at St John’s Church in Baghdad yesterday.  Also in attendance were American soldiers from the 2-12 infantry battalion, members of the Iraqi Army 3rd Division, and, of course, Iraqis from the neighborhood.   

...It was the local Muslims, according to LTC Michael, who first came to him for help to protect the Christians in his area. That’s right. LTC Michael told me more than once that the Muslims reached out to him to protect the Christians from al Qaeda. Real Muslims here are quick to say that al Qaeda members are not true Muslims. From charging “rent,” al Qaeda’s harassment escalated to killing Christians, and also Muslims. Untold thousands of Christians and Muslims fled Baghdad in the wake of the darkness of civil war.  Most of the Christians are gone now; having fled to Syria, Jordan or Northern Iraq.

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

St. John's is the church in Yon's famous picture of the cross going up.  Read all of Yon's post.  He has lots of great pictures with it.

Comments

[Bryan Morton]

I hope no one minds if I ramble a bit, but this article demonstrates something I've been saying for a long time. There's not that much difference between "us" and "them." There are wackos on the fringe. They are Christian wackos, Muslim wackos, atheist wackos, you name the group and they have their wackos. But for the rest of us living on the bell curve, we're just not that different. The average Muslim tries to earn a living, wants a better life for his family, worries about traffic and whether or not he'll get home on time to take his daughter to clarinet lessons. He knows too much red meat's supposed to be bad for him, but he likes a good cheeseburger and he wishes he had the time to take the kids sailing like he and his father used to. when are we going to wise up and stop listening to the "Us Vs.Them" propaganda that governments have been feeding us for so long? Maybe for once, we could stop asking governments to initiate force against others on our behalf, just to see if peace works as well as Jesus said it would.

[Josh]

the problem with that is that their fringe groups have much morepower than ours...
This does show that the average person world-wide is religiously tolerant. Islamo-fascism exists... but its not the norm. Not many know that.