Was Neda a Christian?
Monday July 6, 2009
Categories: Christianity (general), Iran
Terry Mattingly has some shocking information (if true) about the icon of the ongoing Iranian unrest....
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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She may have been. Does it matter? Did the sniper stop to check her religious affiliation before he pulled the trigger? Is a dead Christian woman somehow more shocking than a dead Muslim woman?
There is a point at which we all must admit that making everything about religion is a descent into the utter hell of tribalism and this will destroy us.
What is shocking about this young women being a Christian? Does it make her death any less tragic? Why does this matter? Oh yes - so the American agenda of culture wars based on religion/ the big bad media etc etc can be continued.
All of this is an attempt ( a successful attempt) to divert us from the issues that threaten us - the corporatism , the transfer of wealth to increasingly smaller parts of the population, the depletion of our resources and destruction of our environment. So keep on allowing yourself to be manipulated and fight those culture wars. And keep on ignoring the things that do matter, keep on being divided.
This woman's death - along wqith the other deaths we know nothing of that occurred in Iran - is tragic and sad. Do not dishonor her by turning her into another talking point in the ongoing lunacy which afflicts the US.
I wonder why this is coming up now? Is this an attempt to manipulate us into supporting an invasion of Iran or something? Call me cynical but we've been down this path before. They try to stir up the base to support an invasion and what better way than a dead Christian girl.
Given the track record of the Freepers and Jihadwatch, it's almost certainly false. The only thing missing is the Brussels Journal, which would be a trifecta of misinformation.
She wasn't shot because of her religion.
Cecelia I understand what your saying, but if it came out that Neda was a lesbian I guarantee you "The big bad media" as well as many other "American culture warriors" would gladly stir up some kind of potential culture war rhetoric and then out of nowhere Obama would be back on the TV chastising the Iranian government for their injustice.
The thing to remember about "official" numbers of Christians (or indeed of any non-Muslims) reported in Middle Eastern countries (and parroted by the Western media) is that they are almost always wrong.
Take Iraq for an example. Most experts would agree that the last census taken there that had even a hint of reflecting reality was the 1957 one, so it's been over a half century since any accurate numbers were taken. Ask the Iraqi governments under Saddam and the ones since what the number of Iraqi Christians were and they'll say 2-3%. Maximum. The Chaldean and Assyrian community leaders themselves would say north of 10%. The truth is of course somewhere in the middle, but I'd bet at least part of the rent it might be as much as 8%. This is why people like Rod can wring their hands for five years running now with the programmed "Christians are leaving Iraq at a rate of 10,000 a week!" story that gets printed up every other month or so. If that were true there wouldn't be any left at this point, but go to Baghdad and you'll still find Christian neighborhoods going strong, etc. Communities can be very skilled and digging in and persevering, even if it means keeping a low profile.
Same thing by the way with Iraqi Jews. When Saddam's regime fell you had a NY Times reporter writing up a story adhering to the Ba'athist line that yes, all of them made aliyah to Israel by about 1958, there were only 50 left in all of Iraq, and "there's only one ramshackle synagogue left that my driver took me to see." So very sad.
Except that a civil affairs colonel I knew in Baghdad, who had a background in demographics and surveys, who had a personal interest in the question, and who most importantly had the resources and energy to investigate further than the hotel bar stool, decided to take an admittedly informal but reliable census of Baghdadi Jews. He stopped counting at 500, when he realized the job was much bigger than he expected--reports of the death of Iraqi Jewry have been extremely exaggerated.
The interesting thing about this is if the icon of a force opposing the theocrats was, in fact, a member of Iran's religious minority. Will the ostensible revolutionaries in Iran embrace a non-Muslim? What will the regime do if it's true? The one thing that suggests to me this might not be true is the fact that the regime hasn't exploited Neda as an example of "anti-Islamic" rebellion.
That's a good point, Rod.
The photo is interesting, but by no means definitive. And, OF COURSE, her death is equally tragic no matter what.
But read the post, folks. I am making a narrow, journalistic point. Please take that on.
I'd say though that 1) the photo is not of her on the day she died - so we have no way of knowing if she wore a cross that day - the photos of her death show her pretty covered up - so the sniper would have been unlikely to see a cross if she was wearing on - if being the operative word. 2)it seems the circumstances of her death would suggest she was killed randomly - she was standing next to her father on a street - observing a protest - that does not suggest she was specifically a target.
I suspect Obama and the bogey man liberal media would have recognized that the sniper had no way of knowing wheither one was straight or gay and so they would recognize her death had nothing to do with her sexual orientation or her religion - she was in the wrong place at the wrong time - and was killed as a result of an oppressive regime seeking to hold on to power. That is tragic and horrible enough.
Rod has it right. If anyone's positing she was shot because she was a Christian, I don't see any reasonable grounds to think that. But if she is believed to have been a Christian, and that fact is widely known or believed, the dynamic of what her death means to the protest movement will be significantly different. What she will mean as a symbol will be different -- either Islamic fervor will cause her to be "buried" as a symbol, because no infidel can be allowed to fulfill that role, or the revolutionaries will find themselves embracing a non-Islamic symbol, which when you're talking about a place like Iran is pretty meaningful. Either case is different from what would happen if she was a Muslim.
On the fact that the regime hasn't exploited her as a symbol of an "anti-Islamic" rebellion -- remember that Ahmadinejad's tactic on homosexuality is to deny that it exists in Iran. If he follows that pattern, he'd much rather people didn't know about the un-Islamic people in the Islamic Repbulic.
FWIW, I don't know whether to believe the story that she was a Christian. I'm just pointing out that ignoring the existence of un-Islamic behavior is at least as likely as denouncing it, with that crowd.
Rod, I don't know about Mousavi, but Mehdi Karroubi explicitly ran on a platform of respect and toleration for ethnic and religious minorities (as well as against violence against women, FWIW).
Was Neda a Christian?
Who cares? Who cares about the countless other Iranians who were beaten, raped, brutalized and killed for protesting.
The MSM says we must all prepare ourselves for the upcoming apotheosis of our lord and savior Michael Jackson!!!
One thing you have to understand, Iran is pretty easy going about religious symbols. Iranian artillerymen typically wear the Jewish Tallit Kalat (sp?) as amulets, and cultural Zoroastrianism is growing by leaps and bounds.
She could just as easily have been a member of the Bah'ai faith, which borrows religious customs and symbols from all of the Abrahamic faiths, plus some Zoroastrianism if I remember correctly.
Thanks, for this, Rod, now I'm reading critiques of the online magazine Der Welt, which was apparently the source of this story/photo. IN GERMAN. And I need to pass an Arabic exam in a month or two. Hoooo boy. (German's a lot easier than Arabic, at least.)
Whatever her religion (or lack of it), she is dead. That by itself is tragic, just like the others who died in the peaceful protests are tragic. Iran is...Iran. It doesn't allow for free thinking.
It would be very convenient if it were true, but I have to come down on the side of the cynics on this one; I think Neda Soltani was probably a more or less average young Muslim woman. There is a chance she was a Zoastrian, if only in a cultural way.
I very much agree with those who have said that she was not killed because of her religion. She *was* killed because of her *gender,* by some undoubtedly sexually frustrated Basiji.
The one good thing to come out of this—and a lesson that we should *all* draw from it—is that, even if she were a Christian, the young people in the Green Revolution would still genuinely mourn her. To me that is pretty heartening.
Of course, in addition to our mourning Neda, we should find a way to help the protestors in Iran.
"Was Neda a christian?"
That cross she was wearing in that uncropped photo sure as honk suggests she wasn't Muslim. I hear that christianity is one of the fastest-growing religions in Iran. People are hungry for truth. Yes, even in Iran. Amazing.
I have not read anything suggesting she was shot BECAUSE she was a Christian, unless you are talking about comment-page junk.
Just FYI
She could just as easily have been a member of the Bah'ai faith, which borrows religious customs and symbols from all of the Abrahamic faiths, plus some Zoroastrianism if I remember correctly.
I'm a former Baha'i (now Orthodox Christian) and I can tell you that Baha'is do not normally wear crosses or other non-Baha'i religious symbols, except with other symbols in the context of promoting the idea of the unity of all religions.
Larry Anderson, thanks for that. I knew a couple of people of the Baha'i faith in Iraq. They were interpreters. All I know of the faith comes from a few conversations with one woman at the 4 AM call to prayer over Baghdad (a beautiful experience.)
Actually there is a very old Christian presence in Iran. The first people to recognize Jesus as divine were the Magi (i.e. Persians) and according to some early authorities they helped set up what became Iran's first Christian community (aided by St. Thomas the Apostle on his way to India). Apparently there are about 300,000 Christians in the country today, mostly Armenians, Assyrians and Chaldeans.
Supposedly the True Cross once (briefly) resided in Persia after the Persians sacked Jerusalem in the early 7th century- it was later recovered by the Byzantines.
Find out more and pray for the thriving underground church in Iran at www.iran30.org. A free prayer book is also available.
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