By Rene David Basulto - Monsignor Edward Pace HS
Photographer: Rene D. Basulto
Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, speaks to students from Msgr. Edward Pace High School inside the school's chapel on April 21.
MIAMI GARDENS | Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, spoke with juniors and seniors from Msgr. Edward Pace High School in the school’s chapel April 21. Taimoorazy and her organization have worked tirelessly to provide aid and raise awareness for persecuted Christians in Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East.
Taimoorazy, an Assyrian Christian, left Iran in 1989 after living under Sharia law and suffering religious persecution in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Assyrian Christians have their roots in the city of Ninevah, which is now called Mosul in Iraq and controlled by ISIS.
After presenting the previous day at St. Thomas University next door, Taimoorazy brought her emotional and often unsettling presentation to Pace High.
Over the past 10 years, the violence against Christians in the Middle East has been overwhelming, she said. Christians, priests, and those who oppose Al-Qaeda and ISIS have been threatened, forced into refuge, kidnapped, beheaded, or raped.
Assyrian and Armenian churches, some of which have stood for almost 2,000 years, have been bombed. In Iraq, Al-Qaeda operatives stormed into Our Lady of Salvation Church and opened fire on everyone inside before going in and systematically trying to kill all those who survived.
Taimoorazy also played a video of two survivors from the cathedral attack, one of whom talked about how her 5-year-old nephew was killed after crying for hours.
“These people died because of our shared faith,” said Taimoorazy during her presentation. “Martyrdom isn’t something that happened 500 years ago, it’s something that is still happening today."
She tied the ongoing massacres and persecution of Christians in the Middle East to genocides throughout history, such as the Armenian genocide in the early 1900s and the violence in Rwanda in the early 1990s. To accentuate this point, she played the short film “Sing a Little Louder,” about the silence of Catholics in Germany during the Holocaust. The film is based on a true story.
Students were left in silence near the end as Taimoorazy began crying when talking about how emotionally draining her work can be.
“I knew a lot about the subject thanks to Mr. (David) Masters, such as the problems with the Sunni and Shiite, but she went more in depth about it,” said Pace junior Amber Nicholson. Masters teaches religion at Pace.
“The level of violence is something that we can’t really imagine,” said Pace teacher Ryan Swanson. He added that the human stories of people undergoing persecution was far more powerful than the reports about the persecution’s consequences he had heard and seen on the news.
Juliana Taimoorazy will be returning to South Florida to speak at Barry University in fall 2015.
