By Anne DiBernardo - Florida Catholic

PLANTATION | On a recent trip heading home to Chicago from Miami, Juliana Taimoorazy sat next to two girls in their early 20s.

Shortly after taking off, the flight attendant announced: “I have good news, and bad news. First the bad news — the TVs are down. And now the good news — it’s a full flight and everyone has someone sitting next to them, so go ahead and talk to your neighbor.”

The girls extended a warm hello to Taimoorazy and asked, “Where are you from?” The rest is, quite literally, history.

Taimoorazy is an Assyrian Christian who fled Iran in 1989 due to religious persecution. As the founder of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, she is always prepared to speak out for her persecuted brothers and sisters. The three-hour flight was the perfect venue to whip out her laptop and share her PowerPoint presentation with the girls.

Last month, Taimoorazy gave the same presentation to more than 130 attendees at Flourish 2015, a one-day conference hosted by Catholic Witnesses, a non-profit based in South Florida. The goal of the conference — which Catholic Witnesses hopes to make an annual event — was to rally Christians to stand up for religious freedom and give witness to the love of Christ in the public square.

Taimoorazy led attendees along a heart-wrenching pictorial tour of the unspeakable horrors faced every day by the Assyrian Christians of Iraq (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs). She discussed how Al-Quada and ISIS have devastated their heritage and livelihood. She gave a brief overview of their ancestral history as Christians and her people’s 6,700-year history in Mesopotamia.

“We are the children of Nineveh. I am a Ninevite,” Taimoorazy said. “The majority of our homeland today is under control of ISIS. But we’re not Arabs or Muslims. We are among the first people who converted to Christianity through St. Thomas and we still speak Aramaic, the language shared by our Lord, Jesus Christ. It is a language that is dying and this is why I’m here. I need your help, my nation needs your help so we can preserve this nation and this language.” 

Today, Nineveh is Mosul, and for the first time in 1,900 years, there is no sound of church bells ringing.

“Mass is not celebrated and prayers are not performed,” Taimoorazy said, adding that she thinks about that every time she goes to church. “I cannot tell you how many times I have sat in those pews and I have said, ‘Lord, my people, my brothers and sisters, did exactly what I did today and they were killed.’”

Although the world is hearing more about it now, such persecution is nothing new, she noted.

“What you are seeing ISIS do today is exactly what we have gone through for centuries,” she said. “What they are trying to do is create a caliphate throughout the whole world.”

She said the height of the persecution occurred in 2006-2007 and was marked by beheadings, women being raped, and churches being bombed.

“We have been doing this work for seven and one-half years and it is only within the last nine months, since July, that it has picked up because of ISIS attacks,” she said.

There are four million Assyrian Christians who speak Aramaic left in the world and every family, including Taimoorazy’s, has given at least one martyr for Christ, she noted. Among those present at the Catholic Witnesses conference, whose stories Taimoorazy shared (their names are being withheld for their protection) were:

• A woman who had accompanied Taimoorazy to the National Religious Broadcasters conference in Nashville last February. While there, she found out that two of her cousins had been executed by ISIS and seven family members had been kidnapped.
• A cousin of Father Raghid Ganni, one of those depicted in Taimoorazy’s presentation. Father Ganni received a “bloody bullet” (a sign someone is being targeted) and was martyred. As they tried to force him to convert, they asked him to raise his hands and shot them first so that he couldn’t make the sign of the cross. Then they shot him 17 times.

The litany of martyrs in Taimoorazy’s own family began during World War I, from 1914 to 1918, when what is known as the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocide took place. Half a million Armenians, two-thirds of the Assyrians, and approximately 700,000 Greeks were killed by Ottoman Turks and Kurds.

“My great grandfather, as a result of him escaping from his home, died in the camp from a disease. His wife and two of her sisters were kidnapped, raped and killed 100 years ago, and my great uncle was also killed, cut into pieces and sent in a rice bag to his wife,” said Taimoorazy.

Islamic extremism accounts for eight Taimoorazy martyrs, but a ninth one was an Orthodox priest in Russia who was killed by a Bolshevik soldier because his cross was showing as he returned from a baptism.

Taimoorazy underscored that Islamic extremists are not thugs or gangs rebelling for a cause but systematic terrorists attacking a way of life.

Since 2003, Iraqi Christians have been ordered to either convert to Islam, pay a protection tax (Jizyah), leave Iraq without their belongings or die. Churches have been bombed over 100 times. Ancient churches have been turned into mosques. Christians have been crucified. And parents have had to bury their brutally murdered children.

During the past five years, dozens of priests and deacons have been kidnapped, beheaded, and assassinated, their body parts later found scattered around the churches.

“So next time you are in church, attending Mass or a service, please think about this. At any moment someone who subscribes to the Sharia law, as ISIS has, can walk in and blow themselves up. The religious freedom we have today in the United States must be protected,” Taimoorazy said.

Regrettably, this is not the first time society has chosen to ignore the cry of the persecuted. A new film shown at the conference links a similar moment in history with the persecution of Christians today in Syria and Iraq.

“Sing a Little Louder,” depicts how trains transporting Jews to concentration camps would pass by a church full of parishioners who would just sing a little louder to drown out their cries.

The film was written and produced in collaboration with Catholic Witnesses and Taimoorazy by KingdomWorks Studios. It was directed by Jeremy Wiles, written by his wife, Tiana Wiles, and produced by Josh Melin.

According to pro-life speaker Penny Lea, the film is based on the true story of a sorrowful German Christian who remembered watching as the trains passed by each week.

Lea said her encounter with this tormented witness many years ago compelled her to write the tract, “Sing a Little Louder,” on which the movie is based. Her goal was to rally the pro-life community by connecting what happened in Germany to what is happening in America with abortion: Christians have learned to just sing a little louder. She fears the same thing may be happening now with the persecution of Christians.

Taimoorazy asked her listeners to take action on behalf of those being persecuted by hosting a viewing of the film and booking a speaking presentation at their own parish.

“The belief that our faith changes the way we not only view society and culture, but the way we act within society, is what non-profit organization Catholic Witnesses strives to promote,” said co-founder Adriana Gonzalez, who attends St. Edward Parish in Pembroke Pines. “This is carried out in our daily decisions about how we approach life, family matters and interpersonal relations.”

“I don’t know how anyone can live the Gospel and not get involved,” said Taimoorazy, who ended her presentation by leading everyone in an emotional recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. 

LEARN MORE

Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, will be speaking in South Florida this week:

• Monday, April 20, 11 a.m.-noon, St. Thomas University, O’Mailia Hall 2. Contact: Mary Carter Waren, [email protected], 305-628-6653.

• Tuesday, April 21, 9 a.m.-2 p.m., Msgr. Edward Pace High School, Dante Navarro Chapel. Contact: David Masters, [email protected], 786-859-2117.

Corrected April 20, 2015: An appearance by Juliana Taimoorazy at Barry University, originally listed here, has been postponed until fall 2015.