Iraqi prelate raps Muslim silence on atrocities of Islamic State

November 20, 2014

Iraq’s leading Catholic prelate has decried the silence of the world’s Islamic leaders in the face of the “barbaric” violence of the Islamic State.

Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako, speaking at an interfaith conference in Vienna, pointed to thousands of innocent people killed, women enslaved, and families driven from their homes. He said that “these barbarous acts which will always be a blot in the human history,” were prompted by extremist theories that he compared with Nazi ideology. He said:

It is quite shocking the insufficiency of the official Islamic community that only denounced these acts by shy and helpless statements, showing the absence of a real role in raising the awareness of the public about the impending danger of ISIS in the name of religion.

The Patriarch said that the extremism embodied by the Islamic State is “a plague on the human race,” and called upon Islamic scholars to “refute their arguments with case law and expose their criminal practices.”

 

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Further information:

• Patriarch of Baghdad to Muslim leaders: Unbefitting silence on the Islamic State, a Nazism in the name of Islam (AsiaNews)