Quanto Vale uma Vida? - Os Cristãos Perseguidos por Islâmicos

Quanto vale uma vida? Costuma-se dizer que uma vida não tem preço. Eu acho que uma vida pode não tem preço, mas o mundo coloca preço diferente nas vidas das pessoas. Por exemplo, quanto vale uma vida de uma médico ciclista em comparação com uma criança de uma favela? Não se tem homenagem a esta criança nos estádios de futebol, nem reportagem especial na imprensa.

Aí você responde, mas é que criança de favela morre todo dia, e médico ciclista, não.

Eu respondo que por esta lógica o preço de uma vida é relacionado a quantidade de mortes? Assim sendo, pergunto as crianças brasileiras são menos valiosas que as crianças dos Estados Unidos?

Por vezes o preço da vida depende da profissão ou da raça ou da orientação sexual ou do credo. Qual vida vale mais a de um policial ou a de um sem terra?, a de um branco ou a de um negro?, a de um gay ou a de hetero? A de um cristão ou a de um muçulmano?

Apenas Deus sabe o preço de uma vida. O mundo coloca preço errado.

Mas, nas lógicas do mundo, as vidas dos cristãos do Oriente Médio, em mãos islâmicas, valem cada vez menos. 

Ontem, o Estado Islâmico matou 400 pessoas de uma vez só na cidade de Palmyra na Síria. Se um maluco tivesse invado uma escola nos Estados Unidos e matasse duas pessoas, teria tido mais sucesso na mídia.

Escrevo isso pois li um artigo do padre John McCloskey no site The Catholic Thing. McCloskey escreveu sobre o livro acima de George Marlin.

É um ótimo texto do padre para o que parece ser um ótimo livro sobre a perseguição a cristãos no mundo islâmico. Marlin coloca a perspectiva histórica de sofrimento dos cristãos nas mãos islâmicas desde Maomé. Ele estuda a perseguição a cristãos país por país. Sensacional. Compra obrigatória.

Vejamos parte do que diz  McCloskey.

 As anyone who is paying attention today knows, Christians in the Middle East are undergoing widespread persecution – and even martyrdom. Our Western media don’t much report on it, and our political leaders don’t much notice, however, because it might require them actually to do something. And as a result, it’s not always easy to get a detailed picture of exactly what’s going on.

George Marlin – a noted former public official, author of many books, board chairman of Aid to the Church in Need, USA, and sometimes TCT columnist has provided a remedy. His latest book, Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy, is a thorough history of the ongoing persecution, along with some useful documents and statements by Church figures both there and here.

Marlin opens with an overview of the birth and rise of Christianity in the Middle East, and then follows that up with the birth of Islam and the rise of Islamic terrorism in the region. He provides a well-researched account of persecutions of Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and finishes with Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

As the reader will see, this is not a book merely about the more recent episodes in places like Libya or Pakistan. Marlin situates the present troubles in a wider examination of the recurrent persecution of Christianity by Islamic forces throughout the centuries, country by country, backed up frequently by documents, particularly from the last several centuries, and not only persecution of Catholics, but of Protestants as well.

Indeed, attacks on Christianity by Muslims have taken place not only in the Middle East, but in countries such as the Philippines, an historically Catholic nation, and also in other places in Asia that have a large Christian presence.

Marlin puts all this very well in his introduction, in which he expresses the need for a “testimonial to the real suffering, courage, and faith of those Christians who have chosen to remain in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, amidst the chaos of civil war in the shadow of the constant and still growing threat of ISIS. The church leaders who speak in these pages are risking their lives to remain with their people. The faithful, living under constant threat and in chaotic conditions, often without work or proper sustenance, are choosing to remain where they have lived for centuries as a witness to the gospel.”

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During the Cold War, Christians behind the Iron Curtain would sometimes complain that it was not they who were the Silent Church. It was we, in the West, who remained silent while their freedoms and faith were insulted and suppressed.

This book fervently implores Christians in the West never to forget the suffering of their persecuted brothers and sisters in the Middle East who, in addition to struggling with discrimination, persecution, and actual martyrdom, also often feel that they have been abandoned by their fellow believers. Indeed this is among the greatest crosses they have to bear. “We feel forgotten and isolated, we sometimes wonder that, if they will kill us all, what would be the reaction of the Christians in the West? Would they do something then?” Such is the plea from the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako.