In an interview with Kate O’Hare in CatholicVote.org, Chaldean Catholic Bishop Mar Bawai Soro explained the Islamist threat confronting the West and why it’s important that his fellow Iraqi Christians retain their ancestral home in the cradle of Christianity.
“History teaches, evil is like a virus,” Soro said. “If we don’t treat it in area number one, it will eventually travel to area number two, number three, until it reaches me. Anywhere a virus is found, it has to be treated, dealt with, controlled, so that it does not spread. Evil, persecution, massacres — they’re like that.”
Though Soro calls those who stay “heroic” and is working with a private security company, Kingdom Special Operations, to assist displaced Iraqi Christians living in refugee camps, he is sympathetic to those who wish to flee. But Soro, whose eparchy is located in El Cajon, California, sees a larger Islamist problem confronting the West in general.
“Look, I’ll tell you why Americans have to open their eyes,” he said. “Because the Europeans have not opened their eyes. They are being overrun, by what?”
He explained:
Muammar Gaddafi of Libya said in one of the Islamic conferences that, “We don’t need to fight the West with bullets and daggers, with cannons and airplanes, with terrorism and what have you. We’ll fight the West with the wombs of our women. Just give us time. Not only that, but we will enter and reverse the fortunes of their health and social services, so that we will benefit. We ride on them; we suck all their benefits.”
The West today, it’s suffering from two things — a reverse demographic growth and an overrun by Islamic populations, so much so that France, in 40 years, could very well become by voting the Islamic Republic of France.
These are all alarms — cultural, psychological — that are really related to the fate of Western Civilization.
Bishop Soro said that the weekly news cycle encourages a short attention span, as viewers jump from one crisis to the next without stopping to look at the big picture.
“It takes a fool not to see the truth when the truth is presented to them simply and objectively and in a non-offensive way,” he said. “That is our duty, who know the truth. We have to articulate it in a way that helps the people to see it.”
Still, he worried that the West and America in particular don’t appreciate the full threat.
“This means the collapse of the American civilization,” he said, explaining:
The minute we depart from the very principles that helped us build and strengthen the character of this nation, the ideals that we strive for, for which our soldiers have sacrificed… The minute we abandon these ideals, we are doomed to disappear like every other empire in history, like the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians. We are human beings. It’s the same theory. If we will not follow certain universal rules, the natural law that governs the universe — and we are part of that universe — really, it will happen to us.