John Sanidopoulos writes:
On January 25, 2012 Greek Orthodox Hieromonk Basilios Nassar was shot by an armed terrorist group in Hama, Syria on the second day of heavy fighting there. Fr. Basilios was at the Metropolis when he was informed by a phone call that a parishioner of his was shot and needed assistance. The Patriarchate of Antioch has reported that the 30-year-old priest was shot while giving medical aid to the wounded man who was previously shot. Fr. Basilios was shot in the chest and in the right armpit. Immediately another priest, Fr. Panteleimon Isa, who was with him dragged his bloody body to a nearby building to save him, but the martyr for Christ Father Basilios was dead within 30 minutes from hemorrhaging. His funeral took place today, January 26th, in the Church of Saint George in Hama. The blessed Father Basilios, known in the world as Mazin, was born in 1982 in the village of Kfarmpo in Hama and was a graduate of the Theological School of Balamand. He was also a teacher of Byzantine Music in the school Saint Kosmas the Melodist which he founded in the Metropolis.
Expect hundreds of thousands more if Assad is removed. That is why those who want him removed, want him removed. Thank God for Holy Russia.
You mention holy Russia. Do you feel that Vladimir Putin is leading the Russian people back into the orthodox church? Is is your view that the "Russian cross" will eventually give way to the cross of Christ?
ReplyDeleteRussia has the teaching of Christianity in state schools, which you don't get in certain other places, an absence which is precisely what Russia's detractors there seek to defend and expand by force of arms.
ReplyDeleteRussia is in the front line against Islamist terrorism both on her own soil and by taking the lead, through her links via the Orthodox Church, in protecting Syria's enormous Christian population from much the same forces also cheered on, and more than that, by the same people in relation to Chechnya.
That more than suggests an appreciation, which Russian intellectuals have always been in the vanguard of articulating, of Western civilisation as the synthesis of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire in Jesus Christ and His Church, rather than as the godless, rootless, borderless, stupefied, promiscuous, debt-based, metrosexual wasteland favoured by the neocons.
Not without her faults. But we should nevertheless clutch her as an ally. Old student Trots need to grow up. But they very rarely do.
Perhaps we can even say that Russia protects all of the non-Sunni minorities in the Middle East. Look at Iraq today because that is Syria's future if Assad is removed. On the other hand, American foreign policy has been a huge boon to the Sunni jihadists.
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