"You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."KURDISTAN, IRAQ (ANS) -- This bit of lyric from the Eagles' "Hotel California," keeps running through my mind as the day closes here. I was just exiting my interpreter Mohammed's car back in April of this year to return to my room when he received a call on his cell phone informing him that fifteen Kurdish Peshmerga (security forces) had just died in Mosul when a car bomb was detonated at their post. This news, coming almost instantly to Mohammed, speaks of the closeness of the Kurds to one another in their precarious place in this part of the world.
The fact is the Eagles had been singing that particular verse in my head all day as I was pondering the recent and senseless death of a seventeen-year old Yezedi girl. She was seized by a group of Yezedi, four men, two women, dragged from her father's house into the street where a mob of gawking spectators gathered to watch as her clothing was torn from her and she was beaten nearly unconscious, her torso and legs covered with large ugly bluish purple bruises; she was finished off by one of her tormenters who crushed her skull with a brick.
Her crime? The "offense" that demanded her death? It was terrible indeed; she, a school girl, had fallen in love with an outsider, a Muslim boy and school mate who dared to ask for her hand in marriage. She dared step outside the sacred fold. Of course if you ask anyone else in these climes who the Yezedis are, they'll tell you, "They're devil worshippers." Normally, Yezedis are good folk, quiet and tolerant of their neighbors. They've suffered much persecution at the hands of Islam because of their strange and convoluted religion, which appears to be a strange mixture of ancient Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam; they're angel worshippers, believing that Christ and Satan are two sides of the same coin, that Satan was long ago reconciled to God. They would like you to believe that this religion goes all the way back to the beginning, to the time of Adam, but I can find nothing in history to substantiate this claim of antiquity, its origins are far more recent.
This is a land bound with ancient ideas which have resisted change even through the Greek, Roman and later Christian periods. My personal conviction is that the spirit that activated Cain and motivated him to kill his brother Abel, then strike out on his own full of self-justification, embarking on an almost manic obsession with city building is the same spiritual root dominating this whole region throughout its bloody history. This is the same spirit that later motivated his progeny, notably, Nimrod, to take it to the next level, that of Empire with State Religion to glue it all together.
This may be an overly simplistic view of history; I realize that there are a lot of pages in between and a lot of names and events not mentioned, but mine is a simple assessment of a prevailing spiritual condition; that of power, domination, religion and violence.
Do you recall the words of Jesus when he spoke to the religious folk of his day, the ultra-orthodox, the defenders of the faith? He said to them, "You are of your father, the devil, he was a murderer from the beginning and his works you will do" (John 8:44).
He wasn't talking about the Jews as a people; he was speaking to that particular breed of the "righteous" who feel it is their responsibility to enforce God's will on the earth. These are the same folks who drew out a woman, "caught in the very act of adultery." to publicly stone her (John 8:1-11). Makes you wonder how they caught her in the very act and what happened to the guy, doesn't it?
I'm not attempting to marginalize transgression but to point out how readily the "Righteous" were willing to participate in the public stoning of a girl who made a mistake. The religious leaders even used her misfortune to bait larger game, namely, Jesus, himself. "What do you say about this, Jesus? Moses and the law say she should be stoned but what's your opinion?" For Jesus to go against the law would be to condemn himself as a transgressor of said law; for Jesus not to speak up for the girl would be to discredit his message of redemption. The religious leaders feel they have Jesus between a rock and a hard place.
It's been portrayed many times and in many ways, how Jesus simply knelt down and wrote something in the dirt, and then said, "He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone at her" (John 8:6-8). Nobody knows what he wrote that day; perhaps it was, "Hypocrites!" or maybe it was a quotation from the Scripture, something like "All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one" (Psalm 14:3; 53:3). Whatever it was, from the eldest first, down to the youngest, they dropped their stones and went away, shamefaced. Jesus then speaks to the young woman and says, "Woman, where are your accusers?" "There are none, Lord!" "Then neither do I accuse you, go and sin no more."
There is the contrast between religion, something done in God's name, and the nature of God himself. There was no Christ physically present the other day for that terrified young girl, whose heart dared reach beyond the boundaries placed on it by her religion. She was born Yezedi and therefore, according to many, by Satan; she died Yezedi. None of this love nonsense, or choice and human dignity stuff, it was "Our way or the highway." This is that murderous spirit that cloaks itself in the holy garments of religion. But in reality, in whatever form this spirit manifests, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Yezedi, etc., it is always the same. As Jesus would say, "You are of your father the devil, and his works you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning."
You may ask yourself, "Why is this guy harping on this? What has this to do with anything?" For me however, it's very real, this stoning happened only a short distance from where we did our last outreach to the Yezedi people trying to penetrate that dark religious veil they are cloaked under. I truly wish I had been there to at least attempt to interfere with this lynching.
Just a parting thought -- the broken-hearted father who issued a complaint to the authorities against those that killed his daughter was quoted, as saying, "I, too, thought she should die for her transgression, but not that way!" I asked Mohammed, my interpreter, "What kind of a father would say something like that? He should be hanged with the rest of the murdering so-and-sos" (Not a charitable spirit, I admit, but I was still under the fresh assault of the tragedy). Mohammed's answer was simple; "He said it out of fear, sir; fear for himself and the rest of his family."
This is one example of the realities which we who labor in this part of the world face.
I still can't seem to get those lyrics out of my head " . . . you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."
Jack Harris
ASSIST News Service
Jack Harris is the Director General of Hands of Hope Foundation (Iraq), a humanitarian aid organization working with the Kurds in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. He is also a filmmaker -- documenting the truth of what has happened to the Kurds. Jack is an ordained pastor, missionary/evangelist with over 30 years experience in 46 different countries.
