How Then Shall We Live? How Then Shall We Sing The Lord’s Song In A Strange Land?
"Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." — John 15:13
”This ethnic group has been scapegoated” and ”that religious group has been scapegoated”, the list in history is immensely long.
The Yazidi
The Yazidi religion has elements of Manichaeism: the adherents are neither Christian nor Muslim, nor Buddhist, nor Zoroastrian. Some experts argue that the Yazidis have not been given recognition as a proper religious group. And the adherents lived through 72 genocides in an ongoing history.
Unidentified attackers hijacked a bus carrying factory workers in Mosul, northern Iraq, on April 22, 2007. The attackers checked the identity cards of the factory workers, instructing the Muslims and the Christians to get off the bus. With 23 Yazidis remaining, they drove the bus to eastern Mosul, taking the Yazidis hostage. The hostages were made to lie face down and then shot death in front of a wall.
Before 2014, when the world came to hear about them of having been targeted by the ISIS, the Yazidis were read about as the “devil worshipers” in some works of imagination including HP Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook.
HP Lovecraft had written about them as
"Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers,"in one place, and
"Yezidi clan of devil-worshippers,"in another place.
One may not like to have those words written about oneself for an introduction to the world especially if one's family lineage had lived through 72 genocides.
ISIS members took a Yazidi man’s two daughters (9 and 12) and two sons. The father knows that his little girls would be exploited, but he still believed that the girls would come back to him, while he feared more about his sons who might return brainwashed, radicalized, and changed to even kill him. He lost them more completely. The loss, the exploitation, the heartache, the father will not expect others to understand it.
His wife, kidnapped, raped, shot in the head, survived, but mentally impaired, sold and resold to middlemen. He bought her back. While his wife's sobbing and beating her face on the floor, he tells his story to his audience, an English man.
“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” ― Euripides
The Yazidi man was promised by the English man that he’d tell the outside world about his story.
The Yazidi man replied, predicting that nobody would do anything for a Yazidi person, and he cited past examples of the European Muslims and Christians helping other Middle eastern Muslims and Christians and ignoring the grievances of the Yazidis altogether. The English person went back to Europe and told the story to the people in Britain but, as foretold by the Yazidi person, nobody seemed to care for the loss, the exploitation, the heartache the Yazidi endured.
The Yazidi man had a thousand wishes before this tragedy. But now he only had one wish:
"Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream".
