First published in the American Chronicle, Buzzle and AfroArticles on 26th September 2007
Republished in the Aramaean portal as per below
http://www.aramaic-dem.org/English/Aram_Naharaim/070926.htm A while back, the Arameans of the Aram Naharaim Foundation sent a Letter to the Presidents of the United States and France, and the Premier of the United Kingdom with the respect to the critical issue of the Aramaeans of Iraq. The letter focuses on the false identities projected by Western missionaries among the Aramaean Eastern Christians, who have subsequently been partly divided into ‘Assyrians’ and ‘Chaldaeans’, although their real identity is Aramaean. This criminal act of Spiritual Genocide is at the epicenter of all problems pertaining to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, as it generates the riparian environment on which flows the river of Islamic Extremism.
In fact, all the Muslim populations of the aforementioned countries, as well as the Arabic speaking populations of Turkey and Iran, plus the totality of the populations of Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates and the northern edges of Arabia are not Arabs, but Aramaeans of the Late Antiquity and the Early Christian times who got linguistically arabized because they accepted gradually Islam.
Contrarily, the Ancient Chaldaeans (Kaldu), who lived in Southern Mesopotamia, were just one of the various Aramaean tribes who had settled in Mesopotamia in the beginning of the Neo-Assyrian times ((12th – 11th centuries BCE). Naming some Aramaeans today after a name that refers to a subdivision of the Ancient Aramaeans is an act of absurdity or anti-Aramaean hatred.
Absolutely paranoid is the effort to name other modern Aramaeans as ‘Assyrians’, despite the fact that the Ancient Assyrians left no trace in Mesopotamia, following the extinction of the Assyrian Empire (614 – 604 BCE). This effort is undertaken through vast misinterpretation of sources from the Late Antiquity, and in order to distinguish the Aramaeans, who contrarily to pro-Catholic ‘Chaldaeans’, accepted Protestant missionaries’ preaching and distorted versions of bogus-History.
The shocking fact that linguistically and culturally the modern pseudo-Assyrians have no relations with the Ancient Assyrians makes no sense to these extremists, who by sharing the same area (Northern Mesopotamia, and North-Western Iran) with the Kurds are definitely exposed to Kurdish expansionism.
Adding to this is the incredible paranoia to claim the same past as the Kurds (Assyrian Mesopotamia); only a perverse plan that wants to push these Aramaeans to frontal clash with the Kurds would stipulate such a controversial national name for the Aramaeans.
