Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to share two pictures showing the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul, Iraq. The first shows Jonah's tomb as it looked for centuries prior to last week. The second shows the site after it was destroyed by ISIS last week. Thousands of years of Biblical cultural history were erased in a matter of moments by Islamist terrorists. This ancient site had once been the location of a church and then a mosque famous for its architectural beauty which stood there since the 14th century. The mosque of the prophet Yunus--built around Jonah's tomb--honored a figure who is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jonah, who was sent by God to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, is the subject of a book in the Hebrew Tanakh--the Old Testament--and multiple passages in the Koran. While ISIS has targeted Christians for elimination in its destructive rampage through Syria and Iraq, this atrocity is an offense not just to Christians, but to all humanity. This is more than fundamentalism or extremism. It is nihilism. It is genocide. It is genocide of an entire people of faith in this region. The world should be outraged at the crime against our shared cultural heritage, including the Islam that ISIS claims to represent. ISIS has destroyed millennia of history by detonating an explosive charge and turning this ancient site of pilgrimage to rubble. However, it is not just Biblical sites and Christian churches that are targeted by ISIS extermination.…”