Sectarian Tension Quotes
What the historian did not know was how similarly the Protestants would behave against the Catholics when they had the power. Since the Catholics were the established church, and the Protestants the new “heretics” the Protestants were on the receiving end of most of the atrocities at the beginning. However, as if they had been scholled by their horrible experiences, they repeated them just exchanging the perpetrators and the victims.
Wesley had been to Island several times and was interested in affairs there. He was a strong advocate of freedom of religion but the violence of the earlier religious conflict made him very wary of the Irish Roman Catholics who seemed to him particularly prone to religious violence.
Most of the massacres in Iraq were the other way around: Sunni perpetrators and Shiite Victims, but there was plenty of retaliation. The ‘crusaders’ are the derogatory term for Christians who invaded the Middle East the way they did 1000 years ago. ‘Rafidites’ is a slang, insulting and derogatory term for Shiite Muslims. The Sunnis have been hating and battling the Shiites as long as they have the Christians. In that sense, there is always an element of religious civil war in countries that have both Shiite and Sunni Muslim populations. This internecine conflict has a parallel to that of the Protestants and the Catholics during the Reformation.
The mullahs had a great deal of power in Iraq and were among the most vocal opponents of democracy and freedom and instead argued for a Theocracy under Islamic law—Sharia which allowed almost no freedoms for the individual.
