A prominent religious leader stabbed while delivering a sermon at a Sydney Assyrian church could have been targeted because of his critical and outspoken views on Islam. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel sustained lacerations to his head after a knife-wielding attacker repeatedly lunged at him during a live-streamed sermon at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley on Monday night.
” Australian Catholic University head of theology Dr Joel Hodge said many in the local Assyrian community continued to feel the wounds of oppression. Assyrians — an almost entirely Christian minority group native to an area that spans parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey — have faced persecution as a religious and ethnic minority distinct from the region’s Arab and Muslim majorities. “They’re a strong community bounded by that identity,” Hodge said.