White House Ignoring Christian Genocide
Muslim jihadis murder and wound dozens in San Bernardino, California, and all the president and attorney general want to worry about is gun control and anti-Muslim backlash.
Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East, and all the Obama administration wants to do is admit Syrian Muslims when we know there are jihadi operatives in those masses whom we cannot detect while at the same time rejecting Christian applications for asylum on the grounds that we can’t properly vet them. Consider the following:
An important, ecumenical coalition letter was sent on Dec. 4 to Secretary of State John Kerry, requesting a meeting to brief him about genocide confronting Iraq and Syria’s Christian communities. Signatories represented a broad range of distinguished religious leaders and scholars.
Hudson International Religious Freedom Center’s Nina Shea organized the initiative. It responded to reports that the State Department will soon issue a formal statement that Yazidis—but not Christians—face ISIS genocide. The letter stated:
We have extensive files supporting a finding that ISIS’ treatment of Iraqi and Syrian Christians, as well as Yazidis and other vulnerable minorities, meets this definition. They include evidence of ISIS assassinations of church leaders; mass murders; torture, kidnapping for ransom in the Christian communities of Iraq and Syria; its sexual enslavement and systematic rape of Christian girls and women; its practices of forcible conversions to Islam; its destruction of churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and Christian artifacts; and its theft of lands and wealth from Christian clergy and laity alike. We will also present ISIS’ own, public statements taking “credit” for mass murder of Christians, and expressing its intent to eliminate Christian communities from its “Islamic State.”
Kirsten Powers’ USA Today column and other media publicized the letter.
The letter was also described and appended to Congressional testimony on Dec. 9 by Knights of Columbus head Carl Anderson. His testimony provided examples of such genocide researched by Shea. It also attested to the fact that Middle Eastern Christians avoid U.N. refugee camps due to fear of extremist violence inside them; and, moreover, that the U.S. disproportionately excludes Christians and other vulnerable minorities from its Syrian refugee resettlement program as a result of relying on the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) for its Syrian refugee referrals.
