OPINION:
Christians don’t count. President Clinton, who has a curious affection for Islam, and the dominant media, which has an aversion to religious faith generally and to Christianity in particular, share an indifference to the growing martyrdom of followers of the Christ, and particularly in the Middle East.
Ancient Christian enclaves, some of them dating from the earliest origins of the faith, have survived centuries of persecution and abuse, are being exiled or worse, systematically destroyed. It’s difficult to measure whether the personal suffering or the damage to the culture of the world is the more devastating.
Some prominent voices have been raised in protest, but what may be the most severe persecution of Christians in centuries continues to expand. The Obama administration, while making conventional obeisance declines, for reasons observers can only speculate, to make the Islamist martyrdom of Christians a high-priority policy issue. The president’s remarks on the issue, such as they are, seem to be muffled by fear of rebuke from Muslim moderates obsessed with persecution of Muslims in the Crusades of a thousand years ago.
Pope Francis last year told a delegation of Jews, headed by Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, that he believes the world is already entangled in World War III, but unlike the first two world wars, which began with dramatic events, “this war is coming in stages. The Jews were savagely abused and the world was silent, and now it’s the Christians who suffer death and suffering and an indifferent world falls silent.” Mr. Lauder says Christians in Iraq and Syria are even identified with a symbol bearing the Hebrew letter for the English letter N, for Nazarene, “much as the yellow star was used in the past against European Jewry.”
David Saperstein, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, conceded in congressional testimony that the Obama administration has no strategy for dealing with pogroms. Mr. Saperstein’s office was left open for nine months and downgraded with his appointment. Religious leaders take this as evidence of the low priority the Obama administration has assigned to the issue.
The annual State Department report on religious freedom around the world reports that only 500,000 Christians, who once numbered three times that, remain in Iraq. Some 300,000 Yazidis and thousands of Kaka’is, tribal minorities with certain Christian beliefs, are numbered among nearly a million displaced Iraqis. The worst atrocities are the work of the Islamic State, or ISIS. In one instance, ISIS executed at least 100 Yazidi men within the span of a few hours, and took their women and children into slavery. The al Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate, killed a Dutch Roman Catholic priest in Homs in April, and a dozen Druze, including priests, in August.
A revival of anti-Christian violence has erupted in Indonesia, once touted for its peaceful practice of Islam, where jihadists have forced local officials to close churches and scatter believers.
Prominent Christian leaders say the United States and the other superpowers could do more to stop what Pope Francis calls the “genocide” of Christians in the Middle East. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a Baptist, son of evangelist Billy Graham and head of Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief group, uses the word “genocide” as well to describe the persecution.
Syrian Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan says the deterioration of religious tolerance — always scarce in that part of the world — is “a very direct result of the politics in the West.” The nations of the West must accept more refugees, he says. Taking in refugees is not the most effective way to resolve the resurgent hatred of Christians, but the United States has admitted only 25 Syrian Christians in the thousand or so Syrian refugees it has granted asylum to so far. The sound of the silence at the White House is deafening.
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