John Barsa: Religious organizations banding together to help rebuild Beirut

The rebuilding of Beirut is already under way, thanks in part to people of faith, said John Barsa, the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Lebanon since the deadly blast that leveled parts of the capital city.

Mr. Barsa, acting administrator of the U.S. Agency of International Development, told a religious liberty event in Washington on Thursday that the devastation in Beirut he witnessed on a recent visit to the explosion-scarred city “shook me to the core.”

Mr. Barsa, nominated in April by President Trump to steer the $41 billion international development agency, touted efforts he witnessed led by religious organizations to pick up the pieces a week after massive explosions in the city’s port killed at least 200 people.

“I’m not going to name the organizations,” he said. “But when I was walking down the streets in devastated Beirut … I saw many of these organizations cleaning up rubble and glass. It wasn’t Shia rubble and glass. It wasn’t Druze rubble and glass. Or Sunni rubble and glass. Or Christian rubble and glass. It was rubble and glass.”

Four months into his post atop the U.S. conduit that in recent years has directed millions in aid, from earthquake-stricken regions of Mexico to locust-plagued fields in East Africa. Mr. Barsa also spoke highly of President Trump’s executive order in June that authorized at least $50 million to protect faith freedom internationally.

That order also mandates training on religious liberty values for foreign service workers that, in Mr. Barsa’s words, will help younger employees from the outset of their careers to “be on the lookout” for attempts around the globe to limit religious freedom.

Citing the Boko Haram paramilitary group in Nigeria, the imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinxiang, China, and ethnic persecution against Rohingya in Myanmar, he said he shares the president’s concerns over the decline in religious freedom.

Mr. Barsa was joined in the virtual discussion, hosted by the Religious Freedom Institute, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, by Samah Norquist, USAID’s chief adviser for international religious freedom, another White House appointee, to spell out initiatives involving faith-based organizations in conflict zones.

Ms. Norquist pusheda back on the suggestion that sending tax dollars to religious-backed organizations violates constitutional principles. She recounted visiting a Catholic Church in Jordan housing Iraqi refugees who were learning to bake pizzas under the tutelage of an Italian priest. USAID funds, Ms. Norquist said, helps buy the cheese, prepared by a group of women in Jordan, that is sent to the church to help make the pizzas.

“It’s one of the most incredible success stories that USAID was able to do, and we’re not doing religious teaching,” she said. “We’re not providing Bibles or Quran or preaching, we’re providing programs to build their capacity in order to be able to deliver to their local communities.”

Ms. Norquist also touted the agency’s New Partner Initiative, a project started under previous Administrator Mark Green to broaden the list of organizations USAID works with in providing aid, as “new and underutilized” partners who help spread American values overseas.

During its first year, the NPI awarded over $200 million worth of grants in a “streamlined and more inclusive awards process,” said USAID in a statement.

One partner, Samaritan’s Purse, received $9 million to support the return and recovery of displaced religious and ethnic minorities in the Nineveh Plains and other regions of Iraq.

“Many of those local, little groups don’t know how to apply for grants, don’t know what the regulations are,” she said. “USAID can do magic. Give us the people, give us the tools, and we’ll do it.”

Democrats in Congress have been skeptical of Mr. Barsa and the administration’s influence at USAID. Last week saw the high-profile departure of a White House liaison at the agency who’d made derogatory comments about LGBTQ people. Earlier in the summer, Democrats — including Reps. Joaquin Castro, of Texas, and Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota — called on Religious Freedom Adviser Mark Kevin Lloyd to step down after comments he made critical over Islam surfaced.

On Thursday, the two USDAID leaders did not mention personnel issues, instead championing building pluralism abroad as a security strategy for the U.S. Mr. Barsa spoke of his own mother fleeing Communist Cuba, saying the issue as a personal one for him.

“Believers of nearly all faiths — including Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and Jews — have been increasingly persecuted over the past decade,” said Mr. Barsa. “For Americans, religious freedom is grounded in our founding documents, and has always been a bipartisan issue.”