Two orthodox rabbis plea the case for Christian victims of genocide in the Middle East. Will the Obama administration listen? Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Rabbi YitzchokAdlerstein, both of the Simon Wiesenthal Center write in the Wall Street Journal today:
Islamist terror attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have underlined the need for more and better vetting of refugees from the Middle East who seek safety in the U.S. But with tens of thousands pushing at the gate, who should to get first preference?
In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions should focus on providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing. Churches have been burned, priests arrested.
In the worst cases, Christians have been tortured, raped and even crucified. Mosul, Iraq, which was home to a Christian population of 35,000 a decade ago, is now empty of Christians after an ISIS ultimatum that they either convert to Islam or be executed. In Syria, Gregorios III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, said in 2013 that “entire villages” have been “cleared of their Christian inhabitants.”
Unlike some others, Middle East Christians have nowhere else to go. As a result of turmoil not of their making and beyond their control, these Christians are the region’s ultimate homeless. Should some sort of peace ever return, the likelihood is that maps will be redrawn, carving up the pie among larger ethnic groups. There will be no place for Christians among hostile Muslim populations.
The animosity toward Christians is illustrated by a horrific incident earlier this year off the Italian coast. In April, Italian police investigating events on a boat that had departed from Libya said 12 Christian refugees who were attempting to cross the sea to Europe were thrown overboard by Muslim migrant passengers, and drowned.
The U.S. can do much good for Christian refugees. Their religious heritage establishes an important basis of commonality in the many Christian communities in our country.
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Tragically, present policy does not take into account the uniquely precarious situation of displaced Christians. Instead of receiving priority treatment, Christians are profoundly disadvantaged. For instance, the State Department has accepted refugees primarily from lists prepared by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which oversees the large camps to which refugees have flocked, and where they are registered. Yet endangered Christians do not dare enter those camps.
A poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus released this week finds that Americans agree with the rabbis. Will the Obama administration do the right thing here and call a genocide against Christians a genocide? Will they let them get priority status, not as a religious test, but a facing of facts, an acknowledgement that they have been targeted in a particular way for extermination? So far, a letter signed by ecumenical religious leaders sent to Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month asking some of these questions has gone unanswered.
(I wrote about this topic here earlier this week. And talked with New York’s Cardinal Dolan here about it on Tuesday. More in a recent Q&A with Carl Anderson here. Patrick Kelly from the Knights of Columbus, Nadine Maenza from Hardwired, and Timothy Samuel Shah from the Berkley Center at Georgetown joined this (video available) National Review Institute-Heritage Foundation event earlier this month on Christian martyrs today.)
Rabbis Make a Plea for Christian Victims of Genocide