ishtartv.com
By THE
WASHINGTON TIMES - - Thursday, July 30, 2015
The
mainline Protestant churches in the United States, joined by Pope Francis, have
shown great concern for many fashionable secular causes, such as eliminating
poverty, promoting peace and promoting fear of global warming, but for
Christians around the world under threat of persecution and annihilation, not
so much.
Nowhere
is that more apparent than in the Middle East, the birthplace of religious
faith where some of the oldest Christian minorities and its faithful are
savaged and forced to immigrate at the risk of their lives.
In
its zeal to avoid accusations of Islamophobia, the U.S. State Department is not
only content to leave Christians to twist, slowly in the wind, but in several
instances to bar foreign Christian activists to come to the United States to
bear witness to their faith. Sister Diana, an influential leader of Christians
in Iraq, was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department though she had visited
the United States on other occasions, the most recent trip only two years ago.
Christians
in the Middle East — prominently including Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan
— now number only 4 percent of the population, down from 14 percent immediately
after World War II. More than a third of the 600,000 Syrian Christians have
fled to friendlier places, some to the United States. Only a third of Iraqi
Christians, 1.5 million of them in 2003, remain in their native homeland today.
Many of Iran's estimated half million Christians have been imprisoned, though
Armenian and Assyrian Orthodox Christianity is technically tolerated under
strict Shariah rules of subordination. In Pakistan, the tiny Christian minority
is under siege from a new blasphemy law from Muslims who fear their religion
cannot withstand competing faiths. Many government officials of moderate views
have been assassinated; others have been imprisoned, some to languish there
under neither charge nor conviction.
If
this continues there will soon be no Christians in the region, except in
Israel, where Christians are free to worship as they please.
U.S.
intervention on behalf of persecuted Christians has been grudging, often
reluctant and usually ineffective. There are ritual protests against religious
discrimination, such as those against the Communist government of Vietnam. In
Vietnam the diplomatic protests have been filed only for the record, given the
fact that the head of Vietnam's Communist Party was recently accorded the
welcome reserved for heads of state. There was no shortage of elaborate
diplomatic trivia, an abundance of bells and whistles when he came to
Washington on the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Given
the confusion of the foreign policy strategies of the Obama administration,
expecting effective initiative from this White House is a forlorn and futile
hope. What is needed is a mobilization of American Christians, perhaps modeling
efforts on the example of Jewish activists against anti-Semitism.
That
could begin with congressional hearings; there's plenty to listen to. Christian
churches and other organizations should demand the imposition of economic and
other sanctions which have proved so effective when applied to other foreign
economies.
Freedom
of conscience is the necessary goal in Muslim-majority countries if the war on
Islamic terrorism is to be brought to a successful conclusion. Freedom of
conscience is the right on which all other rights are based, and the only hope
for the reform of Islam, which enlightened Muslim leaders have demanded.
The
timidity of the United States, a reluctance to call out Muslim persecution of
Christians, confuses everyone. Forceful calls to halt deprivations against
Christians in the Middle East is not only necessary for the promotion of human
rights in the dark corners of the globe, but are powerful weapons in the fight
against terrorism and international instability