ishtartv.com-
thefiscaltimes.com
By Rob Garver
November
25, 201
Republican
presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz last week made headlines when
they proposed that the U.S. should only admit Christian refugees fleeing the
civil war in Syria. There was substantial backlash to the suggestion that
individuals’ religions should be a factor in determining who was worthy of
being granted refugee status, including a rebuke from President Obama, who
called a “religious test” un-American.
Cruz
and Bush argue that Christians are the victims of genocide at the hands of
ISIS. Indeed, like other minorities, they have been tortured, beheaded, and
eliminated throughout the Middle East including Syria by radical Islam.
In
February, the U.S. led coalition struck northeast Syria where ISIS
terrorists abducted at least 220 Assyrian Christians. The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights said the air strikes targeted ISIS fighters near
the town of Tel Tamr, where the terrorists had captured 10 Assyrian villages.
Other
Christians would be asked to convert to Islam or pay an exorbitant tax. If they
refused to convert or couldn’t pay, they’d be killed.
But
most of the 215,000 civilian deaths in Syria have been Muslims, not Christians.
They’ve been killed at the hands of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad
who wants to eliminate all opposition to his regime. He allowed Christians to
leave the country and more than one third
have left for Lebanon and other more tolerant Mideast countries.
But
GOP candidates – particularly Bush – have continued to press the “Christians
only” policy. Bush has repeatedly said that it is a simple matter to
distinguish real Christians from Muslims.
“You
can tell when someone is a Christian in the Middle East, I can promise you
that,” Bush
told a New Hampshire radio host Tuesday. “By name, by where they’re born,
by their birth certificates, there are ample means by which to know this.”
Bush’s
claim that positive identification of Christians is easy flies in the face of
the prevailing GOP rhetoric that it is impossible for the U.S. to verify the
real identity of refugees coming from Syria. The standard talking point,
frequently articulated by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and echoed by
other candidates, is, “We have no idea who they are.”
They
cite the lack of databases and intelligence sources in Syria as evidence that
U.S. screeners can’t trust the administration’s claim that Syrian refugees are
being adequately vetted. Of course, that would be equally true of someone
presenting an ID with a “Christian”-sounding name as of someone with a Muslim
one.
If
it seems strange that Republican candidates continue to press a “Christians
only” policy that conflicts with their other claims, an explanation might be
found in the growing anger among the overwhelmingly Republican-leaning
Christian right over a rumor that the Obama administration may not seek to have
the United Nations classify the persecution of Christians in ISIS-controlled
territory as genocide.
This
month, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, writing
for Yahoo News, reported that the State Department was preparing a report
that would describe the ISIS attacks on Iraq’s Yazidi people earlier this year
as attempted genocide, but would call relegate attacks on Christians to the
less-serious category of “crimes against humanity.”
The
distinction is a fairly legalistic one, based on the vague wording of the
United Nations 1948 Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The UN convention requires
the actions taken against a group of people to be “committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
in order to qualify as genocide. Acts of mass murder, expulsion of specific
groups from geographic regions and more that don’t show that specific intent
can still be classified as crimes against humanity, but don’t reach the level of
genocide.
This
is may be a distinction, but to many people it’s one without a difference.
Genocide and crimes against humanity feel, understandably, more or less equally
heinous.
However,
successfully seeking to have the UN to declare a group or government guilty of
genocide requires meeting the standards laid out in that convention, and
according to Isikoff’s reporting the State Department doesn’t believe it can
make the case.
The
Administration isn’t alone. A
detailed report issued recently by the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide meticulously
enumerated the atrocities ISIS has committed against various minority
populations in Iraq and Syria, including Christians, but only identified the
Yazidi as genocide victims.
When
Isikoff reported that the State Department might not seek to have Christians
specified as a group subject to ISIS genocide, there was a substantial
backlash
from the Christian right. Additionally, more than 100 members of Congress have
backed a bill demanding that the U.S. declare the persecution of Christians in
ISIS-controlled territory genocide.
A
special report in The New York Times, “Is
This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?” sums up the political
problem: It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents — Bush, a
conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal — to address the
plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader
and ‘‘clash of civilizations” narratives the West is accused of embracing.”
Candidates
like Bush and Cruz who push a “Christians only” refugee policy may be
exploiting a minor legal distinction for political gain. But there is no
disputing that they are also clearly benefiting from real anger among elements
of the GOP base that will see a failure to call out ISIS for Christian genocide
as a major issue to be debated on the national stage.