The days of all-talk-and-no-action in regard to aiding Christians targeted for their faith overseas is now over as President Donald J. Trump promises new assistance to the persecuted.
Townhall’s Katie Pavlich is reporting on statements made by the President at yesterday’s prayer breakfast in which he specifically addressed the genocide of religious minorities taking place at the hands of ISIS.
“We have seen peace-loving Muslims brutalize, victimize, murdered and oppressed by ISIS killers. We have seen threats of extermination against the Jewish people. We have seen a campaign of ISIS and genocide against Christians, where they cut off heads. Not since the Middle Ages have we seen that. We haven’t seen that, the cutting off of heads. Now they cut off the heads, they drown people in steel cages,” Trump said.
“All nations have a moral obligation to speak out against such violence. All nations have a duty to work together to confront it and to confront it viciously if we have to.”
At the White House press briefing later that day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that the president meant what he said and intends to grant refugee asylum in the United States to Christians who are being persecuted in the Middle East and North Africa.
“It’s important to the president, it was during and throughout the campaign. It’s something he addressed this morning and it’s something he’s committed to in terms of allowing Christian minorities in key countries to seek asylum in the United States,” Spicer said. “He recognizes that in so many nations, these are the oppressed groups in accordance with how the U.N. defines refugees.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
As Pavlich reports, former Secretary of State John Kerry officially declared last year that ISIS is carrying out a genocide against religious minorities, but only after dragging its feet for months. The declaration triggered legal obligations for the U.S. and the United Nations.
“Naming these crimes is important,” Kerry said at the time. “But what is essential is to stop them.”
Apparently, the US did nothing about it, according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). Only after being forced to sue the Obama Administration last year for refusing to provide any information on what they were doing to help these Christians did they discover that neither the State Department nor the UN did anything to fulfill their obligations.
Trump also admonished the former administration for its ineffective handling of the crisis of Christian persecution.
During a recent interview with CBN, he was asked if America should prioritize Christian refugees and he responded:
“Yes. Yes, they’ve been horribly treated. If you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, or at least very, very tough, to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.”
This was much different from a response given by former President Barack Obama in 2015 when he was asked whether he thought Christians should be given a preference among refugees. Obama described that idea as “shameful,” saying, “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
This explains why, during the last fiscal year, the administration accepted 12,587 Syrian refugees of which only 68 were Christian and 24 were Yazidi.
Because Christians comprise 10 percent of Syria’s population, in order to achieve parity with the number of Muslims being admitted, Christian refugees should have numbered at least several thousand.
The good news is that the new president is a much more vocal supporter of aid for persecuted religious minorities and his administration is fully expected to follow through on its promises.
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