What's preventing America from helping persecuted Iraqi and Syrian Christians?
Answer: Being a labelled a "crusader army," according to prominent human rights lawyer and religious freedom advocate Nina Shea.
During a panel discussion on global persecution at International Christian Concern's first annual conference on the persecuted church on Friday in Silver Spring, Maryland, Shea said the U.S. government is afraid to work directly with the Christian communities in Iraq and Syria because it fears such action would only further inflame the Muslim world since it would bolster the narrative that America is out to destroy Islam.
Shea, the director of the Washington-based Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, provided details of the U.S government's troubling pattern of indifference toward persecuted Christians not only in the Middle East but elsewhere in the world, The Christian Post reports.
"The day before [Secretary of State John] Kerry designated [ISIS' atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities] as genocide officially, the [State Department] were announcing they were only going to name Yazidis as victims of genocide," Shea disclosed, adding that it's clear the U.S. government is "so unsympathetic" to the plight of Christians.
"We signed petitions and put enough pressure on them with facts and arguments that [Kerry] listened but he hasn't done anything since then," she said.
"In fact, he went to Iraq and gave two speeches a month later and never mentioned the genocide issue," Shea said. "This is Secretary Kerry, he gave a speech on the anniversary of the Holocaust and said 'never again must we forget' and never mentioned the ongoing genocide in Iraq and Syria right now."
Shea also highlighted the fact that Syria's Christian population has not been fairly represented in U.S.' Syrian refugee resettlement programme.
"Christians comprised 10 percent of the population of Syria before the war five years ago. They constitute less than 1 percent of the refugee resettlement in the United States. The United States has resettled about 60 Christians in five years from Syria," Shea said.
She said the U.S. is also rejecting calls for its forces to train Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and other religious minorities defend their own province because Washington has a "complex" when it comes to working directly with Christians.
"This was true under the [George W.] Bush administration and more so now that the United States is desperate to avoid the label that we're a 'crusader army,'" Shea said.
