They pointed their finger at the genocide happening in the Middle East and then ... well, that's just about it.
Activists decried that nearly six months after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the murder of countless Christians in the Middle East by Islamic fanatics constitutes "genocide," the West has done little to stop the killings, the Religion News Service reports.
Meeting in Washington to tackle the plight of Christian minorities in Syria and Iraq, the activists wondered why the West appears to have given only lip service and has done little to help and protect the beleaguered Christians in the region.
Religious freedom advocate Katrina Lantos Swett called the crisis "perhaps the great moral challenge of our time right now."
"I am baffled and heartbroken, as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, at how it is possible for the West to seem so, so blind, wilfully blind, or even worse, aware but relatively disinterested in what is unfolding in our time, on our watch, in our purview of being able to act," said Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She spoke at a news conference on Wednesday last week during the opening of the national convention for In Defense of Christians, an advocacy group.
The activists called on the U.S. Congress to take decisive steps to protect the lives and culture of groups such as Assyrian and Coptic Christians, and even non-Christians such as the Yazidis.
During the news conference, Republican Rep. Dave Trott of Michigan said he will introduce legislation to support restoration of Coptic Christian churches destroyed by Egyptian looters in religious violence in 2013.
Andrew Doran, co-founder of In Defense of Christians, said his group and other advocates will intensify their effort to seek congressional action on ending the conflict in Syria, which he said serves as the breeding ground for terrorism in the region and beyond.
"It's not coming, it's here — it's in our churches, it's in our nightclubs and it's in our public spaces and it will get much worse before it gets better," he said. "If we move swiftly to end the conflict in Syria we can save lives there now and save American lives and other lives elsewhere in the decades to come."
