While the U.S. Department of State is poised to declare Islamic State’s mass murder of Yazidis a “genocide,” it is unlikely to recognize the mass murder of Iraqi and Syrian Christians as such. Nina Shea explains:
It is difficult not to conclude that the reason for the administration’s reluctance to designate a Christian genocide is not for lack of evidence but for political reasons. One possible obstacle is the Genocide Convention’s requirement that states act to “prevent and protect” the victims of genocide. . . .
But might there be another political reason at the root of the administration’s reluctance to recognize this Islamist genocide of Christians? Consider how it would parallel the reason that Holocaust scholars have found for President Roosevelt’s silence about the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust: “Nazi propaganda, which portrayed the Allied involvement in the war as being on behalf of ‘the Jews,’” led him instead to “refer in general to the aim of ending the mistreatment and murder of civilians under Axis rule.” That silence proved devastating for European Jews and came to be seen as a historic moral failing. . . .
In the face of IS’s anti-“crusader” propaganda, might the Obama administration be on the verge of making that same mistake, of silence, over the genocide of Christians? Whether the official U.S. list of genocide victims includes or excludes Christians will affect the persecuted Christians enormously: in raising humanitarian aid, receiving asylum, overcoming de-facto discrimination in UN resettlement programs, receiving restitution and reparation for seized land, and securing a place at the peace-negotiations table. It would also give these two-millennia-old Christian communities a sense of justice.
Read more on National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431425/genocide-christians-iraq-syria-obama-administration-state-department