Today,
I've been watching a recording of a talk Thursday by Nina Shea, the Hudson Institute's director of the Center
for Religious Freedom, on the State Department's announcement Thursday
designating Christians, Yahzidis, and others as victims of genocide by ISIS.
The
announcement was a surprise -- the State Department had indicated as recently
as the day before that it needed more time to make a determination about
Christians, despite the evidence that this has been going on for years and that
the sexual enslavement of Christian and Yahzidi women and girls long predated
John Kerry as Secretary of State.
It's
easy, perhaps too easy, to say that State did what it did because the issue was
beginning to bubble up, this is an election year, and that various officials
didn't want to repeat what happened with Franklin Roosevelt - who ignored or
disregarded the growing evidence that the Nazis were persecuting the Jews
before World War II and staining his legacy.
Perhaps
those are the reasons. But it shocks me to my soul that our government would
deliberately ignore this horror, for whatever reason, in spite of the evidence
in front of its eyes. And it feeds the narrative that this Administration is hostile
to Christians in general.
Is
this what all this political anger in our country has come to? Can someone help
me understand this?
Related links:
Photograph: Secretary of State John Kerry announcing the State Department's genocide designation, March 17, 2016.
