The Fate Of Syria's Christian Minority

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CNSnews:

 

Four years ago, Israeli “dove” Avi Primor cooed over the prospects for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Mideast. The “key” to peace, wrote Israel’s former Ambassador to Germany, lies in Damascus. Amb. Primor wrote if Israel would only agree to give up the Golan Heights she had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, Syria might yet come around to accepting the existence of the Jewish state and break its dependence on the mullahs in Iran.

Hope soared on the wings of a dove.

Negotiations between Israel and Syria, although conducted through a Turkish intermediary, seemed promising. The incoming Obama administration, buoyed by the President’s Nobel Peace Prize, celebrated the new direction in world geopolitics by sending an ambassador to Damascus. No more refusals to talk. Now, we would see action on a peace agenda.

Hollywood doves Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie shared the hopeful mood and flew into Damascus for a visit to refugees from Iraq. They were, of course, roundly criticized for their photo shoot with the dictator’s fashionable wife, Asma al-Assad. Still, it’s worth noting that Angelina is a UN representative for refugees. The couple was at least urging the world not to forget the thousands of Iraqis who had fled that war-torn country to find a precarious haven in Syria.

Tragically, the doves have flown from Damascus. In the last 14 months, as Western journalists celebrated an “Arab Spring” elsewhere, a full-scale revolt against the Assad regime has broken out in Syria. Bashar al-Assad clings to power as his troops engage in “execution-style” killings of scores of women and children in Houla.

The New York Times recently reported on the endangered status of those refugees from Iraq as well as Syria’s other minorities. All are threatened with being caught in the middle of a civil war. But the region’s minorities increasingly risk becoming expendable collateral damage in the open-ended civil war in Syria. Many of Syria’s ruling Alawites — and their Kurd, Assyrian, Maronite Christian, Greek Catholic and Orthodox fellow minorities, indeed even the prudent Druze — feel caught in a vicious zero-sum game. The minorities listed—fittingly—in the middle of that group (Assyrian, Maronite Christian, Greek Catholic and Orthodox) are all Christians. And their plight points up the fact that Christians are being ethnically cleansed throughout the Middle East.

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State Department Purges Section on Religious Freedom from Its Human Rights Reports

The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.

The new human rights reports--purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered--are also the human rights reports that cover the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011.

Leonard Leo, who recently completed a term as chairman of the USCIRF, says that removing the sections on religious freedom from the State Department's Country Reports on Human Roghts is a bad idea.

Since 1998, when Congress created USCIRF, the State Department has been required to issue a separate yearly report specifically on International Religious Freedom.

But a section reporting on religious freedom has also always been included in the State Department's legally required annual country-by-country reports on human rights--that is, until now.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/state-department-purges-section-religious-freedom-its-human-rights-reports