When Isaiah wrote, “they shall mount up with wings like eagles” (40:31), he didn’t have helicopters in mind. But if Chloe Valdary gets her way, Middle East Christians may.
Writing in last Friday’s “Wall Street Journal”, Valdary (a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal) recalled how in 1975 air and sea missions saved tens of thousands of Vietnamese. Eventually they were resettled in the U.S. She advocates the same approach for the persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
Since the rise of . . . ISIS, about 125,000 Christians have fled [Iraq]. After ISIS took [the city of] Mosul in June 2014, the city’s Christians flocked to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. In Syria, once home to nearly two million Christians, at least 500,000 have been displaced during four years of war. It is ISIS policy to kidnap and rape Christian women and girls. The terrorist group has razed Christian sites, including monasteries dating to the fifth century. Last October the ISIS magazine Dabiq referred to Christians as “crusaders” and vowed to kill “every Crusader possible.”
That should remind Western policy makers: Christians are not random victims, caught in the maw of Mideast strife. They are targets of genocide, much like the Jews during World War II. This entitles them to broad protection under the 1951 U.N. Genocide Convention, to which the U.S. is a signatory.
It is also worth noting that because Christians in Iraq and Syria are facing genocide—as opposed to displacement—there is a limited window for rescue. Unlike the thousands of refugees pouring into Europe, who are mostly escaping the violence driven by the sectarian war in Syria, Christians are facing a targeted campaign of annihilation. The U.S. ought to take that into consideration when prioritizing the resettlement of the additional 30,000 refugees the country is slated to absorb over the next two years.
Valdary goes on to note that a California Democrat has introduced in the House of Representatives a bill to require the secretary of state to “report to Congress a plan to expedite the processing of refugee admissions applications” for religious minorities threatened by ISIS. Valdary writes . . .
The bill hasn’t moved in Congress, partly due to inattention but also because the Obama administration seems to want nothing to do with it.
Mark Arabo has founded the Minority Humanitarian foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to get Iraqi Christians out before it is too late. Arabo . . .
. . . is essentially running an underground railroad to help Christians escape. “We are bringing them to America, Australia and France,” he said. “In the U.S. alone, we have identified 70,000 Christians who have been displaced and have matched them with 70,000 people willing to bring them in.” But that depends on the administration’s willingness to allow them to enter.
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The scale of suffering in the world staggers my mind—and I see only bits and pieces on TV, the Internet and in print. This suffering is intentional. It’s persecution. Not as in, you might lose your job. But in, you will be killed if we catch you.
These are our brothers and sisters. Their fine points of doctrine may differ from ours. They may worship differently. But many certainly have genuine faith in Jesus. That makes them family. Whatever we believe about end-time theology, this is their Tribulation!
Should I write my representative and ask him to get moving on House Resolution 1568, the “Protecting Religious Minorities Persecuted by ISIS Act of 2015”? Should you? One thing I know you and I must do is pray. I’ve become so cynical about the government, and my faith in God’s intervention is sometimes weak. But, if not out of great faith, then out of desperation for our brothers and sisters, I (we) should pray for the Father to save his family from this demonic, antichrist evil sweeping the Middle East.
I know: something else to pray for. It never ends. The list always lengthens. But we are at war and the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ hang in the balance. May our Father protect them. May he save them from the evil of ISIS. And may he, if he so wills, use even helicopters to “mount [them] up with wings like eagles.”
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