Christian Human Rights Group Issues Mideast “Genocide Warning”

A Christian human rights group has issued a “genocide warning” for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

The organization, a Swiss-based NGO called Christian Solidarity International (CSI), is warning that recent anti-minority violence, political unrest, and a culture of “Islamic supremacism” have put the very survival of the region’s religious minorities at risk.

The organization has also launched a petition to President Obama on its website, csi-usa.org, asking him to announce a policy in his upcoming State of the Union Address “to prevent the eradication of the endangered Christian communities and other religious minorities of the Islamic Middle East.”

Minority religious communities in the Islamic Middle East include Christians, Jews, Yezidis, Mandeans and followers of the Baha’i faith. Altogether, these populations number over 12 million.

But the recent popular uprisings in the region, largely welcomed and supported by the international community, have been accompanied by a dark undercurrent of anti-Christian and anti-minority violence.

In the past year, religious minorities in Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the region, have been the target of vicious attacks by Islamist groups and, occasionally, state security forces. In October, Egypt’s ruling military regime drew international condemnation for attacking peaceful Christian demonstrators with soldiers and tanks, killing 25.

In a letter to President Obama last week, the CEO of CSI’s American branch, Dr. John Eibner, argued that a number of “conditions for genocide” can now be seen in the Middle East. They include “deep-seated insecurity on the part of ruling elites,” “outbreaks of organized violence” against minorities, and “prevalence of a religiously discriminatory ideology.”

In the case of the Middle East, Eibner wrote, that “religiously discriminatory ideology” is Islamic supremacism – the same ideology, he claims, which fueled the genocide of Armenian Christians in Turkey in 1915 and the destruction of the Arab world’s Jewish communities in 1948.

CSI is asking President Obama to call on the United Nations’ Secretary-General to issue a genocide warning, to stop funding institutions in the Middle East that promote religious discrimination, and to commit at least 15% of the funding the U.S. has set aside for promoting democracy in the region towards “combating Islamic supremacism.”

The United States and most other countries are signatories to the UN’s Genocide Convention, which obligates parties to “undertake to prevent” the crime of genocide.  However, since 1951, when the Convention entered into force, the United States has invoked it only once, when it labeled mass killings in Sudan’s Darfur region a genocide.