House Democrats continue to highlight examples of immigrants barred from entering the U.S. because of President Trump’s controversial executive order temporarily banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, even as travel has resumed while federal courts determine the order’s constitutionality.
Democrats and some Republicans gathered Tuesday in the House Rayburn Building to honor Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi Parliament whose pleas for help in saving her people from slaughter by Islamic State in 2014 have made her the terrorist group’s “most wanted” woman.
But she almost didn’t make it to Washington to collect her award because of Trump’s executive order, and the event turned into to attack against what Democrats have been terming a “Muslim” ban by the president.
Ironically, Yazidis are not Muslims, and that she could have been caught up by the ban tends to support the White House argument that the temporary ban is directed at countries where terrorists operate, not a religion.
“It was inconceivable to your oppressors and inevitable to you that you would prevail and be here today,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “Sorry for some obstacles that came up … I won’t go there,” she added in deference to the event’s bipartisan nature.
Rabbi David Saperstein, whom former President Barack Obama appointed ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, was less reserved than Pelosi.
Both he and Pelosi hailed Obama for ordering the airstrikes and aid drops that allowed the Yazidis trapped on Iraq’s Mount Sinjar in 2014 to escape the Islamic State fighters who had encircled them. Under Obama’s presidency, Islamic State first arose and has not been defeated. Trump has vowed to eradicate the organization.
Saperstein’s remarks about religious freedom sounded like direct shots at Trump.
Dakhil was “defending some of the most important universal rights that we as Americans have cherished and defended — the right of freedom of religion, conscience and belief; the rights of minorities to enjoy full and equal rights as citizens,” he said.
“When we speak of freedom of religion, we are speaking of the essential right of all of us to live our lives according to the dictates of our own conscience, to be free to live lives of integrity and conviction whether we are Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Buddhist, Jews, freethinkers. When societies robustly protect that most basic right they are not only doing the right thing, they’re also doing one of the most important things any country can do, to build a tolerant, stable, healthy, prosperous and decent society for all their people.”
Dakhil received the 2016 Lantos Human Rights Prize — named for the-late Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif. A former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Lantos was a Holocaust survivor and avid champion for human rights.
Other Democrats in the audience nodded in agreement about what a travesty it would have been if Dakhil had to miss the ceremony, but they did not have speaking roles.
Dakhil “was a voice heard around the world,” Pelosi said. “If we refuse to speak out for human rights because of geography or because of the economics, we lose all moral authority to speak out for human rights wherever they are violated in the world.”
Last week Democrats repeatedly brought up her case as an example of the executive order’s flaws. They held daily events blasting the order and invited immigrant advocates and relatives of affected visitors to make their case in front of the cameras.
