Outside of the Dachau concentration camp there is a sign written in five languages — Hebrew, English, French, German and Russian — saying “never again.” Following the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust, the world rallied around a new word for a crime that has plagued human history. Following the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the international community, heavy with guilt, vowed “never again” to allow such atrocities to occur.
Sadly, this promise has been broken again and again, whether in Rwanda, Srebrenica or Cambodia. Once again, we are faced with the same evil as in the past, and, tragically, we are once again allowing it to continue.
After visiting northern Iraq in January, meeting with representatives from the region and closely following the reports over the last few months, I am convinced that what I witnessed was and is an ongoing genocide of Christians, Yezidis and other religious minorities.
Following Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of his so-called caliphate, members of these historic faith communities were given the option to “convert, leave or die.” Children as young as seven months have been ripped from the loving arms of their parents, some of them have been forced into sex slavery, others brainwashed and made into child soldiers for this inhuman insurgency.
Those allowed to stay are subjected to repression that masquerades as “religious tolerance” but are simply another means of ensuring the slow but steady eradication of any semblance of religious diversity under Islamic State rule. Put simply, actions committed against these groups meet every criterion for genocide spelled out in Article II of the 1948 Convention, and yet the actions continue. “Never again” has become “once again.”
We look back at our recent history as Americans and often lament that we did nothing to stop the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica. As cable after cable, account after heartbreaking account came in, often the rest of the world stood by. When the dust settled and the investigators came, the costs of inaction and apathy became painfully apparent to those who watched from the halls of power and those who watched from their living rooms.
In his 1998 address to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide, President Clinton reiterated the world’s promise to “never again” permit genocide to occur. “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began,” Clinton admitted. “We should have not allowed the refugee camps to become a safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”
The admission was true and the apology necessary, but had they come four years earlier, hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved.
Probably the most disappointing reiteration of “never again” occurred 14 years later. When President Obama stood before the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2012, he uttered the phrase no fewer than five times before announcing that he would award Jan Karksi — who fearlessly infiltrated both the Warsaw ghetto and a concentration camp before reporting the atrocities to the Western Allie s— the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Prior to that, his White House issued Presidential Study Directive 10, which states that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” Now, in 2015, countless political and religious leaders from around the world have acknowledged that the Islamic State is committing an ongoing genocide in Iraq. But the administration seems to be taking great pains to obfuscate and avoid this reality at all costs.
In fact, recent reports indicate that more than 50 intelligence officials have come forward accusing the administration of deliberately misrepresenting intelligence to show that the Islamic State is losing the fight in Iraq and Syria. Not only is this morally and strategically negligent, but it also belies a deadly hypocrisy regarding genocide prevention. If unchanged, this hypocrisy will undoubtedly be complicit in the eventual eradication of Christians, Yezidis, Shia Muslims, Turkmen, Shabak and other minorities from the lands in which they have existed for millennia.
My friend Katrina Lantos-Swett is correct in saying that “the evil of the past is on us.” Thanks to modern technology we don’t need a Jan Karski to tell us what is happening. We don’t need to wait for the cables or the 6 o’clock news.
All of the evidence of an ongoing genocide is available via a quick Internet search. But where is the outcry? Where is the action? Right now our leaders have the chance to break the cycle of denial and apology. But will they? Or will this country once again break its promise of “never again”? In a time that demands resolute moral courage and leadership, I am reminded of the words of the Lutheran pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Frank R. Wolf is a former congressman from Virginia and a senior distinguished fellow at the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
