It started as a message to Nigerian officials. As home to nearly 100 million Christians, Nigeria has the world’s sixth-largest Christian population. But, for too long, the United States has stood aside as successive Nigerian administrations turned their guns on the country’s Christians to starve, murder, or drive them away; the Biafra genocide alone killed perhaps two million. Former President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, removed Nigeria from the religious freedom watch list without explanation, often blaming the regime’s slaughter of Christians on migration due to climate change.
Rather than sanction then-Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Biden invited him to watch a World Cup game with him. The problem neither Biden nor Blinken recognized, however, is that climate change does not charter buses for Fulani militiamen to travel hundreds of miles to invade Christian villages.
First, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and then President Donald Trump himself reversed Biden and Blinken’s immoral policy to stand up for religious freedom. Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced a new policy to reject the visas of violators of religious freedom.
“The United States is taking decisive action in response to the atrocities and violence against Christians in Nigeria and around the world,” Rubio said on X on Dec. 3. “The @StateDept will restrict U.S. visas for those who knowingly direct, authorize, fund, support, or carry out violations of religious freedom. This visa policy applies to Nigeria and other governments or individuals that persecute people for their religious beliefs.”
Nigeria’s constitution prohibits either its federal government or its constituent states from adopting a state religion; yet 12 of its states have already established sharia courts and folded Islamic law into their legal systems. As Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu continues Buhari’s tolerance for creeping Islamism, Tinubu and his advisers deserve no U.S. visas, nor should any governor whose state incorporates Islamic law.
But while the press may focus on the genocide against Christians in Nigeria, the State Department’s new policy does not limit itself to Africa, extending to “other governments or individuals that persecute people for their religious beliefs.” Unfortunately, there are many governments that fit that bill. Consider Pakistan. Pakistan may have always defined itself as a state for Muslims, but, upon its founding, it made Christian and Hindu celebrations official holidays. Today, Pakistan has expelled or slaughtered its Hindus and Sikhs and often applies draconian blasphemy laws to murder Christians. While Trump celebrates Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir with White House lunches, Munir, as Pakistan’s chief patron of U.S.-designated terrorist groups, will no longer qualify for a U.S. visa.
The same is true with Muhammad Yunus, ironically a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has governed Bangladesh since the August 2024 coup that ousted secularist Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Yunus has not only banned the secularist Awami League, but also arrested politicians who dared to treat Christians as equals under the law. He, too, should no longer qualify for a U.S. visa.
Perhaps no two leaders outside Nigeria are as hostile to Christianity as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Aliyev has ordered Azerbaijani soldiers to destroy centuries-old Armenian crosses and now sandblasts inscriptions from Armenian monasteries across Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory he cleansed of Christians in 2023.
ABBOTT PREDICTS DOOM FOR CROCKETT IF SHE ENTERS CROWDED TEXAS SENATE RACE
Erdoğan denies the Armenian and Pontic Greek genocides, confiscates Greek Orthodox property, refuses licenses for Christian schools, and now revokes visas from Christians seeking to minister to congregations they have served for decades. In 2020, Erdoğan converted the Hagia Sophia, one of the most important churches in Turkey that had served as a museum since 1935, into a mosque. Muslims can pray inside, but Christians cannot; indeed, Turkey does not even allow Christians into areas it now deems Islamic. While United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has been shamefully silent about Erdoğan’s illegal move in contravention of UNESCO regulations, Trump and Rubio need no longer be so complacent.
U.S. defense of religious freedom is overdue, but if Trump and Rubio give free passes to Pakistan, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, as Biden and Blinken excused Nigeria, then the new policy will be meaningless, and Rubio’s legacy will be no different than Blinken’s.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
