President Obama is in no hurry to name a special envoy for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East after Pope Francis pressed the international community over the Easter holiday to do more to draw attention to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s slaughter of Christians.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest Tuesday said he didn’t know about the status of the envoy but would look into the matter.
Islamic State fighters blew up the church of the Virgin Mary in northeastern Syria on Easter Sunday, marking the latest in a series of attacks against Christians and other religious minorities in Syria and Iraq.
Pope Francis on Monday stepped up his call for the international community to do something about the killing of Christians in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, pressing world leaders not to “look the other way.”
While he didn’t call for any specific action, the pope pushed for “concrete participation and tangible help in defense and protection of our brothers and our sisters, who are persecuted, exiled, slain, beheaded solely for being Christian.”
On Good Friday last week, the pontiff also denounced what he called a “complicit silence” about the targeting of Christians.
The overthrow of secular dictatorships in Iraq and Egypt, as well as the the unending civil war between Syrian Sunnis and Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist government, have proved catastrophic for Arab Christian communities that date back to biblical times.
Over the last decade the number of Christians living in Iraq plummeted from 1.5 million to roughly 300,000, according to the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for human rights and religious freedom in hot spots around the world.
The U.S. Congress last year, with strong bipartisan support, passed a bill creating a special envoy for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East, and Obama signed it into law. But in the intervening nine months, Obama has failed to nominate someone to fill the new position.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who previously served as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and is a close friend and ally of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., co-sponsored the bill along with several Republicans, including Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., and former Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va.
The issue is extremely personal for Eshoo, a Chaldean Catholic and first-generation American. Her mother was Armenian and her father was an Assyrian Christian from Iraq.
“We’re coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide and when we look over our shoulders at history, we say never again, we will never forget,” she told the Washington Examiner in April. “So from both sides of the family, exactly what my grandmother described and all the elders of the family escaped is [again] taking place.
Eshoo has said the mass killings of Christians and religious minorities such as the Yezidis, Shaback, Turkmen and others keep her up at night. She has spent the spring congressional break circulating a letter among her colleagues for signatures urging Obama to fill the envoy post. Eshoo plans to send the letter to Obama when the House returns next week.
