As Middle East Christians suffer, advocates slam Obama’s failure to support religious freedom

Eshoo also was instrumental, along with several Republicans, in pushing a bipartisan bill through Congress last summer that calls on President Obama to name a special envoy charged with aiding the ancient Christian community and other persecuted religious minorities in Iraq, Syria and other countries in the Middle East.

“It’s very important that someone be in place for all the obvious reasons,” she told the Washington Examiner. “There is an effort in the Middle East to obliterate all the Christians, period, because they are Christians.”

For Eshoo, the ranking member of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee and a close friend and ally of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the issue is extremely personal.

Eshoo is 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 said. “So from both sides of the family, exactly what my grandmother described and all the elders of the family escaped is [again] taking place.”

Last summer the House and Senate, with strong bipartisan support, passed a bill creating the special envoy and President Obama signed it into law. But since then, Obama has failed to nominate someone to fill the new position, and few lawmakers other than Eshoo and a handful of Republicans have raised the issue or tried to press Obama to make the nomination as soon as possible.

Eshoo declined to speculate on why the Obama administration is dragging its feet — even in the face of headlines about the rapes and crucifixions Christians, Yezidis and other religious minorities are suffering at the hand of the Islamic State.

She is now circulating a letter among supportive House and Senate colleagues urging Obama to name the envoy quickly.

“Any president of the U.S. has more than a full plate 24/7, but I think that our bipartisan, bicameral letter will urge him to help move it up on his agenda,” she said.

Former Republican Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, a passionate advocate for human rights and religious freedom throughout his nearly three-decade career in the House, says Obama appeared enthusiastic when signing the bill and even sent him the signing pen. Since then, in the face of a stream of gruesome stories of Islamic State atrocities, Obama has failed to act.

“The holdup is in the White House — they never filled the spot,” Wolf said. “They have ignored the law.”

For Obama, it’s simply a matter of priorities, Wolf argues. About a month ago, he notes, Obama appointed a special envoy to the LGBT community through an executive action and a stroke of his pen. There was no Congressional legislation calling on the LGBT appointment, Wolf notes, unlike the law establishing a special envoy for religious freedom in the Middle East.

“We passed a law overwhelmingly in the House and Senate but he didn’t appoint anyone,” he said.

To other conservatives in Congress, the president’s failure to nominate the envoy is part of an Obama administration pattern of failing to protect religious freedom. Obama also waited nearly nine months to fill a vacancy in the State Department’s ambassador-at-large position for international religious freedom last year. That interregnum followed the president’s leaving the position vacant for nearly a year and a half after he took office. Rabbi David Saperstein was nominated for the job in July 2014 and confirmed in December.

Wolf and others are promoting a “We the People Petition” on the White House website urging Obama to fill the vacant post. They have also established a #ReligiousFreedomNOW hashtag on social media. So far, however, the petition has attracted a paltry 88 signatories, far shy of the 100,000 required for Obama to publicly address the issue.

The White House did not return a request for comment about the seven-month delay in nominating someone for the post.

Wolf is pleased that the administration finally turned to Saperstein, an aggressive attorney and activist for religious freedom who previously co-chaired the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty and serves on the boards of the NAACP and the People for the American Way.

“That is a very good appointment,” he said. “But the vacancy over there was incredibly wrong.”

“That sacred space of conscience where you can exercise your rights in terms of religious freedom and deeply-held, reasonable beliefs is the core of human dignity,” Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican and devout Roman Catholic, told the Examiner. “In fact, that’s the basis for civilization itself. And when you lose that fundamental principle…you have no basis on which to build.”

In an Appropriations subcommittee hearing last week, Fortenberry pressed Secretary of State John Kerry to ensure that Saperstein has the proper stature within the State Department hierarchy. The position has had a low profile throughout the Obama administration.

Kerry confirmed that his door is always open and that Saperstein would have direct access to him.

“So that’s good movement that we’re elevating this essential position,” he said.

But Fortenberry says the administration has hesitated to speak up for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East at critical moments, specifically avoiding — at least initially — referring to 21 Egyptians beheaded by the Islamic State as Coptic Christians targeted for their faith.

“There was an unwillingness to call them Christians — they were called Egyptians” in the first White House press release, he recalled. “Was it an oversight? Maybe. But again, the issue was not them being Egyptians, the issue was their faith tradition. So there was some hesitancy in some regard that I don’t understand.”

Other Republicans are far less sanguine about the president’s religious freedom record.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who co-authored the bill to create the special envoy in the Senate, has pressed the State Department repeatedly to give Meriam Ibrahim political asylum, which he said the department delayed but ultimately consented to do. Ibrahim is a Christian mother who was sentenced to death in Sudan for refusing to become a Muslim. She was jailed in 2014 and eventually released after giving birth to her second daughter in prison.

Blunt also has advocated on behalf of Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American Christian pastor imprisoned in Iran for nearly three years on charges that he was undermining national security through private religious gatherings in Christian homes in the early 2000s.

The Obama administration, Blunt says, should have insisted on Abedini’s release at the beginning of nuclear talks with Tehran.

“How can we move forward with any talks with the Iranians and not ask for a simple gesture of letting this U.S. citizen go as just the first of a good faith effort to have these discussions?” Blunt said during a speech on the Senate floor last summer.

Other advocates for religious freedom says another special envoy isn’t needed, even though Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill creating one with strong bipartisan support.

Human Rights First’s Tad Stahnke said the administration instead needs to make promoting religious freedom and stopping the spread of sectarian violence and religious persecution — including by partners like Saudi Arabia — a cornerstone of US national security strategies in the broader Middle East.

“Recent events in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan and Egypt underscore the urgency of doing so,” he said. “Many major U.S. foreign policy challenges involve countries where religious freedom is denied, where religious conflict threatens to destabilize societies, or where the state-sponsored religion or ideology is used to suppress debate or dissent.”

Now that Ambassador Saperstein is in place, he argues, the administration has the opportunity to ensure that international religious freedom policy — in place since 1998 and largely built around the threat of economic sanctions against foreign governments that successive administrations have been loath to use — meets the current pressing needs.

Wolf disagrees and says the administration needs the special envoy to demonstrate that it is making the issue of religious freedom, especially in the Middle East right now, a major priority.

“[Obama] has the worst record of any president in modern times on religious freedom — this administration has been a disaster,” said Wolf.

After leaving Congress, Wolf, along with Pastor Randel Everett founded the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, a group that advocates on behalf of the nearly 2.5 billion people in 38 countries where religious freedoms are violated.

The group is named after William Wilberforce, an English politician in the 19th century who led a movement to abolish the international slave trade.

Earlier this year, Wolf and several other Initiative staff travelled to Iraq within 1.5 miles of the Islamic State’s frontline and later visited the training grounds of the Ninevah Protection Unit, a Christian defensive guard being trained to defend historic Christian villages and towns if they become liberated from the Islamic State.

Afterward, the Initiative released a report titled “Edge of Extinction,” based on the fact-finding mission in Iraq. If the Islamic State is not defeated in Iraq, the report warns that Christians, Yezidis, Shabak, Turkmen and other religious and ethnic minority groups face a looming genocide.

“If the Islamic State is not defeated and ultimately destroyed, there will be no future for these ancient faith communities who now face an existential crisis and genocidal onslaught in lands they have inhabited since antiquity,” Wolf said. “Their survival and ability to flourish is a bellwether for religious freedom and pluralism in the Middle East more broadly.”

The Obama administration, Wolf argues, is standing idly by and has failed either to arm Kurdish Peshmerga forces or to use U.S. air power to protect areas in Iraq where religious minorities are under assault.

“Genocide is taking place against Christians and Yezidis, and others in Iraq and the administration is doing nothing — they’re not even aiding the Pershmerga,” he said.