Over the past few months, millions of Americans of many faiths — as well as people of no faith — have been clamoring for the Obama administration, and specifically Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S. State Department, to officially designate that genocide is being perpetrated by ISIS against Christian minorities in the Middle East.

Groups as diverse as the Knights of Columbus, the Philos Project, and the United States Holocaust Museum added impressive depth and diversity to the human rights chorus. They urged the Obama administration to call this particularly virulent evil what it is.

They have been joined in this clarion call by the U.S. House of Representatives, which passed a non-binding resolution by a 393-0 vote defining ISIS’s atrocities against Christians as “genocide.” Less than a day after the State Department sent clear signals it would not meet the congressionally mandated deadline of March 17, 2016, Secretary Kerry issued a surprise announcement declaring that ISIS is perpetrating genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

Using an insulting and negative Arabic term for ISIS, Kerry said that “Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims.” He went on to say that ISIS’s “entire worldview is based on eliminating those who do not subscribe to its perverse ideology.”

Secretary Kerry should be commended for opposing his own State Department advisors and taking a stand for truth and justice. Yet this is not the whole story.

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Why “genocide” instead of ethnic cleansing or “crimes against humanity”? “Genocide” is defined by the U.N.’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as actions even worse than (but including) mass murder. It is defined in the U.N. treaty as mass killing and other crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Consequently, after World War II, in light of the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust, the civilized world took a collective oath: “Never again!” The Genocide Convention was adopted by the U.N. It was felt that such a statement would establish a legal threshold for national organizations and international bodies to take action. And yet, it keeps happening: Bosnia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur — and now the Middle East.

On December 9, 2015, Gregory H. Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, gave testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee, noting that “twenty-one human rights organizations, genocide scholars, and religious leaders wrote to President Obama, imploring him and the U.S. Department of State to recognize that ISIS is committing genocide not just against Yazidis, but also against Christians, Shi’a Muslims, Turkmen, Shabaks and other religious groups that ISIS labels ‘infidels’ or ‘apostates.’”

Tragically, no sooner had Secretary Kerry made his announcement than his own State Department started explaining this does not mean the U.S. needs to take any additional action. The New York Times summarized Kerry’s statement as “a symbolic gesture, with no policy change expected.”

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How morally bankrupt and reprehensible! It is bad enough to bury your head in the sand like an ostrich and refuse to see the genocide taking place in plain sight. It is even more immoral to acknowledge and affirm that genocidal atrocities are being committed against our fellow human beings and then say we aren’t obligated to do anything about it. The former at least leaves one the fig leaf of real, or feigned, lack of cognition and ignorance. The latter reveals a barbaric insensitivity and willing lack of moral fortitude that is wholly and completely dishonorable and uncivilized.

As I observe the sad, tragic story of America and the West paralyzed by moral relativism, seemingly incapable of responding adequately to ISIS’s manifold atrocities, I am reminded of a great Oscar-winning film I saw many years ago, “Judgment at Nuremberg.” This great movie, which changed my life when I saw it as a 16-year-old adolescent in 1962, tells the story of the trial of the Nazi judges who dispensed what could only mockingly be called “justice” in the Third Reich.

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The trials took place in 1948 and 1949, when the Iron Curtain had divided Europe, the Soviets had blockaded West Berlin, and there was the palpable threat of war between the Russians and the West.

The American Chief Justice (played by Spencer Tracy) is under pressure to give light sentences to the Nazi judges.

The American jurist’s reply moved me to tears then as it does now: “Survival as what? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.”

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Would that it were as true today as it was in 1949 when those words were uttered, or even when they were filmed in 1961.

Every time we draw a red line — and then reveal our hypocrisy by then not doing anything to back it up and confront the evil we call evil when that line is crossed — we weaken the definition of evil. We embolden the wicked predators always ready to target fresh victims, and we mortally threaten the weak, vulnerable, and defenseless among us.

As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

It was true then and is still true today.

When we can protect the weak and defenseless and we do not, we become complicit and morally culpable for the wickedness we denounce, but do nothing to prevent. 

Dr. Richard Land is president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and served as a commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2001-2004; 2005-2012).