Unchristian Refugee Policies

For more than a year, 120,000 Christians from the Nineveh Plain in Iraq, driven from their ancient towns and villages often with just the clothes on their backs, have languished in camps in and around the Kurdish capital of Erbil.

When I visited with them this May, the people described to me the construction containers they are living in as their “coffins.”

Along with the Yazidi community, their women and children have been abducted, raped and used as sex slaves. As the bipartisan resolution introduced in Congress this week states, what is actually happening is genocide.

Syria, torn apart by more than four years of civil war, has also seen the ancient Christian community, the “Church of Pentecost,” targeted by the brutal thugs who make up the different groupings of Islamic terror. Americans have finally woken up to the horror of the implosion of the Middle East because of the distressing images of hundreds of thousands of migrants, mainly Syrian, flooding the countries of Europe.

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What Americans have not been told, and the administration disingenuously avoids, is that the vast majority of the migrants, probably more than 90 percent, are Muslim. Many are single young men. Many, there can be little doubt, are ISIS “sleepers,” easily entering the secularized states of Western Europe with the great tide of humanity, as visas are ignored and borders become imaginary.

Now the Obama administration — an administration that refuses to acknowledge religion as a reason for emigration — is proposing to allow thousands of Syrian migrants into the United States. Emotion, rather than a rational response to a real problem, seems to be the guiding light for the panicked reaction of so many world leaders.

Emotion, rather than a rational response to a real problem, seems to be the guiding light for the panicked reaction of so many world leaders. 

Pope Francis has called for every parish and religious house to welcome the migrants – from a culture that believes Christians are second class citizens and where women are chattel. A bishop from Hungary, which is being routinely criticized by the media and other European governments, this week called the pope “wrong,” and said he “didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Hungary and Slovakia have been demonized not because they would not take migrants, but because they said they would take only Christian migrants. For much of Europe, as with the administration here, the persecuted Christians do not exist — or if they do exist, their religion is not important. And it is certainly not a reason to allow them any kind of preferential treatment.

Political correctness is not only a new form of totalitarianism, it is dangerous to national security.

Remember when the Obama administration could only refer to the Coptic Christians who had their throats cut as “Egyptian citizens”? This despite the obvious fact that the Islamic barbarians who murdered them told the world the only reason they were martyred was because they were Christians. Political correctness is not only a new form of totalitarianism, it is dangerous to national security.

The Christians of Syria and Iraq are facing genocide — and are waiting patiently to enter the United States and other countries legally. Why are they not flooding into Europe with the Muslim migrants? Quite simply, because they are not in the UN camps in Syria, Jordan and Turkey — because ISIS sympathizers have driven them out! Those of us working to help the Christians get here safely have heard first-hand stories of radical Islamists in the camps telling Christians to “convert or die.”

The rich Persian Gulf nation states, which have conspicuously failed to take a single refugee, must be shamed to take the people who share their faith.

Is it lacking compassion — is it “un-Christian” (always a label thrown at Christians by people who actually hate Christianity) — to not do what Pope Francis is calling for: welcoming all the migrants who wish to come (and will keep coming as long as the door stays open)? Strangely enough, a voice of reason emerged in recent days: not only a Christian, but the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey.

Lord Carey reminded the world that because of this crisis Christians are, once again, at the “bottom of the heap.”

Lord Carey said compassion must be “realistic and clear headed.”

Crucially, he said compassion must be “realistic and clear headed.” Controversially, he both called on the European states to “close doors” to the large number of economic migrants, and bluntly stated that in recent years there has been “too much Muslim mass immigration to Europe.” We can surely expect such truth-telling to have the usual consequence.

Those who are fleeing war and persecution must be fed, sheltered and cared for. This is both a Christian and humanitarian response. It must, however, be very clear that this is temporary — and the rich Persian Gulf state nations, which have conspicuously failed to take a single refugee, must be shamed to take the people who share their faith.

We who claim to be Christian must actively pursue the means to bring to safety and security a people who are experiencing genocide and are being forgotten or ignored in this crisis. And if the administration refuses to recognize their need, perhaps Donald Trump could charter some planes and bring all 120,000 Iraqi Christians straight here. If they were Jewish, we know what Israel would do!

Father Benedict Kiely is a Catholic priest and founder of Nasarean.org, which is helping the persecuted Christians of the Middle East.