*.According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. But ISIS is on record saying that its eradication of Christians is due to their religious identity.
*.The Obama administration’s rejection of the word “genocide” fits a familiar pattern.
*.When asked about the plight of Christians under ISIS, Colonel Steve Warren said “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”
*.Although Christians number 10% of Syria’s population, only 2% of refugees accepted into the U.S. from there are Christian. (The majority — almost 98% — are Sunni Muslims, the same sect to which ISIS belongs and thus are not persecuted.)
According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. During a February 29 press briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked: “Is the Islamic State carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians?” He replied:
Well, we have long expressed our concerns with the tendency of — well, not a tendency — a tactic employed by ISIL to slaughter religious minorities in Iraq and in Syria. You’ll recall at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL that some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military, were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mt. Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.
Due to the obvious equivocation — it is unclear how Obama’s efforts “to protect Yazidi religious minorities” answers a question about persecuted Christians — the question was repeated: “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in the situation [regarding Christians]?”
Earnest’s response:
My understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached.
What is this “very specific legal determination” that encompasses Yazidis but excludes Christians? The Islamic State’s treatment of Christians would seem to fit under the UN’s definition of “ genocide“:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;…
ISIS is guilty of “killing members of the [Christian] group” and causing them “serious bodily or mental harm.” Although two separate videotaped mass executions (one of 21 Egyptian Christiansand another of 30 Ethiopian Christians) were reported by the mainstream media, accounts of torture, rape, mutilation, crucifixion, and massacresof Christians are regularly reported on Arabic and alternate media.
The Islamic State has also been responsible for “deliberately inflicting on the group [Christians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” ISIS has placed these “conditions of life” — more literally known in Islamic doctrine as the “ Conditions of Omar” — on Christians. They included a number of humiliations and debilitations — from the suppression of Christian worship to the extortion of money ( jizya) — a “protection” tax designed to “encourage” Christians to convert to Islam or flee.
ISIS seems further committed to expunging all physical traces of Christianity in the areas it conquers. It has demolished dozens of ancient churches; at least 400 churches in Syria have been destroyedsince the war, as well as countlessstatues and crucifixes. ISIS has also desecrated Christian cemeteries and ordered the University of Mosul to burn all bookswritten by Christians and decreed that all schools in Mosul and the Nineveh Plainthat bore Christian names (some since the 1700s) be changed.
Then there are the numbers. In Iraq, Christians, who totaled 1.4 million in 2003, are now down to about 300,000.
http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2016/03/18/slap-in-the-face-isis-massacre-of-xtians-not-genocide-obama-administration-insists/
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