Petition Urges Secretary of State to Name Middle East Christians as Genocide Victims

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: February 24, 2016 Published in: Christian Persecution

Secretary of State John Kerry, center, shakes hand with James B. Cunningham U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan in Kabul airport, Afghanistan, on Monday, March 25, 2013. Kerry arrived in Kabul for an official visiting from Afghanistan. (Photo by Musadeq Sadeq/U.S. State Department)

As news broke Monday of a plan for a ceasefire in Syria, observers are still fearful that the US State Department will ignore Christians in an expected designation of genocide in the Middle East.

Now, a new effort will try to push Secretary of State John F. Kerry to not leave Christians out.

A petition launched by In Defense of Christians and the Knights of Columbus is urging Kerry not to exclude Christians from a declaration of genocide at the hands ISIS. The petition can be signed at www.StopTheChristianGenocide.org.

“Christians in Iraq and Syria have suffered injustice after injustice by being kidnapped, killed, having their homes and churches confiscated or destroyed, and being forced to flee for their lives. Because of jihadist hit squads, they fear to enter UN refugee camps and, as a result, are then often excluded from immigration to the West,” said Carl Anderson, CEO of the Knights of Columbus, who testified on the matter before a congressional subcommittee in December. “After all of this, these people deserve to have the U.S. State Department call what has happened to them by its rightful name: genocide — just as the European Parliament, Pope Francis, USCIRF and so many other prominent individuals and institutions have already done.”

The State Department is required by law to make a designation one way or the other on the matter by mid-March.