Take a Stand for Iraq’s Christians
Iraq ought to be grateful to America for the blood and treasure we have dispensed to free Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship. Instead, we learn that the remaining Christians in the country are being targeted for assassination and expulsion.
According to Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, relentless waves of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortions and rapes have triggered a mass exodus of Christians from Iraq over the past seven years. Since 2003, more than half of the estimated 1.5 million Iraqi Chaldean Catholics, Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox and Armenian Christians, as well as some Protestants, have fled to Syria, Jordan and farther-flung places.
Where is the Obama administration in this? Nowhere. Where are American and other Christians speaking up for their brothers and sisters under persecution? Nowehere. What about the Iraqi government, which owes its very existence to America? Absent.
Jews spoke up for Soviet Jewry. Where is the Christian community when Iraqi Christians need them?
Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.
Originally published May 24, 2010.
