Genocide
Early last month, during a three-nation tour to South America, Pope Francis demanded an end to what he called "a genocide" of Christians taking place in the Middle East.
In Bolivia, he spoke of the dangers facing Christians around the world, including in Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State extremist group ISIS has overrun large areas in a brutal offensive of beheadings. He termed the bloodshed a "third world war."
Of course, the ongoing atrocities and the statements by the pope received far less media coverage than Cecil, the 13-year-old lion who was accidentally killed in a Zimbabwe national park by an American dentist on a paid hunt.
The outcry was so vicious that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was calling for the hunter to be hanged.
Our priorities are horribly out of whack when a wild animal with a human-killing DNA gets more press than the estimated 200 million Christians facing slaughter and persecution in over 60 countries around the world.
Unfortunately, there are few American politicians willing to cross the line of political correctness and call radical Muslim terrorists the indiscriminate rapists and murderers they are.
At last week's Knights of Columbus Convention in Philadelphia, Aleppo Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart, a Syrian archbishop, detailed how the rise of ISIS has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi Christians from their homes, causing a flood of refugees to unoccupied cities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and neighboring countries including Jordan and Turkey.
The archbishop decried the U.S. reluctance to offer asylum to persecuted Christians, calling the denial of American visas "a clear case of persecution."
According to federal data, the numbers of visas granted seems widely disproportional. Since October 2014, 906 Muslim refugees from Syria were granted U.S. visas, while only 28 of Syria's estimated 700,000 displaced Christians received them.
Who or what is behind this discrimination against Christians?
To their credit, the Knights of Columbus do fundraising and advertising to help refugees through the organization's website, christiansatrisk.org and have donated $3 million to relief efforts for Christians in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, noted in an article on religious freedom that Christian churches are being burned in south India, and Muslim and Christian villages attacked in parts of Myanmar.
Of the 37 Anglican provinces he has visited, almost half were living under persecution, and he explained how Christians are fearing for their lives every day.
It's time that Americans, led by their leaders in Washington, leave their pampered lives of indifference long enough to realize the number of Christians under persecution in the world is enormous and growing every day.
By JIM ZBICK
tneditor@tnonline.com
