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Pamela Geller: AFDI/SION 2011 Warnings Unheeded, Christian Communities Annihilated in Syria, Iraq

At the end of 2011, my organization and our international partners in Europe called upon the United Nations and the international human rights community to act quickly and decisively to save the Christians of Syria, who are being increasingly threatened and victimized by Islamic supremacists. It’s not as if anyone could say that it was not known or that is was unknowable. We knew. Everybody knew. 

Stop Islamization of Nations (SION) issued a press release at that time, noting “with sorrow the one hundred dead in Syria in the recent and ongoing series of kidnappings and murders of Christians.” I said,  “We deplore the manifest lack of respect for human life and the dignity of the human person. We call upon the United Nations Security Council and UN Commission on Human Rights to schedule an immediate meeting to discuss how to protect the Christians of Syria.”

I added: “We call upon Muslim groups in the U.S. and the Middle East to condemn these killings in word and deed, instituting programs in mosques and Islamic schools to teach Muslims that the lives of non-Muslims must be respected as equal in dignity and value to those of Muslims. We call upon the centers of Islamic authority and education to repudiate the specifications in Islamic law that set the value of a non-Muslim’s life as less than that of a Muslim, and call upon the international human rights community to focus on those inherently discriminatory laws as a human rights abuse.”

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Of course, nothing was done. Muslim supremacist groups sat by quietly (perhaps gloating) as Muslim supremacist armies slaughter Christians and religious minorities en masse. The magnitude of the wholesale slaughter was unimaginable.

I ran ads like this:

The elites responded by banning our ads.

We continued to call, protest, write to the Obama administration. We brought in leaders from the Yezidi, Chaldean, Coptic Christians communities. To no avail.

And here we are five years later. Christian communities have been decimated by 50-80% in Syria, Iraq since 2011.

The response by the left? They are working furiously to bring the perpetrators to our shores under the guise of “war refugees.” Let me assure you, the real war refugees are already dead.

“Report: Christian Communities Decimated by 50-80% in Syria, Iraq, Since 2011,” by Thomas D. Williams, Breitbart, June 9, 2017:

According to a new report, more than half the Christians living in Syria and Iraq have been killed or fled the country since 2011, mostly because of targeted persecution from the Islamic State terror group.

Exactly three years ago, the Islamic State took control of the Iraqi City of Mosul, beginning a particularly harsh period of persecution of the beleaguered Christian community living in the area.

The report, titled “Understanding Recent Movements of Christians from Syria and Iraq,” said that since 2011 Christians living in much of the Middle East had experienced an “overall loss of hope for a safe and secure future,” which has driven the majority to flee their homeland in search of safety for themselves and their families.

The dossier, produced by three groups—Open Doors, Served, and Middle East Concerns—also points out that for the many Christians who have resettled elsewhere, there are “few incentives” to return to their countries of origin. Several respondents stated that “the Middle East is no longer a home for Christians.”

Although exact figures are unavailable, it is estimated that currently there are only 200,000-250,000 Christians remaining in Iraq, a decline of more than 100,000 in the last three years and a massive drop from the 1.4-2 million Christians in the 1990s. Many of the Christians remaining in Iraq are displaced internally.

In Syria, estimates suggest that prior to 2011, approximately 8-10 percent of the Syrian population was Christian, meaning some 1.7-2.2 million people. Currently, estimates of the Christian population in Syria range from 1.4 million all the way down to 800,000, meaning that somewhere between 300,000 and 1.4 million have left the country.

Reports from the province of Al-Hasakeh, home to a historic Christian population, state that over half the population has left (around 75,000 people), although some of these may have relocated within Syria itself. Many choose internal displacement over emigration due to the financial cost of leaving the country, which can be prohibitive.

The factors for leaving offered by interviewees included the violence of conflict, the near complete destruction of some historically Christian towns, the emigration of others and consequent loss of community, the rate of inflation and loss of employment opportunities, and the lack of educational opportunities.

While direct violence, such as the movements of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, was the “tipping point” for displacement, the report states, the ultimate decision to leave the countries was depicted as an “accumulation of factors over time.”

Registration as refugees is reportedly not as common among Christians as among Muslims, due to fear of reprisals within camps, family and church networks in other countries, and a sense of pride that keeps them from registering.

While many nations have opened their doors to Christian refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, few have offered support to enable Christians to remain in their homeland.

A notable exception to this tendency is Hungary, which last fall became the first country in the world to establish a government department dedicated specifically to addressing the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Europe.

“Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world,” Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Péter Szijjártó, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview earlier this year. “Four out of every five people killed for their faith are Christians, yet for some reason this fact has not been duly recognized or addressed,” he said.

To date, the Hungarian government has donated 5 million euros to aid persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Szijjártó said. “We don’t really understand why people don’t speak out about the fate of the Christian communities in the Middle East where they suffer intense persecution, discrimination, and threats to their lives,” he said….