Last Updated on 05/09/2024 by Arun jain
As Americans prepare to go to the polls later this fall, persecuted religious minorities abroad are anxiously awaiting the results. Why? Because contrary to America’s longstanding tradition of standing up against faith-based atrocities and genocide, the Biden White House is remarkably hostile to religious minorities around the world, reserving particular hostility toward Christians. And things can get worse if the vice president sees it Kamala Harris Win in November.
I know this problem myself. Under the Trump administration, I a Anti Genocide A program to help Christian and Yazidi victims recover in Iraq ISIS‘ extermination campaign. We have provided humanitarian aid, psycho-social help and medical aid to these traumatized religious minorities, while pushing back against Iranian influence. President Donald Trump met with their leaders, sometimes without publicity, to encourage them to stay in their ancient homelands and to assure them that America was with them.
Unfortunately, the program was shut down shortly after Trump left the White House and the funding intended to help return these exiled communities ended. With American security gone, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid brazenly ordered the removal of the country’s top Chaldean Christian cleric, Patriarch Louis Sako, as the civilian head of the church, forcing the 76-year-old prelate into nine months of exile.
Behind this decision was an Iranian-backed militia leader-approved In 2019 the Trump administration plans to confiscate church properties – for killing, raping and looting Christian towns. Five years later, Iraq’s persecuted minorities are no longer the administration’s priority and little progress has been made on them. return house
The anti-Christian hostility of the Biden administration has hit Africa particularly hard.
The day Biden-Harris took office, USAID canceled a $10 million grant to Nigerian human rights leaders to document mass atrocities committed by Islamic militants, which destroyed hundreds of churches, killed thousands of Christians—including nuns and priests, and displaced millions. Grants cost less than 0.02 percent of the total annual US foreign aid budget. The administration’s decision was not about cutting costs.
Even the White House away Despite pleas from human rights advocates and the government’s own bipartisan Commission on International Religious Freedom, the US government removed Nigeria from its list of worst violators of religious freedom. the opposite Course outcome? Last year saw the highest number of murders on record, surpassing that 8,000 is Christians have been killed by jihadists, and that raises the possibility religious war In a country of over 200 million people.
According to Bishop Mathew Kukah of Sokoto province, is the epicenter of terrorist attacks Christians“We have seen no apparent interest from the American government other than to blame violence on climate change.” He is referring to the US Secretary of State Antony BlinkenLast January, he visited Nigeria, where he made his first visit thing of the profession as “driving climate action”, while saying nothing about atrocities.
Now, church leaders in Africa face the prospect of a future Harris administration further weakening their leadership. Harris called for this as a US senator to cancel of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortions at home, and as president he will likely seek to repeal it. Improve the helmswhich restricts taxpayer funding for abortions abroad.
Such a move will hit Africa hard. Its churches are the continent’s primary providers of critical health, education and other social services. Under the Harris Administration’s policies, millions of Africans would be disqualified from US foreign aid grants, denying them life-saving aid.
This is embarrassing. Africa’s extensive church network is an asset to the United States, but Biden and Harris instead see it as an obstacle to the administration’s progressive agenda. A Kenyan Baptist-based NGO told me: “We used to be invited to US Embassy events. The day President Biden took office, I got a call from the embassy saying: ‘Your website is very Christ-centered.’ Since then we have not been invited to the embassy.”
This hostility toward Christians may come back to bite Vice President Harris in November, however. There are over 200,000 Chaldean Catholics living in the Detroit, Michigan, metro area alone. And more than 700,000 Americans of Nigerian descent, many of whom live in Georgia and Pennsylvania, will also vote this November. The administration’s decision to abandon their religious communities will weigh heavily on their minds.
Max Primorac is a Senior Research Fellow at The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Heritage Foundation. He was the US Vice-President’s Envoy for Anti-Genocide Programs in Iraq in 2018 and 2019.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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