"In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions (to the US) should focus on
providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of
the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer
than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they
have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate
people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis,
ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted
by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing.
Churches have been burned, priests arrested.
In the worst cases, Christians have been tortured, raped and even
crucified. Mosul, Iraq, which was home to a Christian population of
35,000 a decade ago, is now empty of Christians after an ISIS ultimatum
that they either convert to Islam or be executed. In Syria, Gregorios
III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the Church of
Antioch, said in 2013 that “entire villages” have been “cleared of their
Christian inhabitants...”
"...Tragically, present policy does not take into account the uniquely
precarious situation of displaced Christians. Instead of receiving
priority treatment, Christians are profoundly disadvantaged. For
instance, the State Department has accepted refugees primarily from
lists prepared by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees,
which oversees the large camps to which refugees have flocked, and where
they are registered. Yet endangered Christians do not dare enter those
camps.
George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote
in the Telegraph in Britain in September that a similar protocol in the
U.K. “inadvertently discriminates against the very Christian communities
most victimised by the inhuman butchers of the so-called Islamic State.
Christians are not to be found in the UN camps, because they have been
attacked and targeted by Islamists and driven from them.”
For the full article see;
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mideast-christians-deserve-u-s-refuge-1450396991
