Protestant Reformation

Threats to Religious Freedom At An All-time High?

on July 23, 2015

The Religious Freedom Project hosted a provocative conference last Thursday at Georgetown University entitled “Religious Freedom: Rising Threats to a Fundamental Human Right.” While the conference was intended to address a myriad of religious persecution issues worldwide, many of the panels, in an apparent digression, centered on whether acknowledging religious motivation behind terrorist efforts is contrary to championing religious freedom.

Singly espousing the affirmative view, Rutger University’s Engy Abdelkader opined that terrorists “seize and abuse” the term Jihad. In its true, unadulterated form, she said, Jihad is a very honorable means of venerating Allah. Of the terrorist efforts of ISIS and others, she said, “It’s not Islam.”

What she deems an erroneous conflation, however, others called an appropriate assessment of motives. The Religious Freedom Project’s Thomas Farr, for instance, proposed that “radical interpretations of Islam” are “the greatest threat to religious freedom today.” While Farr readily explicated his willingness to call the terrorist efforts of ISIS and others “radical,” he said that their motivations are religious ones. Both of the two remaining panelists on Abdelkader’s panel on “Rising Global Restrictions and Social Hostilities on Religious Freedom” affirmed Farr’s position.

Keynote speaker Frank Wolf, former U.S. representative of Virginia’s 10th district, agreed with Farr, though he did not make terrorists’ motivations his focus. Wolf instead focused on religious liberty, calling it “the human rights issue of our time.” Giving credence to this notion, he said, “Christians [in the Middle East] are being killed [en masse]…if that’s not genocide, I don’t know what is.”

Wolf also encouraged his audience to read this PBS story about ISIS’ sex trafficking Yazidi women, featuring ISIS leaders offering to buy the women for $500 or for a glock. “ISIS believes Yazidi women can be enslaved, under their interpretation of Islam,” says the article, quoting a Frontline undercover agent who spent two months in the Middle East interviewing ISIS leaders.

Wolf suggested enacting the following measures to defend religious persecution: (1) Increase the religious literacy of our ambassadors to counter secular bias in western diplomacy. (2) Use a tier system to identify countries that are known centers of religious persecution. This system, which would mirror the kind used for human trafficking, would make countries vie to have themselves removed from the list, Wolf says. (3) Visit prisoners again and write letters. “Even something as simple as adopting a prisoner of conscience and writing letters can save someone’s life by sending a signal to their government that the rest of the world…is watching.” (4) Deport those involved in atrocities. Wolf believes that “[w]e should not harbor these people…we should not allow visits [to U.S. soil] of any kind.”

In closing, Wolf remarked that “[w]e can and should make the subject of human rights and religious freedom a major issue in the 2016 election.” Time will tell whether his desire sees its fruition.

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