Bill Bouknight: Genocide in the Middle East

Dr. Bill Bouknight on August 22, 2015

Rev. Dr. Bill Bouknight is a retired United Methodist minister, a member of the Memphis Annual Conference.  He was educated at Duke, University of Edinburgh- Scotland, and Yale Divinity School.  He served churches in South Carolina for 28 years.  From 1994 until 2007 he served as Senior Minister of Christ UMC in Memphis, TN.  Currently he is a part-time Associate Director of the Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church.

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In a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Robert R. Reilly, director of the Westminster Institute in McLean, VA, raised the alert status on the fate of Christians in the Middle East.    ISIS intends to wipe Christianity off the map.  The forced conversions, the beheadings, and the slaughter of Copts on a Mediterranean beach—these horrors are all available on YouTube.

We’ve seen this horror show before.  American leaders knew in the early 1940s that mass executions of Jews were being conducted in Nazi Germany.  Nevertheless, to our everlasting shame, America was not willing to receive thousands of Jews who tried to flee.  After 1948, when the Jews were purged from the Arab Middle East, they could at least go to Israel.  Today there is no equivalent for Middle Eastern Christians.

Recently Pope Francis declared: “Today we are dismayed to see how in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world many of our brothers and sisters are persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith in Jesus…a form of genocide is taking place.”

As Jews were forced to wear the yellow star of David in Nazi Germany, Christian homes are marked with the Arabic letter “N” for Nazarene.  Iraqi Sister Diana Momeka testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in May that “ISIS’s plan is to evacuate the land of Christians and wipe the earth clean of any evidence that we ever existed.”

The head of the Christian Aid Program in Northern Iraq told the New York Times that the West comes up with visas for “a few hundred people.  What about a few hundred thousand?”  The Catholic News Agency reported recently that only 28 of Syria’s estimated 700,000 displaced persons were granted U.S. visas.

The Barnabas Fund, a nonprofit aid group, has committed to pay the expenses of persecuted Christians if Western governments will grant them visas.  The total cost to rescue one individual is a modest $3000, including air fare and a year’s basic support.

United Methodists should feel an urgent need to respond to these embattled Christians in the original home of the faith.  We can and should take the following steps:

  1. Bishops and UM boards and agencies should bombard Congress and the State Department with requests for more visas for persecuted Christians.
  2. The General Board of Global Ministries and UMCOR should establish emergency funds for assisting and relocating persecuted Christians.
  3. The 2016 General Conference should put this matter at the top of its agenda.
  4. Delegates to the General Conference should wear the letter “N” on their clothing as a sign of solidarity with Middle Eastern Christians.

 

Before his execution by the Nazis in 1945, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against the West’s moral failures toward tyranny, and his words still apply:  “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.  Not to speak is to speak.  Not to act is to act.”

  1. Comment by Gregg on August 22, 2015 at 10:16 am

    Good luck getting the UM’s Global Board of Ministries to give a whit about this genocide. They only agitate for causes they believe in: sandwiches.

  2. Comment by Dean J. Thompson on August 23, 2015 at 4:17 am

    The EU and USA are more then happy to let you in if you are a Muslim. But a Christian…They should be opening the flood gates all the way for persicuted Christians. The only thing I would insist on would be a thorough back ground check. They pass and then welcome home.

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