US House commission holds hearing on ISIS genocide
April 28, 2016
The United States House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission recently conducted a hearing on the genocide of religious minorities by the Islamic State.
The bipartisan commission was once known as the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Testifying before the commission were David Saperstein, Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State; Robert George, chairman of teh US Commission on International Religious Freedom; Congressman Frank Wolf; Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus; and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, director of the Genocide Prevention Program at George Mason University.
“The United States cannot help defeat ISIS, without defeating its genocidal antecedents – the malignant idea that discrimination and second-class status are the lot of religious minorities, and that those who offend Islam, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, must be eliminated, along with the concept of blasphemy as a punishable offense,” said Anderson.
Irvin-Erickson added:
In considering the US response to ISIS, it must be remembered that it was the US invasion of Iraq, and then Libya, that created the social and political context out of which ISIS’s millennial ideologies were forged. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died because of this war, and a region that is twice the size of Europe was thrown into political and social chaos for over a decade … Sending in more soldiers will not solve anything in the long run—instead it will legitimize this sentiment, and recreate the very conditions that gave rise to this genocide in the first place.
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Further information:
- Confronting the Genocide of Religious Minorities: A Way Forward (Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission)
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Posted by: unum -
Apr. 30, 2016 12:02 PM ET USA
Neither the Iraq invasion, the Libyan attack, nor the expansion if the Afghan attack on Al Qaeda to include the Taliban were well thought out and documented before they were executed. Although Carl Anderson's and Douglas Irvin-Erickson's are 20-20 hindsight, they contain more factual information (known at the time of the attacks) than the justification that was offered by our government. However, our troops followed orders and many are true heroes who acted well beyond the call of duty.
