But Israelis and Jews are excluded from the ISIS genocide?
[From article]
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced Thursday that the State Department had found ISIS responsible for genocide in areas it controls.
“My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims,” he said at the State Department, referring to ISIS by one of the other names by which it is known.
The move has been a long time coming.
[. . .]
If American actions were meant to pre-empt such genocide, they apparently failed. In the past few months, ISIS’s campaign against the region’s ethnic and religious minorities, including the persecution of Assyrian Christians and Yazidis, has been formally declared “genocide” by the European Parliament and the United States National Holocaust Museum. (The former of these designations is particularly noteworthy since it was both unanimous and the first time a conflict had been categorized as a “genocide” in real time.)
[. . .]
Earlier this week, the U.S. House of Representatives joined the call, voting 393-0 to designate Islamic State crimes “genocide.”
[. . .]
Still, it’s unclear what, if any, legal obligations the designation compels. That ISIS is a non-state actor is a complicating factor since the 1948 Convention on genocide, in the words of one expert, is “predicated on the notion that only states commit these crimes.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/isis-genocide-obama/474087/
The Long, Thorny Path to Calling ISIS 'Genocidal'
Secretary of State John Kerry announced ISIS is responsible for genocide in areas it controls. The move has been a long time coming.
Adam Chandler
Mar 17, 2016
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[From article]
It’s not clear exactly what is being done to Christians in the Middle East right now (an excuse similar to that made by world leaders in the late 1930s when Jews were being rounded up and killed in Nazi Germany), but what we do know is grim. In 2003, over 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. By the summer of 2015, there were fewer than 275,000. Most were eking out a nightmarish existence in camps in Kurdistan. The numbers are similar among Syrian Christians: approximately 1.25 million in 2011, fewer than 500,000 today.
Of the missing millions, some have been kidnapped, tortured, and held at absurd bails. Some have been sold into slavery or forced into “marriage” with ISIS fighters. We know many are dead, but we can’t determine how many.
[. . .]
When ISIS moves into a town, the houses belonging to Christians are marked with the Arabic letter nun, or N (for “Nazarene”), painted in red on their doors. Christians then must choose whether to flee or wait for their fate. Those who flee must choose between trying to survive in the wilderness and making their way to U.N. camps, where Christians live in fear of jihadists who infiltrate the camps to kill “infidels.” Many Christians in the Middle East have simply disappeared, their fate as mysterious as that of the Jews of Europe in 1945 before the Allies discovered the death camps scattered across the Third Reich.
In 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations drafted the Treaty on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Such acts include killing, causing serious mental or physical harm, causing conditions of life that will destroy the group, preventing childbirth, and kidnapping children. According to the treaty, United Nations member states, including the United States, must take action against such conditions. The goal was to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust would happen again.
A noble idea, but it hasn’t worked. Since 1948, genocide has clearly been committed multiple times, with no response until it was too late. American presidents in particular have made deliberate policy decisions to not call genocide “genocide,” even in the face of plenty of evidence, because they didn’t want to be responsible for acting. For example, during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, radical members of the Hutu tribe set out to exterminate their rival tribe, the Tutsis, as well as any Hutus who got in the way. The Clinton administration chose not to apply the word “genocide” openly until long after the evidence merited it. Only after 800,000 Rwandans had been slaughtered in 100 days and the bloodbath had run its course did officials finally start to call it genocide.
For a while the Clinton administration protested ignorance, but recently declassified documents tell a different story: CIA reports reaching the cabinet, and most likely the president himself, before the crisis had reached a climax confirmed the existence of a Hutu plan for a “final solution” to the Tutsis, a phrase grimly reminiscent of Hitler’s plan to kill all Jews. Barely two weeks into the 100-day nightmare, a CIA brief sent to the president, the vice president, and hundreds of senior officials reported that rebels were trying to “stop the genocide, which . . . is spreading south.” As always, though, everything depended on what the meaning of the word “is” was.
No American president has ever applied the word “genocide” to a current event or situation. The way is now paved for President Obama to become the first. On January 27 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed (117 votes to 1) a resolution to hold ISIS responsible for genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities. The European Parliament adopted the resolution on February 4. The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee declared genocide on March 2. The British Parliament appears to be leaning toward a similar declaration. All President Obama has to do is jump on the bandwagon. But he hasn’t.
For more than seven years, President Obama’s foreign policy has been a toxic blend of strong language and weak action. [. . .] The foreign policy of the Obama administration tends toward talking a big game and then conveniently forgetting to show up. That would be a lot harder to pull off if he called the genocide of Christians by ISIS what it is. So naturally he’s avoiding it, like the Clinton administration before him.
Congress has spoken. Obviously, President Obama feels that he is under no obligation to consider Congress’s opinion on pretty much anything, but this time he should think long and hard and not ignore it. If his secretary of state, John Kerry, agrees to designate ISIS’s atrocities genocide, that could force the administration to act with the European Union to take military action against ISIS soon. President Obama may want to avoid that policy, but his failure to confront the genocide and name it would be the nail in the coffin of his foreign-policy legacy. If the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that ignoring genocide doesn’t make it go away. If we won’t call it what it is, our children will do it for us, and we’ll have to answer the difficult question of why we wouldn’t do it ourselves.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432793/genocide-christians-isis-congress-obama-john-kerry-state-department
Why Obama and Kerry Fear the ‘G’ Word
by JANE CLARK SCHARL
March 14, 2016 7:38 PM
rtment
Why Obama and Kerry Fear the ‘G’ Word
by JANE CLARK SCHARL March 14, 2016 7:38 PM
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