For the Christians living under the Islamic State, every day brings fear of rape, death or forced conversions.
The atrocities suffered by Christians and other religious minorities, including the 2015 ISIS beheading and shootings of 30 Ethiopian Christians, have been so brutal that last March, the U.S. administration said ISIS was committing genocide against the groups.
While U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on immigration and national security didn’t mention Christians specifically, many assume it was meant to give them a leg up in the refugee resettlement process. Yet some argue the order could actually hurt Christians more than help them.
The president’s controversial executive order suspends the refugee program for now, but calls for it to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality” once it resumes.
In the eyes of Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, this is little more than a cynical ploy to please the Christians in Trump’s base, while actually doing something counter to their interests. Katulis, who has studied the plight of Christians in the Middle East, says the order will hurt Christians in two ways.
By limiting the number of refugees in fiscal year 2017 to 50,000, as opposed to the 110,000 that former U.S. President Obama had pledged, Katulis believes Trump is hurting the chances of Christians making it to the U.S. “There are simply not enough slots,” he says.
“The second way it will harm these religious minorities like Christians is by actually creating greater possibilities for them being targeted in their home countries by militant groups and others,” Katulis says. Most Christians in the Middle East want to be considered normal citizens, with an equal to devotion to country, he says. But the order “fuels the hatred and animosity that is there already and it allows ISIS militants to say, ‘I told you so, these people aren’t one of us.'”
Samuel Tadros, senior fellow at the right-leaning Hudson Institute, believes the executive order is flawed on policy and moral grounds. But he’s convinced that the portion related to religious minorities should be less controversial than it has been.
“It’s a reflection of reality, meaning that the religious minorities are facing a greater threat than others and as a result it’s natural that the greater threat means more prioritization,” he says.
Futhermore, Tadros says, prioritizing religious minorities in this manner will help correct a previous wrong. Christians and other religious minorities from Syria tend to be extremely under-represented in the U.S. refugee program, he says, mainly because relatively few are referred to the U.S. by the U.N. He says that’s because religious often fear persecution in refugee camps, and often seek safety in church camps or elsewhere.
There is nothing new about prioritizing religious or ethnic groups in the refugee program, Tadros says. “Current U.S. law creates a category called priority 2 for refugees defined as ‘groups of special humanitarian concern identified by the U.S. refugee program,'” he wrote in a recent article. Groups in the special class include Ukrainian Catholics, Iraqis working for the U.S., Cuban political activists and members of religious minorities, ethnic minorities in Myanmar, and Congolese in Rwanda.
The Christian population in the Middle East was about 7.5 million in 2010, according to the Pew Research Center, though some estimates put the figure at nearly 15 million. The number of Christians in the region has grown since the early 1900s and the group now represent 5 percent of the population.
As of 2012, “Christians faced religious harassment in a greater share of countries in the Middle East and North Africa than in any other region,” Pew found. But while the group has been targeted by extremists, “Muslims have been the group’s victims far more frequently and represent the strong majority,” according to NPR. Many targeted are Shiite Muslims, who ISIS sees as apostates.
Muslims made up 46 percent of all refugee admissions to the U.S. in 2016, while Christians represented 44 percent.
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Will Donald Trump’s Executive Order Hurt Christians in the Middle East? originally appeared on usnews.com
