Syria: “Entire Communities at Risk” according to New UN Report
WASHINGTON, Dec. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Writing to President Obama on Christmas Eve, Dr. John Eibner, the CEO of CSI-USA, urged the White House to make a “firm commitment to preventing the genocide of the Middle East‘s religious minorities” in the face of rising anti-minority violence in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the region.
Eibner reported that in Syria, “religious cleansing proceeds apace under the publicly proclaimed slogan, ‘Alawites to the grave, and Christians to Beirut!'” and that the perpetrators are mainly “Islamist militias,” operating with “the lethal support of our country’s closest regional Sunni allies – in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.” These forces, Eibner stated, target Syrian religious minorities for “murder, abduction, displacement and humiliation with increasing frequency and ferocity.”
Other authorities have recently warned of the potential for genocide in Syria. Former Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith declared at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: “The next genocide in the world will likely be against the Alawites in Syria.” Simon Adams of the Global Project for the Responsibility to Protect stated in The New York Times that “growing numbers of foreign Sunni extremist fighters are battling … to religiously cleanse” Syria.
CSI also drew President Obama’s attention to Egypt, the scene in recent months of “an upsurge in anti-Christian hate speech, pogroms against Christians, and the religious cleansing of the pyramid village of Dahshour.”
Eibner commended the United States‘ commitment to defend the people of Israel in the face of genocidal threats emanating from Iran, and urged President Obama to make a similar commitment to guarantee the security of “the existentially threatened religious minorities of the Islamic Middle East.”
Eibner called on Obama to commission his new Atrocities Prevention Board, chaired by NSC official Samantha Power, to prepare a genocide prevention policy for the Middle East on the basis of six principles proposed by CSI, and to unveil his anti-genocide policy in the forthcoming State of the Union Address.
Christian Solidarity International is a Christian human rights organization campaigning for religious liberty and human dignity. The organization issued a Genocide Warning for religious minorities in the Islamic Middle East in November 2011. It has launched a petition urging President Obama to address this current threat of genocide.
