Suzan Johnson-Cook
Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom
September 20, 2013
Madam Ambassador,
After two and a half years of constant, nihilistic,
ever-worsening bloodshed in Syria, I’ve become somewhat desensitized to bad
news. There’s a massacre in Hatla? Can’t have been worse than the Baniyas
massacre – or the Houla massacre or the Daraya massacre or the Aleppo
massacre. Maalula, a city continuously inhabited
by Christians since the time of St. Paul, whose people still speak Aramaic, is
religiously cleansed by al Qaeda? It was
bound to happen sometime.
Every once in a while though, a particularly horrible Syria story
breaks through the fog and socks me right in the gut, sending me back into the
tailspin of despair I felt when I had to leave all my friends in Damascus
behind, and the first time a car bomb went off in the neighborhood I used to live
in, and the first time a Syrian friend of mine had to flee their home, and the first
time I heard Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb’s name.
This week, you were that story.
At a meeting of NGOs in New York, a representative from the
American Jewish Committee asked you, “What is the U.S. doing to protect
minority religious groups in Syria and how is this being factored into
potential U.S. military operations?”
You – the U.S.’s ambassador for international religious
freedom, whose ONLY job is to try to blunt the horror of religious persecution
and cleansing in our tortured world – said:
“Syria is very much in
the news right now, and right now we’re not free to comment on what’s happening
in Syria. Right now we will refer that
to the White House and we respect our marching orders from the White House to
comment on that. But thank you for the question.”
For the love of God, Ambassador.
I won’t recite to you the whole list of scores of documented
vicious attacks on religious minorities in Syria – the systematic kidnappings
of Druze in Suweida, the religious cleansing of Christians from Homs, Qusayr, al-Thawra,
Raqqa, Maalula and much of the northeast, the burning of Shia mosques, the huge
car bombings in Christian and Alawite neighborhoods in Damascus. I have to assume you know all this
already. Don’t tell me you don’t – you’ll
just make me more depressed.
At any rate, I don’t expect you to take it from me.
Take it from these people:
Simon
Adams, executive director of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect:
“Growing numbers of foreign Sunni
extremist fighters are battling not just to rid Syria of Mr. Assad, but to
religiously cleanse it.”
The
Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury: “It’s absolutely
clear that Christians in Syria are being persecuted.”
Neil
Hicks, International Policy Advisor, Human Rights First: “What
has happened in Iraq and Syria is de facto ethnic cleansing of Christians.”
Bishop
Nicholas Samra, head of the Melkite Catholic Church in the United States: “We’re
seeing what looks like an extermination of Christianity [in Syria].”
Nina
Shea, Commissioner, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom: “Syrian Christians are being deliberately
targeted in a religious purification campaign.”
Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith: “The next genocide in the world will likely be against the Alawites in Syria.”
If you have nothing to say, you are increasingly isolated in
that regard. You aren’t totally alone,
of course. The entire presidential
administration you’re a part of seems to inhabit a bizzaro world where the evil
regime and the moderates are the only players in Syria, where the religious tensions
that have defined every Middle Eastern land for 1,400 years are a non-issue.
But you aren’t them.
You are the religious freedom ambassador, and I can only assume you
agreed to take this job because, on some level, religious freedom matters to
you.
If the White House won’t let you, the religious freedom
ambassador, speak about the single most egregious, most urgent crisis of
religious persecution in the world today, then they aren’t letting you do your
job. And if you continue to pretend you
ARE doing your job, you are letting them use you.
I say this without malice, and without anger: please resign.
With respect,
Joel Veldkamp
With respect,
Joel Veldkamp
