Russia In, Nigeria Out in Biden Administration’s First Religious Persecution Designations
(CNSNews.com) – The Biden State Department on Wednesday announced its first designations of religious freedom violators, adding Russia to the blacklist for the first time but – in a decision advocates found puzzling – delisting Nigeria.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced ten “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) – Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
The removal of Nigeria from the CPC list came on the eve of a visit by Blinken to Africa’s most populous nation.
Under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), CPCs are defined as countries that have engaged in or tolerated “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Most of the ten CPCs named by Blinken have been fixtures on the list for many years – Burma, China, and Iran since 1999, North Korea since 2001, and Saudi Arabia and Eritrea since 2004. Turkmenistan was added in 2014, Tajikistan in 2016, and Pakistan in 2018.
Nigeria was designated a CPC just a year ago, a development of note since it was the first secular democracy to be blacklisted since the IRFA established the process more than two decades ago. Every other CPC over the years has been an Islamic, communist, or military-ruled authoritarian state.
According to Open Doors, more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country, mostly at the hands of Boko Haram and other Islamist groups.
On Open Doors 2021 watchlist of “countries where it is most dangerous to follow Jesus,” Nigeria is ranked ninth worst of 50 countries named.
Yet not only did Blinken remove Nigeria from the CPC list this year, he also left it off a second-tier “special watch list” – countries determined to be religious freedom violators but not meeting the statutory criteria for CPC designation.
“It’s unfathomable that Secretary Blinken removed Nigeria from being a CPC for its religious freedom violations, and excluded the country altogether from its lists,” said Nadine Maenza, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
“Conditions on the ground haven’t changed, so why has the designation?”
Maenza urged the State Department to reconsider the decision, “based on its own reporting.”
International Christian Concern (ICC) also called Nigeria’s omission troubling.
“The Nigerian government has done almost nothing to stop the violence against Nigerian Christians, leading to continued violent persecution,” said the group’s president, Jeff King.
“In some instances, as with Kaduna’s Governor El-Rufai, the Nigerian government has even furthered the violence,” he said. “We will continue to raise the voices of the many victims of Nigeria with the U.S. government and will continue to serve Nigeria’s Christian community.”
Blinken’s announcement came a day after ICC published its annual “persecutor of the year awards,” with Nigeria named the worst persecuting country.
It noted that an estimated 50,000-70,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed since 2000.
According to the ICC, the Nigerian government has not only failed to adequately respond to violence against Christians, but in some cases itself perpetuates the persecution – including the governments of the 12 northern states where shari’a is enforced.
Over one weekend in September, Muslim militants killed 49 people in two Christian villages in the northern state of Kaduna, days after a violent mob in neighboring Kano state attacked and killed a Christian pastor, accusing him of involvement in a local Muslim’s conversion to Christianity.
‘Cults’
While the USCIRF was disappointed with some of Wednesday’s decisions, it applauded the addition of Russia for the first time.
“USCIRF has proposed this action since 2017,” said the commission’s vice-chair, Nury Turkel. “For years, USCIRF has raised the alarm regarding the Russian government’s purge of ‘non-traditional’ religions and religious freedom repression.”
Russian government repression has focused on groups it calls “cults” and “extremist organizations,” such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses which it outlawed in 2017, and the Church of Scientology, labeled “undesirable” last September.
The State Department’s most recent annual religious freedom report says Russian authorities in 2020 were reported to be continuing to “investigate, detain, imprison, torture, and and/or physically abuse persons or seize their property because of their religious faith, including members of groups the government classified as extremist and banned.”
The USCIRF, an independent statutory watchdog established by the IRFA, each year makes its own CPC and special watch list recommendation to the executive branch.
While the lists partially overlap, many of the USCIRF recommendations are ignored or overruled by the State Department. (Most notably, the Bush and Obama administrations for 16 consecutive years rejected the USCIRF recommendations to blacklist Pakistan, a purported U.S. ally, until the Trump administration did so in 2018.)
This year’s USCIRF recommendations for CPC designations included the ten countries named by Blinken on Wednesday, but also urged blacklisting for Nigeria, India, Vietnam, and Syria’s Assad regime.
In addition to his CPC designations, Blinken also placed four countries on the special watch list – Algeria, Comoros, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
This year’s USCIRF recommendations for special watch list designation included those four countries, but it wanted nine others to be added – Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
Although Afghanistan was not placed on the special watch list, the Taliban – which seized power in mid-August – is named as one of nine “entities of particular concern,” non-state actors that engage in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom violations.
The IRFA provides for the imposition of sanctions against CPCs, among other measures designed to encourage governments to improve, although in some cases – including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Tajikistan – administrations have invoked “national interest” waivers.
Ten Years of Muslim Persecution of Christians
July 2021 was the tenth anniversary of my monthly series, "Muslim Persecution of Christians" (published by the Gatestone Institute). Back in July 2011, I began to collate and summarize the accounts of persecution that surfaced every month in one report — so there is a record, so that when the time comes, the usual excuse, "we never knew," won't stand.
Now that ten years of such reports have passed — for a total of 120 reports, each averaging about 3,500–4,000 words (or nearly 500,000 words in total) — what has been learned? What trends have been demonstrated?
First, the phenomenon of Muslim persecution of Christians is real: it's unwavering, constant, and systemic, and it conforms to sharia-approved patterns — meaning its root source is Islam. (For doctrinal and historic proofs of this assertion, see this more elaborate and detailed article.)
One proof is simple enough: when, in July 2011, I first came up with the idea of a monthly report, I was concerned about the project's feasibility: what sort of "report" could be compiled if, say, only one or two instances — or even none — of persecution occurred in any given month? Sadly, but also rather tellingly, not only has this never once happened over the course of 120 months, but the individual instances of persecution have only grown, so that, in order to keep these reports manageable and under 4,000 words, every month, I leave lesser stories out.
A decade's worth of such reports also gives the lie to the widespread notion that the only or primary Muslim persecution of Christians that occurred within the last decade was at the hands of the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017. Now, it is true that what "ISIS" put Christians and other religious minorities through was horrific, but before and after ISIS, Christians experienced less "spectacular" forms of persecution at the hands of Muslims who are not "professional" terrorists, including Muslim individuals, mobs, clerics, and of course Muslim authorities at every level of state (police, local governors, judges, etc.).
As for some of the more specific trends to develop and sharpen over the last decade, first, what several international observers have characterized as a "pure genocide" is being waged against the Christians of Nigeria. Not a week seems to go by without "Allahu akbar"–screaming Muslims slaughtering dozens of Christians and torching their villages and churches.
This jihadist animus is well entrenched in other African nations — for example, Somalia — and, left unchecked, is increasingly spilling into others, including Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mozambique, and many more. In Christian-majority Uganda, not a month seems to go by without a Muslim family attacking or killing a family member for converting to Christianity.
The persecution of — to say nothing of the blatant and systemic discrimination against — Christians in Pakistan is downright disgusting. Not a week seems to go by without a young, underage Christian girl being abducted, raped, forced to convert and marry her abductor — with the police and courts siding with the abductors and rapists. Similarly, any Muslim who wishes for whatever reason to terrorize any Christian increasingly accuses the latter of "blaspheming" against Muhammad, which in Pakistan is punishable by long prison sentences and even execution. Needless to say, irate and radical mobs often get the infidels before the police can arrest them — as they did when, in 2014, a Muslim mob of over a thousand people burned a young Christian couple alive on the false accusation that they had burned pages of the Koran.
Egypt, home to the largest, most indigenous Christian community of the Middle East, is little better. Both ISIS and any number of homegrown "radical Muslims" have bombed or burned numerous churches, killing many worshipers over the years, while authorities have simply banned churches, often in response to angry Muslim mobs. Moreover, "[i]n Egypt, kidnappings and forced marriages of Christian women and girls to their Muslim abductors ha[ve] reached record levels."
Otherwise, it has been more of the usual for Christians in general throughout the Islamic world. Every year between 2011 and 2021, Muslims claimed the lion's share — approximately 80% — of all the persecution Christians experience around the world.
The last decade has made another thing clear: the media either totally ignore or else obfuscate the reality of Muslim persecution of Christians. Whenever forced to report on, say, extra-sensationalist terror attacks that leave dozens of Christians dead, they predictably chalk up Muslim motives to "grievances," poverty, territorial disputes, or "radicalization" — the type that does not represent "true" Islam.
In other words, the media have done their best to present this phenomenon as an aberration, even though it is both systematic and systemic in the Muslim world. Meanwhile, one does not doubt that if the roles were reversed — if it was Christians who were banning or attacking mosques; attacking or imprisoning Muslims who "blaspheme" or Christians who apostatize to Islam; abducting, raping, and forcibly converting Muslims girls; and enforcing myriad forms of open discrimination against Muslims — these stories would be reported and highlighted by all the major networks.
Nor, one should add, do sensationalist atrocities receive much coverage. A video of ISIS carving off the heads of 21 Coptic Christians because they refused to recant their faith received six times less media coverage than the killing of a gorilla.
In short, the last decade has made clear that, well before the world became acquainted with the phenomenon of "fake news" and learned just how dishonest the media can be — that what they report and how they report it is based on what narrative they want to convey — the media were freely manipulating the persecution of Christians under Islam out of existence.
Similarly, many years before a good number of Americans learned that the so-called "left" — which presents itself as the party that cares about "social justice" and "human rights" — was a complete hypocrite and fraud, the left was suppressing and in some case offering false news concerning the Muslim persecution of Christians out of existence — as when the BBC said most the 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded for their faith were actually released.
If people now know that the left exists to undermine and subvert Judeo-Christian civilization, including by saying anything and lying through its powerful media arm, the left had long been doing this with regard to the Muslim persecution of Christians. After all, then and now, Muslims must always appear in the best possible light and Christians in the worst.
These are some of the lessons from the last ten years' worth of reporting on Muslim abuses against Christians. With the current state of the world — the persecution of Christians is growing all around the world and even spilling into the West — one expects that the next decade will be even worse.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
Image via Max Pixel.
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