Jan 27, 2016
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
January 27, 2016 | M. Zuhdi Jasser and Thomas J. Reese
The following op-ed appeared in USA Today on January 27, 2016
As the United States and the world today mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day of liberation in 1945 for Auschwitz, the largest Nazi killing factory in the death of six million Jews, we solemnly recall a troubled past but sadly face a challenging present. Anti-Semitism is surging, including in Europe, with threats, violence and vandalism against Jews.
Last January, four Jewish men in Paris’ Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket were murdered, and an Israeli in Berlin was beaten. In February, a shooter attacked Copenhagen’s great synagogue. In March, a drunken mob assaulted a London synagogue. In November, anti-immigration demonstrators in the Polish city of Wroclaw burned effigies of orthodox Jews. In December, a Jewish cemetery in Sochaczew, Poland, was desecrated with Holocaust-denying graffiti and pro-Islamic State messages.
Today, the hatred fueling the Shoah is back and must be countered. In 2015, incidents led nearly 10,000 Jews, an all-time high, to leave Western Europe for Israel, with nearly 8,000 coming from France. From the Hyper Cacher shooting to the stabbing of a rabbi and two of his congregants in Marseilles to the wounding of 14 worshipers through a liquid poison attack at a Bonneuil-sur-Marn synagogue, 2015 was another grim year for French Jews. Last week, violence struck Marseilles’ Jews again, as a teenager attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete, prompting a Jewish leader to ask Jews not to wear skullcaps. In 2013, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that one-third of European Jews polled said they had stopped wearing religious garb or symbols for fear of attack.
Meeting last week with European Jewish Congress officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly, and perhaps cynically, invited European Jews to resettle in Russia.
But Russia hardly is immune from this virus. In 2014, the Russian Jewish Congress reported a spike in anti-Semitism. Despite a decline last year, disturbing incidents occurred. In June, a previously vandalized Jewish kindergarten in Volgograd again was targeted. In July, a gunman shot Sergei Ustinov, the founder of a Moscow Jewish museum, and fled, with police deeming anti-Semitism a possible motive. In September, Semyon Tykman, a teacher in a Chassidic high school, went on trial in the city of Ekaterinburg. He faces a possible four-year sentence in a labor colony for “incitement of hatred” for discussing the Holocaust, the first trial of a religious Jew under Russia’s notorious extremism laws.
What is driving the violence and bigotry? A variety of toxic political ideologies and movements historically have scapegoated Jews for any number of social ills. Today, anti-Semitism largely combines two factors — extremists claiming to act in Islam’s name and a neo-Nazi movement targeting Muslims and Jews.
Several factors complicate efforts against the hatred. Some officials remain reticent to spotlight assailants’ religious or ideological motives. Studies show widespread negative feelings toward Jews. Some of this prejudice results in condemnations of Israel which, rather than highlighting specific policies, deem Israel’s existence evil — the new anti-Semitism. Finally, as documented by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, on which we serve, some nations and political parties support religious restrictions against Jews as well as Muslims and other minorities. At least four countries — Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland — ban kosher slaughter. Norway and Germany have seen attempts to ban infant male circumcision.
There are even political parties in Greece, Hungary, Ukraine and elsewhere with platforms denying the Holocaust.
It is time to root out the haters’ motives, which means owning up fully to radicalization problems, religious or political. It is time to confront again anti-Semitism’s ancient legacy. It is time to reaffirm religious freedom by relaxing restrictions on both Jewish and Muslim religious practices.
To its credit, Europe’s largest human rights body, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, has stood strongly against anti-Semitism. Last month, the European Commission appointed Katharina von Schnurbein as the continent’s first coordinator in combating anti-Semitism. France and other countries have increased security in Jewish neighborhoods and religious sites.
No one initiative can defeat anti-Semitism. But these and other actions together can make a difference. As we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hope that Europe and its people, as well as nations around the world, will redouble their efforts against this scourge.
M. Zuhdi Jasser is a Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Thomas J. Reese, S.J., is a USCIRF Commissioner.
To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0615.
Jan 19, 2016
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 19, 2016
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) solemnly marks the 10 year anniversary tomorrow of the illegal removal and detention of Eritrean Orthodox Patriarch Abune Antonios as head of the Eritrean Orthodox Church.
“USCIRF calls on the Eritrean government to immediately release Patriarch Antonios and allow him to return to his rightful position as head of the Eritrean Orthodox Church,” said USCIRF Chairman Dr. Robert P. George.
Eritrean authorities informed Patriarch Antonios on January 20, 2006 that he would no longer lead the country’s largest religious denomination. The government took this action after Patriarch Antonios called for the release of political prisoners and refused to excommunicate 3,000 parishioners who opposed the government. On May 27, 2007, the Eritrean government replaced Patriarch Antonios with Bishop Dioscoros of Mendefera, forcefully removed the Patriarch from his home, and placed him under house arrest at an undisclosed location. Patriarch Antonios continues to be held incommunicado and reportedly is being denied medical care despite suffering from severe diabetes.
“This anniversary should remind us all that the Eritrean people are denied the fundamental, universal human right of religious freedom. The Eritrean government sends those whom they imprison for their religious beliefs to the harshest prisons and subjects them to the cruelest punishments. We must continue to shine the light on these prisoners of conscience until they are free,” said Chairman George.
President Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea since 1993. His regime is among the most repressive in the world, with thousands of Eritreans imprisoned for their real or imagined opposition to the government and torture and forced labor are extensive. Between 1,300 and 2,000 people are imprisoned because of their religious beliefs, with the government torturing and beating religious prisoners, confining many in 20-foot metal shipping containers or underground barracks where some have been subjected to extreme temperature fluctuations. Since 2002, the Eritrean government has registered only four religious communities - the (Coptic) Orthodox Church of Eritrea, Sunni Islam, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Church of Eritrea – and maintains tight control over their internal operations and activities. No other religious group has been approved. Without such approval, no group legally can hold public religious activities.
Since 2004, USCIRF has recommended, and the State Department has designated, Eritrea as a “country of particular concern” (CPC), for its “systematic, ongoing and egregious” violations of religious freedom. For more information, please see USCIRF’s chapter on Eritrea in the 2015 Annual Report.
To interview a Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0615.
Jan 15, 2016
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
January 15, 2016 | Robert P. George and Thomas J. Reese
The following op-ed appeared in Religion News Service on January 15, 2016. This op-ed also appeared in the Washington Post.
On Saturday (Jan. 16), our nation will observe National Religious Freedom Day. This day commemorates the Virginia General Assembly’s adoption of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom back in 1786.
As Jefferson’s statute proclaimed, religious freedom is among the “natural rights of mankind.” Yet to this day, billions of people abroad routinely are denied this liberty. From forbidding the construction of places of worship to perpetrating mass torture and murder, abusers continue to operate with impunity.
For both humanitarian and practical reasons, the United States must stand with the persecuted and weave the concern to protect religious freedom more tightly into U.S. foreign policy.
To these ends, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended that the State Department designate as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs, those nations the commission has found to be the world’s most severe abusers. Although meant to be an annual designation, the State Department last designated CPCs in July 2014. So we urge swift action.
Among State Department-designated CPC nations, China and North Korea exemplify secular tyrannies that suppress religious groups across the board. Others, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, enthrone one religion or religious interpretation while often brutalizing those embracing alternatives, from dissenting Muslims to Christians to Baha’is.
Pakistan is an example of an electoral democracy that both perpetrates and tolerates religious freedom violations. More Pakistanis are on death row or serving life sentences for blasphemy than anywhere else. The government’s enforcement of blasphemy statutes, in turn, emboldens extremists to assault perceived transgressors. From the Pakistani Taliban to individual vigilantes, these attackers victimize religious minorities, from Shia to Christians, Hindus to Ahmadis, with impunity and rarely are brought to justice.
Pakistan is one of several nations experiencing a dramatic rise in violent religious extremist groups committing mass violence based on religion. In some of these countries, such behavior meets the legal criteria for genocide.
Among the most horrifying examples are in Syria and Iraq, where the so-called Islamic State has unleashed waves of terror against Yazidis, Christians, and Shia, as well as Sunnis who oppose its extremist views. In Syria, other extremist groups replicate those horrors.
Yazidis and Christians have borne the brunt of the Islamic State’s depredations and for a chilling reason. The summary executions, rape, sexual enslavement, abducted children, destroyed houses of worship, and forced conversions all are part of a systematic effort to erase their presence from the Middle East.
Beyond the Middle East, Buddhist extremists in Burma have ferociously assaulted Rohingya Muslims, a religious and ethnic minority that has long suffered discrimination and persecution.
In the Central African Republic, an explosion in strife between Christian and Muslim militias has destroyed nearly every mosque in the country.
And in Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to attack both Christians and many Muslims who oppose them. From mass murders at churches and mosques to mass kidnappings of children from schools, Boko Haram has cut a wide path of terror across vast swaths of Nigeria.
We should care deeply about this surge in religious freedom abuses and other human rights violations for humanitarian reasons and because of the tremendous instability these abuses unleash.
But there is still another reason to prioritize religious freedom. In 2014, the Latin Rite archbishop of Baghdad said: “I do not think Europe will be calm. This … does not stop at territorial boundaries.” His words proved tragically prophetic, as the same forces of violent religious extremism plaguing his own country struck a kosher supermarket and a satirical magazine in Paris a year ago. The supermarket victims were murdered simply because they were Jews and the victims of the assault on the newspaper were killed because their attackers considered them as blasphemers deserving punishment.
Thus, standing for the persecuted is not just a moral imperative; it is a practical necessity for any country seeking to enhance stability and protect its security and that of its citizens.
As we celebrate National Religious Freedom Day, let us honor our own heritage by reaffirming religious freedom as a vital component in our relations with the rest of the world.
(Robert P. George is chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Thomas J. Reese is a USCIRF commissioner.)