A Matter of Time Before ISIS 'Holocaust' Hits West
WASHINGTON -- After the Holocaust, the world said "never again." But a group of religious freedom fighters says the world is allowing genocide to happen again.
ISIS is wiping out Christians in entire regions of the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Former Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., has seen the evidence himself.
"In 2003, there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Now the number is 300,000," Wolf, with the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, said at the National Press Club.
And ISIS declares it won't stop there; it will bring this purging to the West.
After years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, America and its allies are tired of war. But that doesn't mean the Islamic State's genocidal killers are going to give the civilized world a pass.
Professor Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, says Europe's pacifism has done nothing but create a huge refugee crisis that probably won't end until ISIS is defeated.
"NATO simply hasn't stepped up to the plate on this," Stanton told participants. "The result: all of the refugees that are now flooding into Europe."
Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), wants military action, but she believes the bigger, longer fight is to win the hearts and minds away from the ideology of the Islamic State.
"What is it that is attracting young people from Western countries, young people with relatively fortunate circumstances to join a group that to most of us embodies pure evil?" Swett asked, saying countries need to see a better way.
"We have to win the battle of ideas," she explained. "And that, in our view at USCIRF, does involve around somehow embedding into these societies religious freedom as a valued principle."
Stanton said "they should be put on trial."
He advocates dragging members of ISIS before the International Criminal Court at The Hague, as much to ruin its reputation and appeal as to actually prosecute it.
"To take them down ideologically because the reason why ISIS is attractive to young men and women around the world is the same reason Communism was," Stanton said. "It is a utopian, millennialist [sic] ideology."
The group, In Defense of Christians, organized the National Press Club gathering. One of its members, Ninar Keyrouz, is positive ISIS can be defeated.
"We believe that this can be stopped," Keyrouz said. "It just needs action more than words."
