Home > US Watchdog Turns Blind Eye to Israel’s Religious Rights Violations
US Watchdog Turns Blind Eye to Israel’s Religious Rights Violations
by by Stuart Littlewood - Open-Publishing - Thursday 9 May 2013US Watchdog Turns Blind Eye to Israel’s Religious Rights Violations
by Stuart Littlewood
It’s hilarious.
I’m still rolling on the floor laughing my socks off at a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
What’s the joke? Well, it’s no joke really. The USCIRF has just released its 2013 Annual Report http://www.uscirf.gov/images/2013%20USCIRF%20Annual%20Report%20(2).pdf on the world’s worst violators of religious freedom. And… you simply won’t believe this… it doesn’t even mention the worst offender of all, Israel.
Truly. It’s like Israel doesn’t exist…
I am regularly bombarded with reports of Israel’s religious persecution of Christians and their Muslim brothers and sisters in the Holy Land. This week included an account http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=592219 of how Israel continues to cause “countless difficulties” for Palestinian Christians and Muslims trying to reach their holy sites. “It is not only that Israel has isolated our occupied capital from the rest of our country — forcing our people to apply for special military permits to access their families and holy places for religious occasions — but even Palestinians from Jerusalem were beaten when trying to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” said Hanna Amireh, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and Head of the Presidential Committee on Church Affairs.
The Israeli forces turned a religious occasion into a battle camp scenario, she said. “What was witnessed in Jerusalem was an attempt to cancel a tradition of 700 years. The Israeli government is doing everything possible in order to achieve its goal of changing Jerusalem’s landscape, by building more settlements, demolishing more Palestinian homes, revoking more IDs and by attempting to prevent the normal celebration of Christian and Muslim religious events.”
This week also saw Jewish settlers storming the Aqsa mosque. The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation accused Israel of pursuing a systematic policy of aggression against holy places in occupied Jerusalem.
I have spent time with priests and members of their congregation in Occupied Palestine and it’s true that Israel is conducting a religious war. If you don’t believe me, go see for yourselves – but not by Israeli bus-tour, obviously.
Imagine the fuss if we road-blocked Jews from their synagogues in Golders Green, Hendon and Finchley.
The USCIRF report was sent to the President on 30 April with a covering letter hammering home the Commissioners’ recommendation that the Secretary of State re-designate eight countries as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs, “for egregious violations of religious freedom”. These are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.
The Commissioners also recommend that seven additional countries be designated as CPCs: Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam.
Israel is not even on the list of countries looked at, while the Commission’s press release
emphasises how US foreign policy recognizes the critical role religious freedom plays in nations and prioritizes accordingly. “Religious freedom is both a pivotal human right under international law and a key factor that helps determine whether a nation experiences stability or chaos.”
The letter is signed in all seriousness by USCIRF’s chairperson Katrina Lantos Swett. The report she presided over has allowed Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/05/07/report-finds-iran-worst-violator-religious-freedom/ to point the finger at Iran, not Israel, and to give poor old Ahmadinejad another verbal blasting. “Religious freedom,” says Fox, “is in short supply in the Middle East, according to the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has issued a report finding Iran chief among the nations where spiritual beliefs can bring prison sentences or worse.”
An article http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=124980 by Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett herself, called ‘US Promotion of International Religious Freedom’, explains that USCIRF was created in 1998 by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) to be “an independent watchdog of US government activity that identifies violations of religious freedom and develops policy solutions to advance religious freedom for everyone everywhere. USCIRF is separate and distinct from the State Department…
“Through our work, we have observed how governments engage in or allow at least three kinds of violations: state hostility toward religion, state sponsorship of extremist religious ideology, and state failure to prevent and punish religious freedom violations.
“Through state hostility, individuals or groups are persecuted on account of their beliefs. State sponsorship involves governments promoting including exporting violent and extremist religious ideas that include calls to violate the religious freedom and sometimes even the right to life of others. State failure refers to governments abandoning their duty to protect those whom others are targeting due to their beliefs, creating a climate of impunity in which religious dissenters are threatened, intimidated, or even murdered.
“In response to such violations, IRFA requires the President, who has delegated this authority to the Secretary of State, to designate as ‘countries of particular concern’, or CPCs, those governments that have engaged in or tolerated ‘particularly severe’ religious freedom violations.”