HR 390: U.S. Must Stop the Genocide of Middle East Christians

[TomSea]

U.S. Must Stop the Genocide of Middle East Christians
By Stephen Hollingshead and Loay Mikhael
http://thehill.com
Posted 2017-09-07 03:08 GMT

The horrors of the ISIS genocide continue, and the most deliberative body in the world is standing in the way of fixing a major problem in our government's response to that tragedy.

H.R. 390, the Iraq and Syria Genocide Emergency Relief and Accountability Act, passed the House unanimously on June 6. Then 40 legislative days passed, and the Senate recessed without moving the bill. We implore the Senate to take action now.

The most important thing about this bill is that it would end the USAID/UNDP discrimination against religious minorities qua religious minorities, which rests on an obstinate legal theory at the UN. In spite of the fact that the UN Genocide Convention, to which the U.S. is a party, explicitly addresses the need to redress genocide based on religion, the UN refuses to aid groups based on their religion.

Because USAID sends its aid via UNDP, this means that Christian groups in Northern Iraq, for example, have received essentially no humanitarian assistance from the UN or from the U.S. Local churches have shouldered the burden, relying on private sector help (the Vatican and the Knights of Columbus have been very generous, for example) and that well is running dry at the time when money for rebuilding ISIS-devastated villages is most acute.

H.R. 390 does not appropriate any new aid for Iraq or Syria -- it merely ensures that aid already flowing starts flowing to the victims who need it most, victims almost ignored by the current money flows. The bill also takes important steps to ensure that the government of Iraq is collecting evidence against and prosecuting perpetrators of these crimes.

Continued: http://aina.org/news/20170906230841.htm

I thought this looked important. Some of you all do know how the Senate and House work with bills, etc. It is interesting that this passed the House already "unanimously". 

What's the hold up? Most Senators, it seems all Senators, left or right, would vote for this as well.

[The_Reader_David]

Let's see if it can make it through the Senate.  Besides the visciously anti-Christian (or is that Antichristian?) ranks of the Demonrats, on the other side of the aisle, there is Sen. McCain who seems to suffer from a virulent hatred of Orthodox Christians (cf. his behavior when a group of Orthodox Christians from Syria testified before a committee on which he sat about their persecution at the hands of the "Syrian rebels").