In a historically significant display of religious, racial, ethnic and geopolitical diversity, thousands of people from around the world gathered in Washington last week for the International Summit on Religious Freedom. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus and many more have shared horror stories of anti-religious discrimination so hellish that most Americans cannot imagine.
In China, the secular communist government tortures and enslaves Uyghurs who refuse to renounce their Islamic beliefs. Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans have gathered in the National Mall to report a massive and growing organ harvesting operation in which the Chinese Communist Party allows the sale of organs taken from captive Uyghurs. They say hearts, livers, kidneys and more are being sold to unsuspecting medical tourists from the United States and other developed countries.
A report from the Biden administration in March declared that the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs was “genocide.”
Nigerians spoke of West Africa Province, Boko Haram and Fulani Muslim militants targeting Christian villages for annihilation in the Middle Belt. The United Nations reports that more than 3 million Nigerians have been displaced from their homes by anti-Christian activists in northeast Nigeria.
Witnesses from various parts of the world have told of rogue governments and terrorist cells imprisoning and torturing their children, spouses and other family members. A few said they had received threats of retaliation for attending the summit, organized by a bipartisan federal commission established in 1998 by the International Religious Freedom Act. They spoke of forced conversions, forced abortions, forced sterilizations and forced marriages of young girls who are treated as movable property by old people because of their religious identity.
No one attending the summit could leave without a disturbing awareness of the human suffering caused by the abandonment, reversal and trampling of cultures against religious freedom.
Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss reminded participants of what happens when much of the world turns a blind eye to religious persecution. She said the Nazis captured her when she was 13. As a slave in an Auschwitz concentration camp, she asked a guard when she would see her family again. He pointed to the smoke from a chimney and said, “This is your family.
As Weiss suffered and lost his family, save for a sister in the gas chambers, much of the world stood still in alarming silence until a socialist and secular regime killed millions of Jews. Yes, a genocide of the magnitude of the Holocaust can happen in an environment of ignorance.
Open Doors, the United Nations and several other reputable organizations are tracking and documenting the increase in religious persecution in North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Iran, India, Iraq and around 50 other countries. Pew Research reports that about 83% of the world’s 7 billion people live in countries with strong government or social hostilities involving religion and persecution.
Officially, most world leaders claim to respect religious freedom as the foundation for other freedom. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares the right of individuals to believe or not to believe, and to promote such beliefs or disbelief in their speech, actions and ways of life.
The worst violations of religious freedom involve rape, torture, beheadings, slavery, imprisonment and murder. Less violent offenses include the enforcement of “hate speech” laws, such as that used against a Finnish parliamentarian charged with expressing denominational opposition to same-sex marriage.
McMaster University professor Jody Maiullet has been investigated by Toronto police for asking the Catholic school his children attend to stop waving a rainbow flag -sky to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender relationships.
Trent College in the UK reported Reverend Bernard Randall to authorities as a potential terrorist because he told students they were free to embrace or reject “LGBT ideology”.
“You don’t have to be told anymore that you have to accept LGBT ideology, that you don’t have to be in favor of Brexit or that you have to be a Muslim,” Maiullet told the students.
Rest assured that if peace-loving countries do not respect religious freedom – the freedom to think and believe as one wishes without authoritarian retaliation – the hard-earned civil rights for members of the LGBTQ community will disappear.
Individual freedom requires societies to defend the freedom to think, believe, worship, associate and speak. This is why “religion” is the primary concern of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution.
Without religious freedom, the United States and other civilized countries would not have ended slavery. Without the First Amendment and all that it stands for, the United States would not have spent most of 250 years expanding the rights of individuals with an endless assortment of beliefs from all ethnic and religious communities around the world. Because of the First Amendment – which protects religion first – our government supports the rights of individuals to openly challenge the principles of the First Amendment and freedom itself.
The right to explore the origins and meaning of life, and of all that exists, is fundamental for humanity to achieve and maintain peace in the world. It is the basis of other rights. The free world will ignore and accept religious persecution at the cost of freedom and justice for all.
The Gazette Editorial Board
