They are from some of the oldest Christian communities in the world, from lands where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah walked, and where Jonah called the people of Ninevah to repentance. But today these Christians have been targeted for death, sexual slavery, displacement, cultural eradication and forced conversion by ISIS. The U.S. government’s response has been woefully inadequate — neither helping them defend themselves and stay, nor providing them asylum to leave. And now, to add insult to injury, they are casualties of the agencies contracted to resettle refugees in America.

Many of these persecuted Christians understandably hope to escape to the United States where there are already sizeable Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities. But they have been largely excluded, with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) even admitting outright to officials at The Barnabas Fund, a Christian relief agency, “There is no way that Christians will be supported because of their religious affiliation.”

There’s also this: According to official data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center for Fiscal Year 2015, resettled Syrian refugees were 97% Muslim. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea, in a November 2 article in National Review, showed that in the past five years only 53 of 2003 Syrian refugees accepted by the United States have been Christians (only about 2.5% of the total). But about 10% of Syrians are Christians, so why are so few of these refugees Christians, particularly given that they are among the most persecuted of groups in Syria?

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Source: Faith McDonnell, https://stream.org/