The State Department had an unusual critic in its failure to label the persecution of Middle East Christians “genocide” -- its former boss! Hillary Clinton, who served as the agency’s secretary for five years, is trying to boost her creds with mainstream voters by taking a decidedly different position than President Obama on one of ISIS’s biggest targets. The Democratic presidential candidate broke with the administration she used to be a member of at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire late last week, when a voter asked if the former First Lady would “join those leaders, faith leaders, and secular leaders and political leaders from both the Right and the Left, in calling what is happening by its proper name: ‘genocide?’”
While the State Department continues to drag its feet on the classification, cries for an official designation continue to grow. Solid majorities of American voters agree with leaders on both sides who are fighting for Hillary’s successor to lead the charge against faith-based violence. Clinton, seeing an opportunity to distinguish herself from President Obama, took it. “I will,” she replied, “because we now have enough evidence.” It’s clear, she went on, that the violence is “deliberately aimed at destroying, not only the lives, but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East and the territory controlled by ISIS.”
Of course, it will take a lot more than a few soundbites for Clinton to wash her hands of her own checkered legacy on religious persecution. While radical Islamists like Boko Haram (which killed more people than ISIS in 2014) burned down villages and massacred Christians in Africa, the Clinton State Department refused to list the group as terrorists. Instead, as men and women of faith were being targeted overseas, Hillary focused on the phony crisis of human rights: special privileges for the world’s LGBT population.
Only after Hillary left DOS did the agency formally designate Boko Haram as a terrorist group. Now, it seems, Clinton is hoping to make up for past wrongs. Whether voters will forget her indifference on religious persecution remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: with even Hillary Clinton acknowledging the realities overseas, President Obama stands virtually alone in his refusal to call the slaughter what it is. It’s a sad legacy of extremism from an administration where religious liberty hasn’t just been pushed to the back seat – it has no seat at the table of White House priorities. For more on the importance of the “genocide” label, check out Travis Weber’s piece in the Stream.
