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The U.S. State Department is facing a congressionally mandated deadline to make a choice: Will the U.S. follow in the footsteps of the European parliament and a growing global consensus on telling the truth about the genocide of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria?

L. Martin Nussbaum is a religious-liberty attorney in Colorado Springs. He serves as legal counsel for the Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians, which Thursday released a report of the evidence that what is happening is, in fact, a genocide. The report entitled Genocide against Christians in the Mideast is available here. Nussbaum is one of the lawyers who worked on the report’s legal brief and talks about it here. – KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: How clear is the genocide case?

L. Martin Nussbaum: It’s clear. ISIS has systematically targeted Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, killing or abducting thousands of Christians in those countries. In Iraq alone, 200,000 Christians have been displaced from their historic homeland on the Nineveh Plain. ISIS and its affiliates have wiped out almost every trace of Christian civilization there, destroying hundreds of churches and other holy sites, some dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. And ISIS is explicit about its goal: the total annihilation or subjugation of Christian people. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” they have said. In light of the atrocities they’ve committed in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere, we should take them at their word.

This ongoing genocide has been recognized by 28 European countries, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, major world leaders (including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Pope Francis), and U.S. presidential candidates of both parties. The United States government stands virtually alone in refusing to acknowledge the genocide.

Lopez: Why is naming it as genocide so important, when the policy implications aren’t clear at all?

Nussbaum: First, it’s the truth. ISIS’s stated goal is the establishment of a “caliphate” and the eradication of all who refuse to submit to its warped vision, including Christians. Hence the genocidal atrocities we’ve seen in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Second, the word “genocide” actually means something — morally, politically, and legally. The United States, like all signatories to the 1948 Genocide Convention, has an obligation to prevent and punish genocide. But, as our government’s own U.N. ambassador Samantha Power lays out in her groundbreaking book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, the United States has historically dithered about genocide, refusing to acknowledge it even when it’s unfolding before our eyes. Why? Because to call it genocide means we have to do something about it. Critically, though, it doesn’t necessarily mean “boots on the ground.” As our report lays out, we’re asking for the State Department to recognize the ongoing genocide and to immediately take concrete — though at this point, relatively moderate — steps, including investigation and collection of evidence of genocide, referral to the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations Security Council for investigation and possible criminal indictments, and exploration of whether to set up a hybrid international criminal court to bring ISIS and other perpetrators to justice.

How does a person decide to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel? As someone who understands the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supporting Israel seems to be the natural position to take. Shared values of democracy, freedom, and tolerance make backing Israel an easy decision. And yet, we now see ostensibly freedom-loving movements throughout the West turn their backs on the only state in the Middle East where the existence of these very movements is tolerated.

It is true that there are issues of democracy and freedom between Israel and the Arabs. It is possible to argue that refugees exist in squalor, that Palestinian children have died, that the conflict seems endless, and that Israel is the stronger party. But none of these suggest that Israel is the cause of the conflict, nor that it is in Israel’s hands to provide a solution. In fact, as a democratic state with a market economy that seeks foreign investment, Israel has strong motivation to avoid conflict and war. History has taught us that such nations tend to seek peace at almost any cost.
But this means nothing to supporters of BDS, because the movement is entirely based on the manipulation and distortion of the truth. If you engage with BDS supporters and directly challenge them, their response is usually little more than an illogical pack of lies. If someone you know is thinking about supporting BDS, why is it so hard to “show them the truth”?

The simple answer is that BDS is a movement that has reached its verdict beforehand. It does not ask if Israel is guilty. Instead, it seeks to determine the correct punishment for a “criminal” that is already condemned. So when you respond to a potential BDS supporter with facts, you are simply irrelevant to them. It is like bringing evidence to a sentencing hearing that should have been presented during the trial itself. You are simply too late.
Recently, I have heard more than my fair share of lies about Jews and lies about Israel. However, what is different about the recent events I have witnessed is that I have seen how these lies are created.
I witnessed the first step at a meeting of the Arab Organization for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR-UK). The group swung into action after the latest wave of anti-Israel terrorism erupted. For pro-Palestinian groups, the attacks are deeply troubling because they strike at the very foundation of their argument. These acts of terror, such as the stabbing of innocent Israeli civilians, are classic examples of anti-Semitic violence that would occur if no national conflict between Israel and the Arabs existed. Motivated by religious incitement, they represent the same types of attacks that have been regularly committed against Jews by both Muslims and Christians over the last 2,000 years.
If you remove all of the suggested causes of the tension—the “occupation,” the settlements, the checkpoints, the situation in Gaza, the refugees, and even Israel itself—you would find that identical racist violence against Jews has occurred throughout history. Even the forces behind this specific wave of terrorism, false claims that Jews are interfering with Arab religious sites in Jerusalem, have been used to incite anti-Semitic violence in the past.

This week we learned that Lebanon is no more. It has been replaced by Hezbollah’s Iranian colony in Lebanon.

Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and canceled its $3 billion aid package to the Lebanese military. The Gulf Cooperation Council followed suit. Rather than support the move by his sponsors and allies, Saad Hariri, the head of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 movement, flew to Syria to meet with Hezbollah leaders.

Saudi Arabia’s decision to end its support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia is making peace with Hezbollah.

It means that the Saudis are no longer willing to maintain the fiction that with enough support, the LAF will one day challenge Hezbollah’s effective control of Lebanon.

Hezbollah and its bosses in Tehran don’t seem too upset about the Sunnis’ decision to acknowledge that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. And they are right not to care. In essence, the Saudi move is simply an admission that they have won. Lebanon is theirs.

Hezbollah’s isn’t the dominant force in Lebanon because it has better weapons than the LAF.

Unlike the LAF, Hezbollah has no air force. It has no armored divisions.

Hezbollah is able to dominate Lebanon because unlike the LAF and the March 14 movement, Hezbollah is willing to destroy Lebanon if doing so advances its strategic goals.

This has all been fairly clear for more than a decade. But it took the war in Syria to force the truth above the surface.

Taylor Force had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, he had served at Fort Hood in the year of the infamous Islamic terrorist attack on the base, but a Jihadist finally caught up to the veteran, whose father and grandfather had also served their country, in civilian life during a visit to Israel.

Bashar Masalha, the Islamic terrorist who murdered Force, was shot dead by Israeli police around the time that Biden was hanging out a mile away at the Peres Center for Peace. But Biden and his boss signed the checks to Iran and the Palestinian Authority that motivated and rewarded Force’s killer.

Masalha came from Qalqilya which is under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority. Its mayor, Othman Dawood, is a member of Fatah, the core political organization behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. Fatah celebrated the murder of Taylor Force and other victims of the attack, praising Masalha as a “heroic martyr”. It named him and two other terrorist attackers as “the pride of all of the young Palestinians” and urged future terrorists to go on killing in their name.

Palestinian Authority television called the terrorist who murdered an American, a Shaheed, a martyr for Islam. And the Palestinian Authority’s support for the murder of Taylor Force doesn’t just end there.

The Palestinian Authority pays terrorists based on the amount of harm they caused and the resulting jail sentence. Had Masalha survived his attack on Taylor Force and the other victims, he would have likely been paid $2,000 a month for his act of terror. That’s pretty good money in a place where $2,000 is more like an annual income. It’s so good that that there’s no shortage of terrorists eager to kill for cash.

President Obama is looking at the fires he lit in the Middle East and North Africa, and desperately hoping to salvage something, anything, from the conflagration before he leaves office. Israel will be pushed to provide at least one “victory.”

Iran has come closer to nuclear weapons competence in the past eight years. And Obama’s abandonment of dissidents and pro-democracy advocates in Cuba, Venezuela, China, Turkey and Iran paves the way for waves of repression and bloodshed around the world.

It is estimated that more than 17,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, four times as many as 2012, after the U.S. withdrew its combat forces. This is a far cry from 2011, when Obama announced the U.S. was leaving a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”

He needs to find a “success.” Cue the Middle East “peace process.”

As Vice President Biden arrived in Israel this week, word leaked about yet another “peace plan” designed by the Obama administration. There isn’t much new in it. According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. might support a UN Security Council resolution calling on “both sides to compromise on key issues,” and it might involve the Middle East Quartet. Israel would be told to stop building in the territories and recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian State. The Palestinians would be told to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and give up the “right of return” for the original 1948/49 refugees and their descendants.

Popular among European Protestants, members of the Christians for Israel movement believe it is their religious and moral duty to help Jews return to their ancestral lands

NIJKERK, Netherlands (JTA) — As a boy, would often accompany his father, Karel, on the elder van Oordt’s weekly shopping excursions specifically seeking out products made in Israel.

A Christian Zionist businessman in Amersfoort, some 25 miles east of Amsterdam, Karel van Oordt sought to strengthen the Jewish state economically by purchasing its exports to feed his family of eight. But it wasn’t easy.

“At the greengrocer, my father asked for Jaffa oranges, but they didn’t offer those,” Pieter van Oordt recalled. “Then at the liquor store, dad asked for Israeli wines. Same reply.”

Four decades later, those Israeli goods and thousands more are available across the Netherlands thanks to the international advocacy group founded by Karel van Oordt in 1979. Pieter and his brother, Roger, have run Christians for Israel since their father’s death in 2013.

Through its own import agency, the Israel Products Center, or IPC, the organization brings in 120,000 bottles of Israeli wine each year, as well as many tons of Dead Sea cosmetics and other merchandise. Most of the products are sold in IPC’s own store, on its website or by a corps of 200 volunteer door-to-door sales agents, a majority of them women.

Annual biomed conference is Israel’s ‘calling card’ for medical professionals interested in the latest in life science technology

Few people realize that more than one out of every four of the medicines, treatments, and technologies in use today have Israeli roots.

“Research in Israel is present in between 25% and 28% of the world’s successful biotech-based solutions,” according to Ruti Alon, a General Partner at Pitango Venture Capital and chairperson of the upcoming IATI-Biomed Conference, set to take place in Tel Aviv in May. “Many of the patents in pharmaceuticals that are now being used to treat cancer, heart problems, and much more were developed at Israeli institutions like Hebrew University or the Weizmann Institute,”

“All of the big pharma and health tech firms, from Merck to Pfizer to Sanofi, and many more, have R&D centers in Israel, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of start-ups that over the years have come up with unique solutions to some of the most pressing problems in biotech,” said Alon.

Some of those solutions and patents are part of the main treatments in some of the world’s most devastating diseases.

Exelon, for example, is a treatment for Alzheimer’s that helps patients cope with the disease and remain independent longer. Marketed by Novartis, the drug is based on research that was conducted at Hebrew University. Doxil, sold by Johnson and Johnson, effectively helps treat numerous cancers, and it, too, was developed at Hebrew U, along with researchers at Hadassah Medical Center. And, of course, there’s multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone, developed at the Weizmann Institute and marketed by Israel’s own Teva Pharmaceuticals.

Many of Israel’s biotech and life science solutions were first introduced to the world at the annual IATI-Biomed Conference, now in its 15th year.

1. Pressuring Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines – which is an 8-15-mile sliver along the Mediterranean, dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge – ignores Jewish history and represents a victory of wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of Mideast violence, unpredictability, doublespeak, tyranny and hate-education.

2. Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and accords, which have been, since the 7th century, the world’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the intensifying Arab Tsunami from northwestern Africa to the Persian Gulf.

3. “Land for Peace” assumes that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea & Samaria would convince Arabs to accord the “infidel” Jew that which Muslim “believers” have denied one another for 1,400 years: peaceful coexistence and compliance with agreements.

4. “Land for Peace” would usher the Arab Tsunami into the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria, which tower over 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructures, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel’s only international airport. It also towers over the Jordan Valley, Israel’s longest border.

5. “Land for Peace” would doom Jerusalem to be an enclave connected to the coastal plain through a 4-mile-wide corridor, which would be dominated by mountains under Arab sovereignty.

6. The width of pre-1967 Israel (8-15 miles) is equal to the length of DFW airport in Texas, the distance between JFK and La Guardia airports in NY, Kennedy Center and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. The area of pre-1967 Israel (0.2% of the Arab World) is smaller than the gunnery range at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

7. Former Chairman of the US Joint C-o-S, the late General Earl Wheeler told President Lyndon Johnson: “The minimum requirements for Israel’s defense include most of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza and the Golan Heights.” 100 retired US Generals and Admirals cautioned Israel against withdrawing from Judea & Samaria, stating that is would be impossible to demilitarize the area effectively. The late Admiral Bud Nance:” The eastern mountain ridge of the West Bank is one of the world’s best tank barriers…. The western mountain ridge of the West Bank constitutes a dream platform of invasion to Israel’s narrow [8-15 miles] coastal plain. Control of the West Bank provides Israel the time [50 hours] to mobilize reservists [75% of Israel’s military], which are critical to Israel’s survival during a surprise Arab attack.” Most reservists reside in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Haifa area, which is dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge.

From manufacturing to medical research, the Jewish state is crucial to the economic health of the U.S.

” it becomes easy to see that the BDS movement’s attack on Israel’s economy, not to mention its encouragement of academic and scientific boycotts, directly hurts Americans. Just as the movement claims to be helping the Palestinians, but in fact harms Palestinian interests, it also harms what is perhaps America’s most important interest: its economic success. Regardless of your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if you support a stronger American economy and workforce, you should oppose boycotting Israel. It is important for Americans to know this, and for the anti-boycott effort to expand to include them.”

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (often referred to as BDS) hopes to economically isolate the Jewish state to the point that it is pressured into permitting the creation of a Palestinian state under conditions that would threaten Israel’s security and even its very existence. Those of us who fight against this support Israel’s right to exist and are usually motivated by religion, a specific worldview, or a moral code. But when boycotts hurt Israel’s economy, they hurt America as well. Israel makes massive and often unknown contributions to America’s economy and quality of life. If the boycott movement were to achieve its aims, Americans would lose regardless of their position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the last few presidential election cycles, the economy has ranked among the top two most important issues to voters, and this year will likely be the same. This means that this fight is much bigger than the pro-Israel community, and the coalition to fight boycotts of Israel should expand to include those concerned about American domestic policy as well. Americans needs to understand that this hurts them too.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is expansive. Pro-Israel advocates understand that the alliance contributes to America’s security and its position as a moral, democratic leader in the world. Decades of polling show Americans outside the foreign policy establishment support Israel because of the democratic, liberal values shared by our two nations. But the alliance is much deeper than that. As of December 2015, according to the World Bank, Israel is the 37th largest economy in the world by gross domestic product (GDP), an extraordinary accomplishment for such a young and perpetually beleaguered nation. But last year Israel was also America’s 23rd largest trade partner. From Israel, America receives unusually high amounts of investment; helpful and profitable technologies and services; and advancements in science, agriculture, the environment, and healthcare that improve the quality of and, in some cases, quite literally save our lives. Our exports to Israel create jobs in America. Through Israeli innovations and collaboration, our scientists and medical professionals become smarter and more effective at their jobs, and our agriculture and environmental sectors become more efficient and productive. The impact of the alliance is as wide as it is deep.

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org

A Connecticut College professor has told colleagues that his school has grown so hostile toward Jews that he can no longer recommend Jewish students or professors come to the college.

“In my opinion, this harassment of Jews on campus in the name of fighting for social justice should end; immediately,” wrote Spencer J. Pack, an economics professor, in a faculty-wide email.

His comments were triggered by the smear campaign that pro-Palestinian students successfully waged against a pro-Israel professor, resulting in his indefinite leave from campus, and a more recent push to malign Birthright (a program enabling student travel to Israel) by plastering the campus with posters. The posters reportedly intimidated Jewish and pro-Israel members of the Connecticut College community, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel. The posters were put up by Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP), whose faculty advisor, Eileen Kane, runs the school’s Global Islamic Studies program.

Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program also invited Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi to speak at Connecticut College on April 12. Kanazi, who is scheduled to give a “poetry performance,” is on the organizing committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and listed among its endorsers. His strategy has been to connect anti-Israel politics with popular urban struggles.

Making matters worse, Jasbir K. Puar was also invited to speak at Connecticut College. At a Feb. 3talk at Vassar College, Puar unleashed a torrent of vicious anti-Israel lies and blood libels, including outrageous accusations about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs and conducting scientific experiments in “stunting” the growth of Palestinian bodies. Her Connecticut College appearance was scrapped, but Kane has ignored repeated questions about the invitation.

Hatred of Israel and overall hostility towards Jews at Vassar has been amply detailed. More generally, campus hate against Israel and Jews has become an increasingly frequent and widespread problem thanks to the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS) movement. Even Palestinians who aren’t sufficiently critical of Israel are targeted by BDS. Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, was directly threatened by anti-Israel protesters while lecturing at the University of Chicago on Feb. 18. More recently, the New York Post reported on the hateful harassment of Jews at four City University of New York campuses.

Connecticut College seems to be moving in the same direction. Last spring, Connecticut College Professor Andrew Pessin was libeled and silenced in a campaign led by Students for Justice in Palestine activist Lamiya Khandaker. That campaign included condemnation of Pessin by scores of Connecticut College departments and affiliates, including the Global Islamic Studies program. The administration nevertheless gave Khandaker the “Scholar Activist Award.” Then came the Birthright smear last December, the Puar invitation, and the scheduled talk by anti-Israel activist Kanazi, sponsored by the Global Islamic Studies program.