ICC Note: With debates about what to do for refugees from the Syrian conflict at fever pitch, some writers are trying to understand why more Christians have not been accepted into the United States. While some have proposed bringing in Christians would be imposing a religious test, the reality is that prioritizing Christians would not be a test of a religion but a test of persecution. This is in fact already the law and a primary factor that the USA, UN and others take into consideration for resettlement. So it ought to be demonstrated as a primary factor in the current situation.

12/04/2015 Middle East (Washington Post) – The recent long-distance debate between GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and President Obama over the fate of Syrian and Iraqi refugees — and especially Christians — was both unseemly and misguided. Both are wrong about why Christians should or should not be singled out for special protection.

Of course, the Texas senator’s suggestion that Christians should be accepted into the United States as refugees, in exclusive preference over Muslims, was, as Obama called it, “shameful.” But Obama’s contention that accepting persecuted Christians would amount to unacceptable “religious tests to our compassion” was also off base.

In any case, I have a proposal to break the logjam. Set a priority and help at least some refugees in particular need: Offer asylum to Christians who were expelled by the Islamic State more than a year ago from and around Mosul in northern Iraq.

Such an offer, which could also be made to the equally threatened, smaller Yazidi minority from the same area, would stand firmly on the grounds of international law. The U.N. definition of a refugee is someone who is outside his or her homeland and unwilling to return because of “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

These refugees — at least 30,000 of them are now stuck in nearby Kurdistan — fit into an exceptional refugee category for at least a couple of reasons: They were expelled solely because of their religion, and they have been persecuted for a dozen years, ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They can never go home.

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