“CT has reported how terrorists such as ISIS are now officially the greatest threat faced by the persecuted church, as Christians in 50 countries continue to face record levels of persecution. Middle Eastern evangelicals have exchanged strategies, while advocates call for the creation of a safe haven.”

For two years, ISIS has been terrorizing Christians and other religious minorities in Syria and Iraq.

In one week, Secretary of State John Kerry will have to tell Congress whether the United States will officially label ISIS’ actions a “genocide.”

Many Christian groups have been ratcheting up the pressure for such a declaration. Today, the Knights of Columbus released “encyclopedic evidence” for Christian genocide in the Middle East at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

“If Christians are excluded from the classification of genocide, we will be responsible for a greater and more ruthless campaign of persecution against them,” said Bishop Angaelos of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom, one of this morning’s speakers at the National Press Club. “We cannot declare genocide for Yazidis and not Christians if they are suffering the safe fate at the hands of the same perpetrators at the same time under the same conditions.”

“I share just a huge sense of revulsion over these acts, obviously,” Kerry told a House Appropriations Subcommittee two weeks ago. “We are currently doing what I have to do, which is review very carefully the legal standards and precedents for whatever judgment is made.”

Meanwhile, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted last week to pass two resolutions: one calling for support of the creation of an international war crimes tribunal to prosecute those involved in Syria, and the other calling the crimes perpetrated by ISIS against Christians and other minorities there “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.”

The House committee is following the lead of the European Parliament, which passed a resolution last month saying ISIS’ behavior fits the definition in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

According to the 1951 convention, genocide involves an intention to wipe out a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group by killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children to another people group.

The UN genocide convention calls for the prevention and punishment of perpetrators. But the language is vague, and doesn’t obligate the US to a specific course of action. The Washington Post explains:

Genocide scholars say the administration’s decision has large implications for what the word means. Bill Clinton hesitated to use the word in Rwanda, saying it would mandate action. George Bush used it a decade later in Darfur, but concluded it didn’t mandate any policy change. Genocide experts want, above all, for the word to mean something.

David Saperstein, America’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said that the label won’t change the US response.

“Had we a year ago made a determination about genocide crimes against humanity, it would have resulted in what we are doing [now],” he said at a January press conference announcing Open Doors’s 2016 World Watch List. “You phrase the question, ‘Is there significance?’ ‘Is there importance?’ We are doing what we would have done regardless of whether the designation had been made or not.”

But others argue that the designation is an important step.

“The International Association of Genocide Scholars, over 200 members of Congress, and over 70 human rights experts and organizations, spanning the nation’s religious and political spectrum, have raised their voices that the treatment of these communities by ISIS meets even the strictest definition of genocide under international law, and must be treated as such,” said Kirsten Evans, executive director of In Defense of Christians (IDC).

IDC and the Knights of Columbus have used a TV ad and online petition to argue for the genocide declaration. Some of the 64,000 signatories include National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson, Northland pastor Joel Hunter, Baylor University history professor Philip Jenkins, and evangelist Ravi Zacharaias. US Commission on International Religious Freedom commissioner Robert George and philosopher Cornel West have also weighed in, as has the former US ambassador to the UN for human rights, Ken Blackwell.

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