c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Activists on behalf of persecuted Christians overseas urged Tuesday (April 29) that Congress address the issue more forcefully, with one speaker telling a Capitol Hill briefing that”prayer without deeds is dead, as love without action is dead.” Baroness Caroline Cox, president of the British branch of the human rights organization Christian Solidarity International, said congressional action is necessary to maintain political and moral pressure on governments that persecute their Christian minorities.

Equally important is the hope such action would give to those who are oppressed, she said.”The fact that they know they’re not forgotten gives them strength,”said Cox, a member of the British House of Lords who has traveled extensively in Sudan, where the fundamentalist Muslim government has been charged with forcibly trying to convert Christians to Islam.”Silent prayer alone is not enough.” The call for action came as new legislation is being prepared to address the issue. Anne Huiskes, an aide to Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., said the bill is expected to call for establishment of a White House office to monitor religious persecution overseas.

Huiskes said the legislation _ to be introduced by Wolf in the House of Representatives and in the Senate by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., _ will also include trade and foreign aid sanctions and make it easier for”religious believers”to enter the United States as asylum seekers. Huiskes said the bill is expected to be introduced by mid-May.

Last year, the House and Senate each passed resolutions condemning the persecution of Christians overseas. However, the resolutions lacked teeth and merely reflected congressional sentiment.

Also, last year, the White House established a State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad in response to concerns of Christian activists. However, the committee is also looking at the persecution of non-Christian groups overseas _ Baha’is in Iran and Buddhists in Chinese-controlled Tibet, for example.

Leading Christian activists are on the committee, but some Christian leaders maintain the panel’s broad focus will deflect it from the problems of Christians.

Tuesday’s briefing, organized by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, focused on the problems of Christians in Islamic nations, leading some Muslim leaders to say their faith has been singled out for criticism.”To put the issue in terms of persecution of Christians in Muslim countries makes this a de facto trial of Islam,”said Shaker A. Elsayed, president of the American Egyptian Council.”What about how Muslims have been persecuted in Bosnia and Kashmir?” Speakers at the briefing insisted they are not singling out Islam. They pointed out that in many Islamic nations _ Egypt and Algeria being two _ moderate Muslims are also subject to violence at the hands of militant Islamists.”We have to differentiate between liberal Muslims who are themselves persecuted and the radicals who persecute all who do not agree strictly with them,”said Bat Ye’or, an Egyptian-born Jew and the author of”The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam”(Farleigh Dickinson University Press).

Ye’or maintained that predominantly Christian nations _ including the United States _ have ignored widespread Muslim persecution of Christian minorities for economic and security reasons.

The Rev. Patrick P. Augustine, a Pakistani-born Episcopal priest living in Vienna, Va., said Muslim persecution of Christians stems from a theological belief that Islam is a conquering force and non-Muslims are inferior.”It is noteworthy,”he said,”that the Koran explicitly sees the relationship between Muslims and the People of the Book (a Muslim term for Jews and Christians) as that between conquerors and conquered. It is an arrangement of subjection, as opposed to communal equality.”

MJP END RIFKIN