Don't want to promote
"Islamophobia," doncha know. Nothing does that like reports of Muslims
committing atrocities against Christians and other non-Muslims in the
name of Islam -- and of course challenging Muslim entities over this
persecution is out of the question as far as this Administration is
concerned. "State Department Purges Section on Religious Freedom from
Its Human Rights Reports," by Pete Winn for
CNS News, June 7 (thanks to Mackie):
The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.
The new human rights reports--purged of the sections that discuss the
status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered--are also
the human rights reports that cover the period that covered the Arab
Spring and its aftermath.
Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has
happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly
Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary
movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.
For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the
section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead
referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011.
Leonard Leo, who recently completed a term as chairman of the USCIRF,
says that removing the sections on religious freedom from the State
Department's Country Reports on Human Roghts [sic] is a bad idea.
Since 1998, when Congress created USCIRF, the State Department has
been required to issue a separate yearly report specifically on
International Religious Freedom.
But a section reporting on religious freedom has also always been
included in the State Department's legally required annual
country-by-country reports on human rights--that is, until now.
And this is the first year the State Department would have needed to
report on the effect the Arab Spring has had on religious freedom in the
Middle East--had its reports, as always before, included a section on
religious freedom....
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