Evangelist Franklin Graham has called on all believers to join him in praying for the U.S. Senate to pass H.R. 390—the Iraq and Syria Genocide Emergency Relief and Accountability Act of 2017—quickly to send to President Trump for approval.
The bill is designed to aid victims of Islamic State genocide in Iraq and Syria, where Christians are being killed or forced to flee their homes and leave everything behind.
“This bill would allow funding already available to be used to help Christians and Yazidis return to their hometowns and would foil ISIS’s plan to wipe them out totally from the region,” Graham said on Facebook. “The Islamic State has tried to brutally eradicate minorities like Christians and Yazidis from the face of the earth and they continue to target members of religious minorities in the Middle East with rape, kidnapping, enslavement, and death. …. Christians have lived in the region for nearly 2000 years and, without help, may disappear from the Nineveh Plain.”
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill, authored by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the House panel on global human rights, on June 6 by unanimous consent.
This week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in introducing the International Religious Freedom Report for 2016, made it clear that the designation of genocide against ISIS and other terrorist groups was a U.S. State Department determination rather than an individual one. {eoa}
