Rescue Syria’s persecuted religious minorities 1st

President Obama says it would be offensive to our values to save just Syrian Christian refugees. But since when is it un-American to stop genocide?

Obama denounced on Monday those who say America should “just admit the Christians but not the Muslims” fleeing war-torn Syria. “That’s shameful,” he declared. “That’s not American. … We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

However, for at-risk religious minorities in Syria and Iraq, this is not simply a question of compassion; it is a matter of life or death. The U.S. may not impose religious tests, but the Islamic State terrorist group does. Muslims who remain under the oppressive rule of the caliphate might suffer, but Yazidis, Assyrian Christians and other indigenous religious minorities are marked for extermination, with women and children sold into sex slavery.

Obama would do well to familiarize himself with the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” ISIL might be killing individual Muslims, but it is not trying to destroy the Islamic faith.