The connection between religious persecution and support for terrorism demonstrates why freedom of belief should be significant to the foreign policy of the United States and the work of the United Nations, Ambassador John Bolton said recently at Religious Freedom Day on Capitol Hill.
Speaking at the inaugural event, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said the importance of focusing on religious liberty is demonstrated in a general truth about oppressive regimes.
“It is a nearly 100 percent correlation — I don’t think it’s accidental — that countries that suppress human rights domestically, and particularly countries that have demonstrated extraordinary religious intolerance, are also among the states that are the principle state sponsors of terrorism, and have been for many years, and are states pursuing weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, biological — and the ballistic missile capabilities they need to deliver those weapons of mass destruction,” Bolton said to an audience consisting largely of congressional staff members and religious-freedom advocates.
While religious suppression, sponsorship of terrorism and the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction “may sound like unrelated policies,” it is intriguing “to see that regimes that engage in one of those practices tend to engage in all three,” he said.
“I think as foreign policy practitioners, we have not paid enough attention to this correlation,” Bolton said. “There’s some reason that regimes that are threats from the perspective of the global war on terror, regimes that are threats because of their effort to proliferate weapons of mass destruction are also so abusive in terms of religious liber
ty and human rights more generally. And that’s the sort of thing that ought to engage the United Nations more.”
The Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom sponsored the four-hour event. The bipartisan group brings more than 90 nongovernmental organizations together monthly with members of the Senate and House of Representatives to discuss domestic and international issues regarding religious liberty.
John Hanford, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, made the same point as Bolton about the correlation between persecution of religious adherents and support for terrorism.
“Religious freedom deserves a central place in our foreign policy because religious persecution leads to the suppression of other human rights,” Hanford said. “I would argue that respect for religious freedom is a very useful, diagnostic tool or a litmus test for a society’s overall health.”
He gave five other reasons Americans should defend religious liberty where it is endangered:
• Religious freedom is a “universal ideal,” not just an American or Western ideal.
• It is a “cornerstone of other human rights, because it cuts to the very core of what it means to be human.”
• It is a “living American ideal” as the “first freedom” in the Bill of Rights.
• It is a “moral obligation.”
• Its promotion is “in our national interest.” (BP)
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