(LifeSiteNews) — There are few surprises in this year’s report published by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). But there are surprises.
The annual document was released last month to scant media attention. It’s 96 pages – hardly light reading – purported to track the most egregious violations of religious liberty across the world.
Professor Stephen Schneck, a holdover from the Biden administration, served as chairman for this year’s report.
Schneck is a retired professor, dean, and department chair of political science at the Catholic University of America (CUA). While undoubtedly a liberal, he has a reputation for being rather fair-minded, or so I was told years ago by students I knew in CUA’s Ph.D. program.
The purpose of the USCIRF is simple enough: to inform lawmakers of countries that fail to protect religious minorities so they can decide if they want to take further action, or not.
The report does this by using three classifications: Countries of Particular Concern (the worst), countries on the Special Watch List (the second worst), and Entities of Particular Concern (non-state actors such as terrorist groups that either attack or suppress religious expression altogether).
Predictably, North Korea, Iran, and China are routinely designated Countries of Particular Concern. Islamic terror group Boko Haram — which has killed thousands of Christians in Nigeria — and Houthis in Yemen are among those on the Entities of Particular Concern list. This is all in keeping with years past.
A noticeable change from the 2024 report to 2025 is the inexplicable downgrade given to Azerbaijan, a Muslim-majority country that went from a Country of Particular Concern to the Special Watch List.
This change is an international scandal as Azerbaijan has engaged in – and has effectively succeeded in – cleansing the region of Christians since 2023.
Israel trafficked arms to Azerbaijan to carry out its religious genocide
Also known as the Republic of Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh was a former satellite of the USSR before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Since that time, its 99 percent Christian population has suffered through three significant conflicts with Azerbaijan: one in 1994, another in 2020, and another in 2023.
Despite Russia spending diplomatic and military resources to ensure the 120,000 Armenians in the region live in peace, Turkish-backed Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev launched an offensive to retake the area for good in October 2023.
Aliyev’s forces began what his government called an “anti-terror” operation with artillery and drones that was carried out in less than 24 hours. The blitzkrieg left many, including civilians, dead. More than 80 percent of the Christian population fled to Armenia.
The U.S. State Department denounced Aliyev’s attack, as did Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States who said in an X post that the international community is eager to assist Muslim migrants but has gone silent in the face of attacks on Christians in this situation.
Mel Gibson supports my appeal for the Armenian people. pic.twitter.com/6bPmeSXhmS
— Arcivescovo Carlo Maria Viganò (@CarloMVigano) September 27, 2023
Not widely reported at the time was the fact that Israel also had a hand in Aliyev’s offensive.
“Israeli arms quietly helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh,” an AP headline published in October 2023 reads.
Israel’s “fingerprints are all over the ethnic cleansing” said an editorial in Haaretz, a liberal Jewish newspaper published in Israel.
Azerbaijan “used Harop kamikaze strike drones … Hermes-450 and Orbiter-1K, Orbiter-2, Orbiter-3 reconnaissance drones,” a former lieutenant colonel in the Artsakh Defense Army told CNN. All were produced by Israeli arms companies.
So much for “our greatest ally” being a friend of Christians.
In mid-2024, Armenia argued before the International Court of Justice that Azerbaijan had “completed” its cleansing of the region by “erasing all traces of ethnic Armenians’ presence.” The case is still ongoing.
So why was Azerbaijan downgraded by the US Commission on Religious Freedom?
By any objective measure, Azerbaijan committed religious genocide right in the open. Worse, it got away with it.
With firepower acquired from foreign governments, it brazenly swept aside more than 100,000 Christians who had deep ties to the land. It was right and just for the USCIRF to place it on its list of Countries of Particular Concern.
So what has changed with the USCIRF over the last year? Simply put, its commissioners.
This year’s commission includes Schneck, Meir Soloveichik, Ariela Dubler, Mohamed Elsanousi, Maureen Ferguson, Susie Gelman, Vicky Hartzler, Asif Mahmood, and executive director Erin D. Singshinsuk.
Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, as well as the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. He is also senior scholar at the Tikvah Fund.
Dubler is the head of school at The Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York City.
Elsanousi serves on the board of the Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Jewish Theological Seminary, also in New York City.
Gelman was the board chair of the Israel Policy Forum from 2016 to 2023. She also served as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington for three terms, one term as Federation’s campaign co-chair, and is a lifetime member of the Federation’s board of directors, among other roles in many other Jewish and pro-Zionist groups.
Hartzler, a former congresswoman, co-led a group of more than 40 lawmakers in 2022 urging then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to defund a U.N. Commission of Inquiry into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. She also co-sponsored a 2017 resolution opposing U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal under international law.
Suffice it to say, the USCIRF that produced this year’s report holds strong pro-Zionist views.
At the same time, this year’s report does note that that a U.S. nonprofit found that Azerbaijan carried out a “comprehensive, methodically implemented strategy to empty Nagorno-Karabakh of its ethnic Armenian population and historical and cultural presence” during its 2020 and 2023 military operations.
Still, the USCIRF did not mention that Azerbaijan carried out its cleansing of Christians with Israeli and Turkish weapons. Last year’s USCIRF report also failed to make mention of that.
If the USCIRF wants to be taken seriously as an organization, it needs to have a more comprehensive group of commissioners who are far less ideological in its view of Israel and more objective in its assessment of the situation unfolding in Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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