No Faith in Quiet Diplomacy
Michael Horowitz, a Jewish writer writing for Christianity Today's online version today, has a sharp response to the view of some that quiet diplomacy is the best way to combat religious persecution by tyrant regimes in foreign countries - a view expressed in a commentary on ChristianityToday.com last October by Robert Seiple, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom. Horowitz:

First is a lesson I know as a Jew - that silence doesn't work with tyrants. At root, Seiple's preferred "government-to-government" and "quiet diplomacy" approach erroneously assumes that persecuting regimes have greater power and permanency than they actually possess. It fails to understand the fragile and vulnerable character of such regimes, and it dispirits their internal opponents and crushes their victims' spirits. While engagement with persecuting regimes must often be abided as a tactical expedient, doing so on a routine basis causes their character and conduct to be masked over time, and in the process empowers and legitimizes them.

I vividly remember from my service in the Reagan administration the fear and apoplexy of senior State Department officials when President Reagan delivered his "Evil Empire" speech about the Soviet Union. (Not by accident, the speech was delivered at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals.) State Department critics of the speech labeled its truth-telling premise (and the audience before whom it was delivered) with the same "cowboy" and "machismo" pejoratives with which Seiple labels those who have raised the religious persecution issue to its current place on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Yet as we know authoritatively from senior officials of the former Soviet Union, Reagan's truth-telling was a decisive means by which the regime was brought down.

Likewise, President Bush's "Axis of Evil" designation of North Korea - viewed with equal horror by "engagement" enthusiasts like Seiple - has placed in the dock, for the first time in years, a Stalinist regime that treats possession of Bibles as a criminal offense meriting life (and as frequently death) sentences in gulags of unrivaled savagery. The regime's blustering response to the President, while raising understandable fears of a U.S.-North Korea confrontation, is in fact a clear sign of its desperation, clear evidence that it knows that the spotlight shined by the President on its conduct ensures that its days are numbered.

Who is Horowitz? He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan years. In recent years, he's become a leading light in the effort to combat persecution of Christians around the world, especially Christians in Third World countries run by repressive regimes.

Christianity Today says Horowitz "has had an explosive impact in motivating the church to advocacy on behalf of its persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and in pushing Congress to pass the International Religious Freedom Act," and reports that Horowitz "became concerned with Christian persecution when he and his wife hosted an Ethiopian Christian refugee, named Getaneh, in their home" and heard his story of being "beaten and hung upside down while hot oil was poured over his feet because he refused to stop preaching about Jesus."

Says Horowitz:

Throughout much of Europe's history, you could tell a country's level of democratic commitment by looking at how Jews were treated. Jews were the canaries in the coal mine, and the manner in which they were treated showed how comfortable ostensibly Christian societies were with Christian values and teachings. Too many Jews, my people, have by now been killed to be useful targets of evil, repressive regimes. But there are millions of vulnerable Third World Christians who are just right for that purpose, and they have become the scapegoats of choice for today's thugs. The manner in which Christians are treated in many parts of the world is a litmus indicator of whether freedom exists not only for them—but for all others in their societies. Christian villages and churches have become the medium on which battles for freedom in much of the Third World are waged. And, as was true with the fight against Hitler's reign of terror against Jews, appeasing the persecutors of Christians condemns millions of others to dark-age lives.

Appeasing tyrants always prolongs and extends the tyranny.