Religious Persecution: Underestimated and Ignored.
Simply ignoring a problem won't make it disappear. Not nearly enough is being done to combat the persecution of religious believers worldwide. One would expect that, when the different superpowers in the world today are frequently being informed of atrocities being committed against various faiths in countries worldwide, more would be done to prevent serious injury and death of innocent people. However, minimal action is currently being taken against perpetrators by uninvolved countries. .
Had any serious religious persecution ever occurred in any of the countries that formed the economic and political center of the world today, there would undoubtedly have had to be intervention on the part of the countries that were affected by it. Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, states that it is surprising that intervention by uninvolved or unaffected governments is not a common occurrence in almost all cases of religious persecution ( 2). According to U.S. Congressman Don Nickles, the issue of religious persecution has been conveniently steered clear of by major political actors and the western mainstream media. Concern has rather been shown for women's rights, repression of labor activists, homosexual rights and other matters that did not necessarily have the same degree of consequences as religious persecution instances at the same time might have had. These human rights violations were made into more sensational news stories at the time ( 9). Henry Carey, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University, states that the major occurrences of atrocities have been in the countries of the developing world, and as a result, the major political powers haven't often enough been forced to become directly involved in these matters. Only in isolated cases have superpowers been forced to step in, as in the case of genocide in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999.
