Let’s see, why would the State Department want to scrub the portion of the Human Rights report that focuses on Religious freedom in the Middle East in 2011?
Perhaps, as many of us predicted, that ‘Arab Spring’ thing wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Via CNS News:
The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.
The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.
Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.
For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011.
So, in addition to the State Department championing of the ‘Arab Spring’ which saw the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, it is now suppressing information that shows religious persecution on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Moreover, does the fact that the State Department is directing people to the 2010 report instead of the 2011 report indicate that religious persecution under the regimes that preceded the ‘Arab Spring’ wasn’t as bad?
Actions speak louder than words, especially when those actions involve the purging of words that are harmful to you.