The Chilling Irony at the Washington Hilton: Religious Freedom Must Be for All

I speak the mother tongue of Jesus, Aramaic, or Syriac as we call it. My forefathers walked the same ancient lands where the faith was born in the Middle East. Today, my people are disappearing. In Syria, where Christians once numbered up to 1.5 million before 2011, fewer than 300,000 remain. Villages emptied, churches burned or turned into stables, ancient roots torn up. The same in Iraq. In Turkey, fewer than 20,000 remain.

For over 25 years, as an investigative journalist and founder of A Demand for Action, I have documented religious and ethnic persecution across the Middle East, Africa and beyond. I have testified before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and spoken at the International Religious Freedom Summit. What I see now is deeply disturbing.

Last weekend, at the Washington Hilton Hotel, a 31-year-old man named Cole Tomas Allen tried to force his way toward the ballroom during the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner with President Trump in attendance. He left behind anti-Christian rhetoric on social media alongside writings that named Trump administration officials as his targets. He had been raised Christian before turning against the faith. The irony is crushing. This happened at the very hotel that for decades has hosted the National Prayer Breakfast and, in recent years, major International Religious Freedom gatherings, places where global leaders pray and speak about defending religious freedom. I have spoken in those halls myself.

This attack should force us to confront a larger truth. Religious freedom must be taken seriously for everyone, not just as a political football. Hatred against Christians is real and deadly, but it does not exist in isolation. We see antisemitism surging across the world. We see the genocide against the Yazidis by ISIS, a people whose ancient faith was nearly erased in 2014. In Iran, the Baha'i community faces systematic persecution. And Muslims are brutally persecuted in many places: the Uyghurs in China endure mass internment and cultural erasure, the Rohingya have faced ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and other Muslim minorities suffer under authoritarian regimes.

It was President Bill Clinton who signed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, creating the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and making religious liberty a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Yet today, many who claim the liberal mantle practice selective blindness. They treat the defense of persecuted Christians as a conservative or Trump issue, while downplaying or ignoring facts when they do not fit the preferred narrative. When Trump highlighted the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, parts of the media dismissed it as politicized rhetoric instead of engaging with the evidence.

Open Doors' World Watch List reports that more than 380 million Christians live with high or extreme levels of persecution. They are the world's most persecuted religious group.

Christianity is not without sin. Like other great world religions, it has at times been used to justify oppression, colonialism and violence. Jesus was not a white, blond, blue-eyed European. He was a Middle Eastern man, born in Bethlehem, speaking Aramaic and living under occupation. His first followers were people like my ancestors, Semitic and indigenous to the region.

The attack at the Hilton should wake us up. Hatred against Christians is real, including in America, sometimes expressed through political polarization that dismisses concern for Christians as right-wing hysteria. At the same time, there is a deeper misunderstanding in the United States about Christianity itself, about where it was born, what it looks like globally, and who its original communities are. Too often, Christianity is unconsciously framed as a Western identity, rather than a Middle Eastern faith with ancient, living communities that still struggle for survival.

Christians of the Middle East are about to disappear. They come from different nations and ethnic backgrounds and belong to several church traditions. Some are Armenians or Greeks, descendants of the Byzantine world, but most belong to my own people. We call ourselves Assyrians, Arameans, Chaldeans or Syriacs, descendants of the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. We still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and carry a heritage rooted in the cradle of civilization. My people have survived empires, genocides and displacements for thousands of years. The world deserves to hear our full stories without the filter of political polarization.

The shots at the Washington Hilton echoed far beyond one hotel ballroom. They remind us that hatred does not stay "over there." If we fail to confront religious hatred in all its forms, both the global slaughter and the domestic radicalization, we will lose not only ancient communities, but something essential in ourselves.

Nuri Kino is an independent investigative multi-award-winning reporter, human rights advocate and founder of A Demand for Action. He has reported on persecuted communities for over 25 years and testified before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.