A Jew Battles Persecution of Christians

A Jew Battles Persecution of Christians

9 October 1997
The Washington Post
Paul Blustein

A Jew Battles Persecution of Christians

Washington -- In a think-tank office here sits the mastermind of a crusade against foreign regimes that persecute Christians, an issue that is galvanizing evangelical churchgoers across America.

He is Michael J. Horowitz, a top budget official during the Reagan administration, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute -- and, as his name suggests, a member of a different religious group from those whose cause he is championing.

Why a man who calls himself "rootedly Jewish" would join forces with the Christian right is a question he gets asked often. "Jews will call me and say, 'What are you doing consorting with the enemy?' " the 59-year-old Horowitz chortles. "Then I'll get a call from the Jews for Jesus saying, 'When can we sign you up?' " In a town full of power brokers ad policy wonks promoting issues and mobilizing coalitions, this onetime yeshiva student from the Bronx stands out as an advocate for an unlikely cause. Not only has Horowitz stirred up the wrath of Christian groups over reports that their foreign brethren are being tortured and jailed for practicing their faith, he is also the brains behind a hotly contested legislative proposal to impose economic sanctions on countries such as China and Saudi Arabia where such persecution allegedly takes place.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is viewed by some Republican strategists as an ideal vehicle for boosting support among the Christian right, and both House and Senate GOP leaders have put a priority on its passage in some form.
The rationale behind Wolf-Specter, summed up by Horowitz with characteristic verve: "They're pulling fingernails out of preachers? And you want us to subsidize these guys with aid? What, are you kidding?" With his often-profane wit and easily aroused sense of outrage, Horowitz doesn't exactly blend in with allies who feel bound by the New Testament injunction to love one's enemies. Yet he says he has developed a powerful feeling of affinity toward evangelicals, whom he calls "the Jews of the 21st century, the scapegoats of choice for many of the world's thug regimes." His approach is arousing fierce opposition in the foreign-policy establishment and in the business community, whose representatives argue that economic sanctions rarely accomplish anything other than causing U.S. companies to lose sales to foreign competitors.

"It's not going to work, and it has the potential to do tremendous harm to this country both economically and militarily," says J. Daniel O'Flaherty, a vice president at the National Foreign Trade Council. "You're talking about sanctioning Egypt, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - come on!" The reaction to Horowitz is particularly acidic among some mainstream human-rights advocates, who are furious over his accusation that their elitist attitudes have caused them to ignore the plight of oppressed Christians.
"Under the guise of religious tolerance, he spreads divisiveness wherever he goes," says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
Roth adds that while he applauds Horowitz for helping to rally the Christian right behind the human-rights banner, he doesn't think religious persecution should take priority over other human- rights violations such as the jailing of political dissidents. Similar objections have been raised by the State Department.

Nobody disputes, however, that the campaign against overseas religious persecution of Christians and other peoples of faith (such as Tibetan Buddhists) has gathered political momentum, and that Horowitz is its prime mover.

Says Wolf: "Mike has probably done more than anyone else in the country to sensitize the religious community" to the persecution abroad.
"By force of personality, intimidation or moral suasion, he usually gets his way," says Richard Cizik, a policy analyst at the National Association of Evangelicals, who admits that Horowitz's bare-knuckle tactics often disturb him. "I know people who disagree with Mike who feel that they're the persecuted; they call me up and say, 'How can you assign this man this role?' And I say, 'I didn't. He took it, as an obligation of conscience.' " Whatever his stylistic flaws, "it took Michael to wake people up," says Faith McDonnell, an associate at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. "I always compare him to Saint Michael the Archangel, and say that he's defending the faith the way Saint Michael did." Quite a tribute for a guy who grew up hearing stories from his immigrant grandparents about bloody pogroms against Jews in Poland, and who vividly recalls the taunt "You killed our Christ!" from the bullies who beat him up on the way home from school in the Bronx.

The incongruity is not as great as it might seem, Horowitz contends. He believes that Jews, as the victims of the most horrific religious persecution in history, ought to be particularly appalled by the stories he has seen documented - Chinese clergymen in unauthorized "house churches" being sent to prison camps, for example; or Filipino guest workers in Saudi Arabia being jailed for holding Bible study groups; or Egyptian Christians being kidnapped by radical Moslims for forcible conversion without interference from the police.

And even though many of history's most brutal acts of antisemitism have been carried out by people invoking Jesus's name, the American Jewish community has a self-interest in joining forces with fundamentalist Christians, according to Horowitz.

Citing an article by a retired Washington rabbi titled "The Bible Belt Is Our Safety Belt," he argues that Jews are safest from the world's Hitlers when the populace is worshiping a God of faith rather than a God of politics.
"The fact of the matter is, the Holocaust really began after religious faith declined in Europe," he says, noting that his family was able to avoid the gas chambers and the ovens because it immigrated to a country where totalitarianism never caught on.

"I would be a bar of soap, a lampshade," Horowitz declares, " were it not for the rooted faith of churchgoing Americans." His introduction to the religious-persecution issue came in 1994 when he and his wife, Devra Marcus, hired a devout Christian Ethiopian, Getaneh Metafria Getaneh, as a live-in domestic helper.

Horowitz was horrified when, in response to his probing, Getaneh disclosed that while in Ethiopia he had been imprisoned several times for preaching, and tortured by having boiling oil poured on the soles of his feet while being whipped by metal cables.

Outraged when he learned it might be impossible to secure asylum for Getaneh, Horowitz became acquainted with a small network of activists and clergy involved in fighting persecution. The more he learned about the issue, the more incensed he grew over how little notice it was getting, which he blamed on the same sort of indifference and contempt that European Jewry had once encountered from Western elites.

"I came to see the blindness and bigotry of the establishment about Christians," he says. Together with Nina Shea, founder of the Puebla Institute, a conservative Catholic human-rights organization, he organized a conference in January 1996 that was aimed at jolting Christian organizations into action. It worked.

A "Statement of Conscience," drafted by Horowitz, was adopted by the National Association of Evangelicals and several other organizations with millions of followers. Christian broadcasters began talking up the subject, generating a prairie fire of agitation, as did columnist A.M. Rosenthal in The New York Times who wrote that Horowitz had "screamed me awake." Not that Horowitz won over the entire Christian establishment; far from it. A number of religious groups, including the mainstream National Council of Churches, oppose his confrontational approach as counterproductive and likely to endanger missionaries.

Others argue that persecution is abating in many countries. William McGurn, an Asia-based journalist whose family has helped build two churches in China, wrote recently in Slate magazine that "much criticism now leveled by American Christian activists seems less a snapshot of China in the late 1990s than a caricature drawn from the high days of Maoism a generation ago." Horowitz rebuts such claims by citing a recently published book, Their Blood Cries Out, which estimates that 200 million Christians are being systematically persecuted worldwide, mostly in Moslem and communist countries.

Horowitz's bigger headache has been to craft an effective bill for dealing with persecution. He acknowledges that imposing punitive barriers against imports from offending countries would be a bad idea, because trade often helps foster the growth of middle classes and democratic tendencies in developing nations.

Trouble is, critics of Wolf-Specter point out, the bill suffers from a "shooting yourself in the foot" problem -- namely, that the punishment it would supposedly inflict on the Chinese, Saudis and others would arguably hurt the US a lot more. For example, banning the US Export-Import Bank from financing a deal to sell telephone equipment to the Chinese might simply mean that the Japanese or French would get the contract instead.
Retorts Horowitz: "Here are countries which are found to be involved in widespread and ongoing acts of murder, torture, starvation, even crucifixion - why in the world should taxpayers be providing direct or indirect subsidies to regimes of that kind?" The sanctions in the bill are "mild," he admits, and that's precisely why the bill's opponents ought to accept its basic approach rather than kill it as they are trying to do now, because the alternative will be a battle royal over the issue during next year's midterm election.
"This is not a movement that's going to go away," he says.

"There's going to be a Day of Prayer on November 16 in which a lot of churches are going to be participating. I don't know why people think they can wage war on the religious community, and I don't think it's in the interest of the administration, or the Democratic Party, or the business community, to do so. If we end up having a great debate in an election year, so be it."