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“VIOLENCE AGAINST CHRISTIANS IS GENOCIDE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1452-H1453 on March 17, 2016.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VIOLENCE AGAINST CHRISTIANS IS GENOCIDE
(Mr. POE of Texas asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, facing persecution, murder, and torture each day, Christians overseas are persecuted for their religious beliefs. These individuals are being slaughtered, raped, and sold into slavery and forced to watch as their churches are burned down.
This morning, the State Department labeled these atrocities as genocide. This is mass genocide by ISIS and other radical jihadist groups that is taking place throughout the world.
Less than a year ago, 30 Ethiopian Christian men were marched to a beach, beheaded, and shot by radical Islamist terrorists because of their religion. These killers proudly put the video of the executions on YouTube.
In total, over 1,000 Christians have been killed by the radical Islamic State. These atrocious, cold-blooded massacres are an attack on the very nature of human existence: the right to practice one's religion.
Declaring the torture, crucifixion, and murder of Christians and certain religious groups genocide is now the official position of the United States. Genocide in any form is a grave injustice to those who are persecuted for their beliefs. Those people who murder Christians and other minorities because of their religion must be brought to justice because, Mr. Speaker, justice is what we do.
And that is just the way it is.
International law
Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as
``any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part1; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.''
The definition of Genocide is codified in 18 U.S. Code Sec. 1091:
(a) Basic Offense.--Whoever, whether in time of peace or in time of war and with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such--
(1) kills members of that group;
(2) causes serious bodily injury to members of that group;
(3) causes the permanent impairment of the mental faculties of members of the group through drugs, torture, or similar techniques;
(4) subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part;
(5) imposes measures intended to prevent births within the group; or
(6) transfers by force children of the group to another group;
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