Did foreign contributions to President Clinton's re-election campaign persuade him to ignore evidence of the increasing persecution of Christians in China?
"The American Christian community and others have begun to raise their voices against the persecution of minority Christian communities now occurring with mounting ferocity in remnant communist and radical Islamic countries," reports Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute. The response of the Clinton administration, Horowitz laments, "has been indifferent and cynical. Pushed . . . by well-wired insider lobbyists, the president has sought to maintain a hands-off, status-quo policy towards China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other major persecutors of Christian and other religious minorities."
One of those lobbyists was Indonesian billionaire James Riady, whose financial interests in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia would be adversely affected if the Clinton administration suddenly developed scruples about trading with governments that brutalize their own people. Horowitz insists that the most villainous aspect of the campaign contributions scandal is not merely the improper purchase of "access to the highest levels of the American government," but the malicious motivation behind that purchase: "protecting murderers of vulnerable Christians."
Did the persecutors of Christians get the protection they paid for? It appears they did. "The Clinton administration's behavior has sent clear signals to such agencies as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which now treats religious refugee and asylum petitioners with consistent hostility," says Horowitz. "A State Department barely able to protest on behalf of political dissidents," he adds, "appears incapable of understanding that millions of men and women now brave horrific retribution for simply professing their Christian faith."
Human rights activist Harry Wu knows from personal experience that the Chinese people pay an enormous price for American indifference to their plight. "Chinese and Tibetan dissidents are either locked up in prison, forced into hiding, or silenced by fear of police retaliation against their families," reports Wu. "All the happiness about China's economic growth has made many Americans forget that police clubs and guns and the Laogai system of forced labor camps keep the Communist Party in power. Moreover," Wu continues, "it is still little recognized how American resources help to sustain that power through trade, investments, and the transfer of technology."
There may be room for reasonable people to disagree on certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy, but surely no decent American would condone -- much less encourage -- the persecution of people of faith. That, however, is just what the Clinton administration is doing, and will continue to do until it's confronted by an ethical opposition. Michael Horowitz argues that increasing publicity about foreign contributions to the Clinton campaign and growing public outrage should "fuel efforts to reverse our government's abandonment of millions of believers now increasingly trapped in gulags of faith around the world." He predicts that the 105th Congress will "take steps in support of Christian and other religious minorities."
