The Christians have suffered disproportionately in Syria and deserve more help from the US than they are receiving.

“Armenpress” reports that Professor Mark L. Movsesian—director of St. John’s School of Law Center for Law and Religion expressed such an idea in his article. As the author points out many Christian leaders do not want their flocks to leave their homes in Syria, where Christians have lived for many centuries. And other religious minorities are also dying in Syria, as well as Muslims. But, for many Christians, escape to the West is the only viable option. Therefore, the US must provide more assistance to the latter, hoewever, in the past five years of the Syrian civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Christian refugees from Syria. Fifty­three!

When one considers that at the start of the conflict Christians made up 10% of the country’s population of 23 million, and that ISIS and other Islamist groups have made Christians special targets, the minuscule number of Christian refugees the US has admitted is truly shocking. Movsesian also released a photo which appeared recently on Instagram. It’s the photo of a page from the New Testament — Acts 25, which recounts St. Paul’s trial before Festus. The page, seared into a bookshelf, is all that remains of the Bible that once contained it.

ISIS recently burned the Bible, along with the Armenian Orthodox Church that held it, in Tal Abyad, Syria. The page is written in Armenian characters, but in the Turkish language, which suggests the Bible was once the possession of refugees from the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Survivors of that Genocide founded the town of Tal Abyad 100 years ago