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Last month, two religious-freedom advocates debated how best to help those persecuted for their beliefs. Michael Horowitz, director of the Hudson Institute's Project for International Religious Liberty, urged public campaigns and punitive sanctions against repressive regimes. T. Jeremy Gunn, senior fellow for religion and human rights at Emory University, favored quiet diplomacy.

Robert Seiple, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom is a critic of the punitive approach. Seiple wrote an essay for ChristianityToday.com in which he contrasted the "public finger pointing" of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the "quiet diplomacy" of the State Department. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) created both the USCIRF and the ambassador's post. Felice Gaer, chair of the USCIRF, responded to Seiple's article prompting Christianity Today to invite two longtime religious-rights advocates to make their cases.

We posted Horowitz's response to Gunn's original essay yesterday. Today, Gunn responds to Horowitz.

Ibegan this exchange by identifying some positive steps the United States could take to promote religious freedom abroad. I also offered several examples to show that policies relying on denunciations and sanctions are usually unsuccessful. In response, Michael Horowitz—a longtime proponent of the denunciation and sanctions approach—says, remarkably, nothing.

Nor does Horowitz take up a serious discussion of which measures are most effective in promoting religious freedom abroad. Rather, he devotes his response to inventing opinions of others and then attacking these phantoms of his own creation. Let me offer just a few examples.

My opening article did not discuss Sudan in any depth. Horowitz, with no supporting evidence, preposterously responds that this is due to my "aversion to accountability." (Horowitz would rightly object if someone accused him of an "aversion to accountability" because he did not discuss genocide in Rwanda.)

In fact, I believe that Sudanese officials are among the world's worst ongoing abusers of human rights. They have, in my opinion, committed crimes against humanity and should be fully prosecuted by competent criminal tribunals. Their bombings of civilian populations, churches, and relief organizations are among the most cynical and brutal actions of any regime in the world today. The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations all wrongly neglected Sudan.

He falsely claims that I believe in returning to a pre-IRFA world. The truth is that I have published several articles defending and supporting IRFA and have worked for and with the Office of International Religious Freedom since its inception.

Horowitz's related fixation on ferreting out allegedly suspect opinions of Ambassador Robert Seiple—rather than focusing on implementing effective policies—is further exemplified by his attempt to re-construe long-past conversations in which Horowitz was not even present.

In a surprising but welcome about-face, Horowitz abandons his earlier denunciations of diplomacy. Indeed, he now seeks some credit for the ongoing negotiations with Sudan as well as for American diplomacy in Kazakhstan.

Let me offer three short responses.

First, I am pleased that Horowitz, although belatedly, has finally recognized the value of diplomacy, even with countries that violently abuse human rights. Engaged, quiet diplomacy should never be confused with what he originally and wrongly called "silence and passivity."

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47