Kirsten Powers

Hillary Clinton has said it. Marco Rubio, too. The European Parliament, the U.S. Catholic bishops and Pope Francis have also uttered the important word to describe the Islamic State’s systematic elimination of Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East.

It’s called genocide.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have called what is happening by its correct name.

But not so the Obama Administration. The president and his representatives refuse to embrace the word and the attendant responsibilities that come with recognizing the campaign of terror in the Middle East.

So it was left to the House of Representatives to speak out on behalf of the United States. On Monday, Congress joined the global chorus of condemnation and took up a resolution originally sponsored by Reps. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and three others and finally cosponsored by 213 members of Congress — including 65 Democrats — to say what the president will not. The resolution declares that the atrocities against Middle Eastern religious and ethnic minorities constitute “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” It declares that it is the sense of Congress that all governments, including the Unites States, should recognize this reality. The resolution passed unanimously 393 votes to zero with bipartisan support. A bipartisan companion bill in the Senate has ten cosponsors.

The resolution came in advance of a looming March 17 congressional deadline requiring the secretary of State to, “submit to the appropriate congressional committees an evaluation of the persecution of, including attacks against, Christians and people of other religions in the Middle East by violent Islamic extremists.”

From Japan's tsunami, hope springs anew: Column

Why the administration has not yet invoked the “g-word” is a bit of a mystery since Secretary of State John Kerry has all but acknowledged that the word is applicable. He stated a year and a half ago that ‘‘ISIL’s campaign of terror against the innocent, including Yezedi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque and targeted acts of violence bear all the warning signs and hallmarks of genocide.” In February this year, Kerry said of the terror being visited upon religious and ethnic minorities: “None of us have ever seen anything like it in our lifetimes. Obviously if you go back to the Holocaust, the world has seen it.”

Indeed, a just-released Knights of Columbus report chronicles the murder, kidnappings, sexual slavery and displacement of Christians at the hands of ISIL. Mass graves of Christians have been discovered in Syria.

Kerry himself has also noted in testimony that there has been “forced evacuation and displacement of Christians” in the Middle East and that it’s a “cleansing, ethnically and religiously, which is deeply disturbing.”

U.S. should speak out for Tibet: Nancy Pelosi & Jim McGovern

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

So, what are they waiting for?

If there is still any question about the religiously motivated actions of ISIL, the Knights of Columbus report outlines ISIL propaganda that declares they will “continue to wage war against the Christians” and promises, “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted … If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”

Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide because he recognized that this was a special kind of evil that needed to be named. It wasn’t enough to call it an atrocity or mass murder. He wrote, the “formulation of genocide as a crime [enshrines] the principle that every national, racial and religious group has a natural right of existence.”

Is this what the Obama Administration believes? If so, now would be the time to let the world know.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY and is author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.