[Beginning of speech]

As the recipient of the International Religious Freedom award for Business Leader of the Year, a United States bipartisan recognition, I am honored to be with you all today to celebrate the 50 years of excellence, survivorship, and leadership of the Syriac League and the great work of all our organizations and communities. I usually give my speeches on global stages: the United States Congress, French Senate, and with international think tanks. I have never had the honor of speaking about international religious freedom in my hometown, Beirut. I am grateful to be sharing with you a few words that were meant for an American government audience, but being home and amongst you is much more important.

When I recently congratulated our friend, Nuri Kino, for being awarded the prestigious Swedish Kavian Prize, it really hit me how long it has been since we have had something to celebrate. So I tweeted: “when one of us wins, we all win.” I wish to begin by underscoring this message today. It is a blessing that we have much to celebrate. Congratulations dear friend Habib Ephrem on your prestigious appointment as Advisor to the President of the Republic of Lebanon for Human Rights and Religious Dialogue. And congratulations to each and every leader, activist, and journalist in this room and those who are not with us today. Your humanitarian diplomacy has never been so critical.

How do you say no to those most in need? Governments and media do so all the time. In that moment, I realized that my visit to the United States needed a very strategic mission: to disrupt the narrative. The Yazidi people were an ancient community built on a faith of coexistence with people and land. These women were not weak, but immensely strong and dignified. Sexual enslavement was not just a weapon of war, it was the principal means of committing genocide.

This month, my family’s philanthropy, the Zovighian Public Office, turns ten years old. We did not know our first day until it came upon us. I was in Washington D.C. to speak about the plight of Yazidi survivors; incredibly brave women who had dared to escape their Da’esh captors. Many had come back with their bodies destroyed by sexual enslavement as a weapon of war. Others had experienced forced abortions. Some came back to their families pregnant. During a meeting with State Department, I learned that these women and a new NGO that had just been established to advocate for their rights would not be receiving the funding they had applied for urgent gynecological treatment. Why? Because they had been unable to conduct due diligence on them, because just a few months earlier, who knew of the Yazidi people? And how could funding be given to a small start-up organization with no track record? I rejected this rejection, and seized the bill. Yazda’s first funder was the Chaldean Church in Iraq. We became their second.

How do you say no to those most in need? Governments and media do so all the time. In that moment, I realized that my visit to the United States needed a very strategic mission: to disrupt the narrative. The Yazidi people were an ancient community built on a faith of coexistence with people and land. These women were not weak, but immensely strong and dignified. Sexual enslavement was not just a weapon of war, it was the principal means of committing genocide. I had just completed survivor-centered research combined with a theological analysis of Da’esh’s so-called fatwas and had documented damning evidence of their intent to destroy the entire community to “cleanse” Iraq and Syria for a “rightful” caliphate. With Yazda, and within only a few days, every international media outlet, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, changed their language and the front pages changed from exclaiming that Da’esh was occupying Sinjar and Iraq, to genocide was being committed against the Yazidis and other minorities. This evidence became the basis for a United Nations Security Council recognition of the Yazidi genocide and the establishment of UNITAD to protect and document the evidence amply present in the dozens of mass graves and in the lived experiences of the community.

Lebanon could not exist without every one of our communities. Our Republic would just be a country like every other in the world. I sincerely hope and wish in this powerful national new beginning that we stop shying away from our greatness and start to embrace it in partnership.

While recognitions help elevate and bring visibility to the causes and communities we serve, we also know not to count on the front page news, because we know just how much never makes the news. And that is why these spaces for dialogue and sharing are so important. For who remembers the Yazidi people today after everything they have and are still going through? Let us not forget that almost 2,700 women and children still missing and still being held captive by the remnant cells of Da’esh.Habib opened the floor today with a very important question: where have we gone wrong? If you would allow me, I would like to humbly answer one small part of this universal question with a challenge for all of you. To survive the many crimes of genocide that our communities, culture, and land have endured, we have often applied a very powerful strategy: to preserve our existence, identity, and history. We have each attended to our own communities and causes. We have put the oxygen mask on our people first. We divided to conquer. That strategy is why we are still here, 110 years after Medz Yeghern, Sayfo, and Kafno. We are strong and dignified, like those Yazidi survivors who changed my life and brought out the philanthropist and humanitarian diplomat in me.

But today, friends, partners, and peers, to divide and conquer is no longer enough. We need a new disruption. It is time that we combine to conquer! We must come together in the deepest-rooted collaborations. We must bring out the courage known and unknown within each other. And we must hold space and give voice with an authenticity, creativity, and strength that we have never done before. I am confident that with this mindset shift, we can be much more powerful than the confessional mechanisms of Lebanon that try to keep us small and weak in both representation and power. Lebanon could not exist without every one of our communities. Our Republic would just be a country like every other in the world. I sincerely hope and wish in this powerful national new beginning that we stop shying away from our greatness and start to embrace it in partnership. 

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