Father Patrick Desbois

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Roman Catholic priest who heads the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference and also a consultant to the Vatican. He is the founder of the Yahad-In Unum, an organization dedicated to discovering genocidal practices wherever they are found around the world and to providing a voice of protest on behalf of all past and present victims of mass murder. Yahad-In Unum was initially founded upon the mission of locating the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile-killing units in the former Soviet Union. More recently, he has also spent the last two years gathering testimony from survivors of the Yazidi Massacres in Northern Iraq at the hands of ISIS. The work has resulted in hundreds of hours of eye-witness accounts of this modern day genocide and reveals the tactics and strategies ISIS utilizes to turn young Yazidi boys into brainwashed soldiers and terrorists. This compelling research is covered extensively in his new book, “The Fabrication of Terrorists: Into the Secrets of ISIS.”

He received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest honor, for his work documenting the Holocaust. He also serves as director of the Episcopal Committee for Catholic-Judeo Relations, under the auspices of the French Conference of Bishops. In 2004, he began to research the story of the Jews, Roma and other victims murdered in Eastern Europe during WWII by Nazi mobile killing units. His work through Yahad-In Unum has been recognized through numerous awards and public commentary in France and throughout the world.

His work has been sanctioned by the Pope, recognized and honored by the President of France and supported in Europe and the United States. Desbois has been internationally recognized for his extraordinary efforts; his awards include the Medal of Valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Roger E. Joseph Prize by Hebrew Union College, the Humanitarian Award by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jan Karski Award by the American Jewish Committee, the B'nai B'rith International Award for Outstanding Contribution to Relations with the Jewish People and more recently, the National Jewish Book Award for his 2008 book Holocaust by Bullets (Palgrave-Macmillan). In 2013, he received the LBJ Moral Courage Award from the Holocaust Museum Houston. Since 2015, he has been teaching at the Program for Jewish Civilization in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University as an adjunct professor.

Action for Yazidis is also led by Patrick Desbois and collects the words of survivors to document and offer evidence of every step of the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria. Father Desbois was interviewed on two episodes of CBS’ 60 Minutes.