ABC News reports:
At least half of the country’s governors are refusing to take in Syrian refugees in their states amid heightened security concerns following Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Michigan and Alabama were the first states in the country to refuse relocating Syrian refugees on Sunday, and they have now been joined by Oklahoma, Nebraska, Idaho, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Georgia, Maine, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina and Iowa, some of which say more information is needed before accepting more refugees.
Govs. Rick Snyder of Michigan, Robert Bentley of Alabama, Greg Abbott of Texas, and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said in separate statements Sunday and today that their states would not be relocating refugees from the war-torn country until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security fully reviewed its screening procedures.
“Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” Snyder said. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”
So far so good, but:
However, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said refugee status gives individuals both legal status in the U.S. and freedom to move from state to state, making it unclear that the states refusing to take in Syrian refugees could in fact reject them.
Oh great!
Remember, this whole refugee crisis was caused by OBAMA’s decision to retreat American forces from Iraq. After George W. Bush defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq, we should have left a residual force to rebuild Iraq and protect our victory. But no – Obama decided that he could “end the war” by retreating our forces, turning a victory into a defeat. And that was the beginining of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) caliphate. Obama created it because of his pacifist isolationist foreign policy.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Obama is refusing to prioritize Christian refugees over Muslim refugees, even though that makes much more sense from a national security perspective:
As France is learning, Islamic State is only too happy to use the Syrian diaspora to plant its agents to kill the French. At least one of the killers on Friday is believed to have migrated from Syria through Greece and into Paris. Nearly all of the other migrants, Muslim and Christian, have no such bloody intent. But can you blame the average American for refusing to volunteer as a next door neighbor?
Mr. Obama was especially harsh on those, like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, who say Christian refugees should be a priority. “When some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
But Messrs. Bush and Cruz are right that Christians are under particular threat from Islamic State. If they aren’t killed for jihadist sport, they must convert to Islam or die. Their daughters are raped and forced into Muslim marriages. Their churches are blown up. The U.S. would have been right to accept and save more Jews from Nazi genocide in the 1930s and 1940s. Syrian Christians are no different today.
This Daily Caller article is a nice reminder of what happens when generous socialists decide to take care of the nice unskilled immigrants from Muslim countries with taxpayer money.
It says:
Sweden began opening its doors to Muslim immigrants in the 1970s. Today it pays a high price for having done so. The group suffering the severest consequences of such an open door policy has been Swedish women.
[…]A 1996 Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention report bears this out. It noted that Muslim immigrants from North Africa were 23 times more likely to commit rape than Swedish men. It is no wonder why today Sweden is deemed the rape capital of the Western world.
Even more shocking, however, is the political correctness overshadowing the reporting of these crimes. Sensitive about accusations of Islamophobia, the Swedish press refuses to sound a warning alarm for native women about who these sexual predators are. Thus, when a Muslim commits a rape, the media only refers to him as a Swedish male.
[…]Interestingly, between 1995-2006, the Swedish government tracked gang rapes, identifying a drastically increasing trend. Unbelievably, after discovering the problem, it then adopted an ostrich-like “head in the sand” approach, terminating any further studies on them . Apparently the government’s fear of being labeled Islamophobic proved greater than its concerns about warning Swedish women about the threat. While no studies on gang rape have been conducted since 2006, one can assume these numbers have continued to rise.
The political correctness is also at work in the UK. I blogged before about the Muslim grooming gangs, which prey on young women. Complaints about the rapists by the victims of the families were ignored by the police, who did not want to get into trouble for “discrimination” against the Muslim men.
Meanwhile, Obama is in the news for different reasons.
The Washington Times explains:
President Obama showed a flash of anger Monday with Republican critics of his anti-terrorism strategy, saying he is “too busy” to engage in a rhetorical debate with them.
“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership, or American winning or whatever other slogans they come up with, that has no relationship to what actually is going to work to protect the American people” and America’s allies, Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Turkey. “I’m too busy for that.”
The president was addressing a question about critics of his strategy for defeating the Islamic State, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris last week.
The context was Islamic State, and what to do about their aggression and acts of terrorism. Obama’s answer: he’s not interested in America leading, or in America winning. This is the Democrat Party.
WINTERY KNIGHT 