In an otherwise unremarkable opinion over the federal Freedom of Information Act, a federal appellate court judge has issued a sharp rejoinder to the Obama administration over an issue that has been discussed in the news—the almost complete lack of Syrian Christian refugees being brought over to the U.S.
[…]However, in a spirited concurrence written by Judge Daniel Manion, the judge expressed his “concern about the apparent lack of Syrian Christians as a part of immigrants from that country.”
According to Manion, it is “well-documented” that the refugees are not representative of that “war-torn area of the world.” Ten percent of the Syrian population is Christian and “yet less than one-half of 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian.”
President Barack Obama set a goal of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., and by August that goal had already been exceeded. But of the “nearly 11,000 refugees admitted by mid-September, only 56 were Christian.”
Yet Christian Syrians have been one of the primary targets of the Islamic jihadists infesting Syria and butchering, murdering, and killing civilians. The Islamic State has made it clear that it is going after Christians because it intends to “conquer Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”
Thus, one would expect that Christian Syrians would represent a significant portion of the Syrians being accepted into the U.S. as refugees. But that hasn’t been the case, and, according to Manion, the Obama administration has no “good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy.” Thus, we “remain in the dark as a humanitarian catastrophe continues.”
This is also relevant to the complaints of various states about the Obama administration settling Syrian refugees in them without providing any information about the people arriving. As Manion points out, “the good people of this country routinely welcome immigrants from all over the world. But in a democracy, good data is critical to public debate about national immigration policy.”
The courts and the Obama administration “demand high evidentiary burdens for states seeking to keep their citizens safe, and then prevent the states from obtaining that evidence” on these refugees. That creates a catch-22 for state governments.
So while the administration brings Syrian refugees into the country by the thousands, it is concealing basic information about those refugees behind a wall of government secrecy. This, despite the fact that the Syrian refugee crisis has been the catalyst for the infiltration of terrorists into Western Europe.
Yet the administration refuses to tell the American public or the states how it is making its decisions on who it is accepting for resettlement in the U.S., or even what steps it is taking to ensure we don’t have the same infiltration here.
Or why, in a religious civil war where Christians are one of the main targets of the Islamic terrorists engaging in indiscriminate slaughter, it is bringing in almost none of those victims of one of the worst human rights atrocities of the new century.
It’s no surprise to me that the Obama administration prefers Muslim refugees to Christian refugees, even though the Christian refugees are the ones who are more in danger, in predominently Muslim countries. But siding with Christians is not something that you would expect a secular leftist like Obama to do.
First, let’s get the facts from the Washington Free Beacon, which links to Der Spiegel and BBC.
They write:
Dozens of reports of sexual assault perpetrated by Arab and North African men on New Year’s Eve have shocked officials in Cologne, Germany.
According to Spiegel Online, dozens of women reported being sexually assaulted by individuals belonging to a group of 1,000 young men gathered in a square near Cologne’s main train station on New Year’s Eve. The men were largely of Arab or North African descent, Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers said, according to BBC.
At least one women reported being raped. There were nearly 100 complaints filed about incidents last Thursday, about a quarter of them related to sexual assault and many other related to thefts.
Albers said that the incidents last week in Cologne constituted “a completely new dimension of crime.” Mayor Henriette Reker called the alleged crimes “monstrous.”
“We cannot allow this to become a lawless area,” Reker said.
The perpetrators of the assaults and thefts last week appeared to range from ages 15 to 35. Investigators have zeroed in on a group of men from North Africa who have been behind small thefts in Cologne recently.
Germany received a record number of migrants last year, which has resulted in fierce debate surrounding the country’s acceptance of migrants and refugees.
As everyone knows, Germany is taking in 800,000 primarily Muslim refugees. So naturally the authorities are hesitant to come clean and admit that the rapists and sexual assaulters were let in by their generous, compassionate government policy.
Now consider this article from the UK Guardian about the Muslim child-rape sex-trafficking gangs that exist everywhere in the UK, thanks to the Labour Party’s generous immigration policy and generous welfare policies.
The article says:
Police and social workers in Oxfordshire had a tainted perception that girls as young as 11 consented to sex with men who raped and brutalised them, an independent report into the failure to stop their exploitation has said.
Throughout their interactions with six young girls in Oxford, professionals struggled with the law on consent, failing to understand that such was the power of the grooming process the children had no power to say no to gang rape, sexual torture and violence.
[…]The report called on the government to research why the perpetrators of this type of child abuse – which has been seen in Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Bristol and Oxfordshire – were predominantly from a Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage.
Blyth said what the children were subjected to was “indescribably awful”.
The number of children affected by the Muslim underage sex-trafficking is put at 1400 by the BBC. 1400 children raped and sex-trafficked, primarily by Muslims immigrants.
What is interesting about this is that I keep hearing about all of these compassionate Christians – mostly philosophers, missionaries and pastors and other wordsmiths – who keep telling me how important it is for the West to retreat from wars against radical Islam, and then welcome in predominantly Muslim immigrants who are displaced by our retreat. I ask them whether they understand that the Boston bomber’s parents were let it by claiming to be refugees. I ask if they knew that the San Bernardino terrorist woman was background-checked by five different government agencies. And I ask them about the victims of crime by illegal immigrants who are convicted, but never deported. Their answer is that they didn’t mean for it to happen. They thought that because they felt good supporting a policy, that meant that it would have good results.
I guess I have a simple question for the pro-refugee people. What would you say to the victims of this “generous” immigration policy? The ones who are blown up, shot up, raped, sexually assulted, intimidated? I think these kind, Bible quoting Christians want everyone to believe they are “nice”. That’s why they want to be so generous with other people’s lives, other people’s chastity, other people’s modesty, other people’s money. One wonders how a feelings-driven religious leader like Russell Moore, who supports illegal immigration and Muslim refugees, would handle it if he or someone close to him were the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants or radical Muslims? I guess he probably hasn’t thought about that beyond the level of feelings and people-pleasing. Probably, he is not even aware of what is going outside the walls of his pious little church. Pastors are not the most reality-grounded people in the world, in most cases. Most are not good at thinking about consequences to policies. The important thing, they think, is how policies make them feel about themselves, and how it causes them to be seen by others in their pious little churches. What would a pious preacher like Russell Moore say to the victims of his religious blathering?
Obama wants to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, then another 100,000 in 2016 and another 100,000 in 2017.
In previous posts, I have laid out several reasons for why we should not take in Syrian refugees. First and foremost is the cost of taking in Syrian refugees – pegged at $6.5 billion total for just the first 10,000 refugees. Canada is taking in twice that number, and their government costed their plan out at $1.2 billion for only six years. Obama himself doesn’t earn any money, has never worked in the private sector. So he isn’t going to pay for this with his own $6.5 billion with his own hard work. He’s going to pass that bill onto young people to pay, but today he’ll preen for the cameras and show how “generous” he is for spending other people’s money. He already added $10 trillion onto the national debt, doubling it.
Second, we don’t have the national security in place to vet the Syrian refugees. The news lately has been full of cases of people traveling with Syrian documents, and some of them trying to come into the USA through our porous Southern border. In general, we should assume from the many national security failures of the Democrats that they cannot be trusted on anything they say about things being safe. We have the Bradley Manning leak, the Snowden leak, the Hillary Clinton private unsecure e-mail server hack, the Benghazi cover-up, the gun-running to Mexican drug cartels, the leak of the planned Israeli strike on Iran, the leaking of the name of the British spy who foiled the airline bombing attack, and on and on and on. Although none of these are remembered by Democrat supporters of the President, they paint a picture of the administration’s incompetence at protecting Americans. In fact, senior officials in Obama’s own administration confirm that the vetting process is unreliable. They can’t even ask them questions that would help to identify them as terrorist risks.
Third, although many of the refugees are women and children, we have to make two points about that. The first point is that women and children are frequently used in Islamic terrorist attacks. Here’s an article tracing some of the recent Islamic terror attacks involving women and children. We need look no further than the Boston bombers to see how letting in Muslim children can turn into a terrorist risk. They were carefully vetted by the Democrats, and yet they murdered anyway. Second point, there is something to be said about letting in a lot of Muslim immigrants in any case, since a critical mass of Muslim immigrants can create the environment that allows terrorist attacks to be planned. Just read this article on how the Islamic “no go” zones in Paris played a part in the recent terrorist attacks there.
Fourth point is about stewardship. What should we do in order to help the refugees. I’m running short of space, so I’ll just point you to this article that argues that it is a much better use of our money to help the refugees where they are. We can help many more refugees if we leave them over there than we can help if we only bring a few here, for the same cost. Although Democrats who are spending other people’s money don’t care to think of who is paying, it’s always a good idea to spend taxpayer money wisely.
The fifth and final point is something I could not articulate, but that was behind my anger at the well-meaning but naive Christians who were calling for us to take on Syrian refugees on Biblical grounds. I think the real reason I was so angry is as follows:
Naive Christians do not understand anything that is happening in the Middle East. They just don’t follow it, they don’t know the players, the previous attacks, the risks and threats, nothing.
Naive Christians take their cues from a pacificist culture, the left-wing media, and their own fact-free emotions. So, they think that war is NEVER the answer to aggression from evildoers, e.g. – Assad and his controllers in Iran. They just don’t have the understanding of good wars like World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, etc. that were clearly wars that America undertook in order to help others from terror, torture, murder and rape. They don’t understand that setting up Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Kuwait, etc. with long-term protection and guidance is what allowed them to recover and become peaceful and democratic.
Naive Christians had nothing to say about staying the course in Afghanistan and Iraq, invading Syria (which we should have done, instead of attacking Egypt and Libya, which was stupid and pointless) and NOT making a deal with Iran. In short, they have nothing to say about preventing the situations where wars and refugees result in the first place. They just want to ride in sanctimoniously after their benign neglect has failed to work, and then appear to be concerned about peace. But only by spending trillions of taxpayer dollars to clean up around the edges, while leaving the core problem intact.
So with all that said, here is the article that cured my anger once about this. It appears in The Weekly Standard, and it involves the indomitable Bill Kristol, quoting a journalist named Walter Mussell Mead, who voted for Obama in 2008, who now writes about Obama’s lack of seriousness about opposing evil with force, the disaster that resulted, and his attempt to paper over his stupidity with sanctimonious statements about taking in refugees from the mess he himself created.
Here it is:
“To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?
“Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time. . . .
“To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd. Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this President’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass. . . .
“For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.”
Read the whole thing. Really. And remember than people on the Christian left are basically the same in terms of foolishness as people on the secular left. They are not guided by evidence, but by feelings. And they need to be told early and often how their feelings fail to work in real life. Otherwise, we will continue taking their compassionate naivete seriously, and go bankrupt paying for it, or maybe just get ourselves killed by the evil we allowed to fester. I know a lot of naive leftist Christians are trusting Think Progress and Huffington Post to tell us what the Bible says about refugees, but surprise! Think Progress is not that good at Biblical exegesis.
WINTERY KNIGHT 