It’s March 31st, do you know where Matthew Lee is tonight?

 Update April 3, 2008:   Still no sign of Mr. Lee’s monthly report to complain about the Bush Administration not bringing enough Iraqis to the US.   I can only conclude that the numbers were up this month and thus it was not worth reporting.    Or, maybe he is waiting for the big pow-wow tomorrow. 

Time for our monthly Matthew Lee Watch. 

We are waiting for AP reporter Matthew Lee to tell us how few Iraqi refugees arrived in the United States during the month of March.   The time of his reporting varies slightly.   Last month he posted his story about 8 hours into the first day of the month, but he was early and reported late in the evening of October 31st, so who knows it could be soon!

He will tell us how many Iraqis are in Syria and Jordan, and that we have a moral obligation to bring them to America (even Bush says so!). 

He will tell us that the Bush Administration promised to resettle 12,000 in FY 2008 which began on October 1, 2007.   Then there will be a little subtraction to show how many the Administration will need to bring to fill its quota for the year.

He may make an oblique mention of the fact that Homeland Security and the State Department were in a tussle over security issues.  I guess, by at least mentioning it, he covers his bases, but never goes into much detail about Homeland Security’s concerns about terrorists getting in as refugees.

I would really like to see him find out how many of the refugees coming from Iraq are Christians and how many are Muslim, now that would be an interesting bit of investigative reporting.

If any of you see his report before I do, please comment here and send a link!

Sweden tightens up on Iraqi refugees

“Sweden closes doors to fleeing Iraqis” reads the headline of a March 30 AP story. As is usual with stories like this, it begins with the sad tale of a “victim” of Sweden’s heartless policy. Only it doesn’t seem that sad:

The fear of being sent back to Baghdad has taken its toll on Mustafa Aziz Alwi.

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He says he cannot sleep and has lost about 20 pounds since his claim for asylum in Sweden was rejected in January.

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“They told me it’s because it’s calmer in Iraq now, that I can go back and be happy. But they don’t know that it’s death there,” said Aziz Alwi, 25, wiping away tears in an interview at his cousin’s apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Sollentuna.

Why is it death there? Nobody provides any evidence of that. It’s just a guy who would rather stay in Sweden. That’s what Sweden’s Migration Board thought too, when he had his hearing. But the reporter needs a dramatic sob story so Alwi becomes a victim.

Sweden has already taken in about 100,000 Iraqis, far more than any other country, 40,000 of them since the U.S. invasion in 2003. That is an odd date to cite, since the sectarian violence didn’t start until 2005.

Last year more than 18,000 Iraqis applied for asylum in Sweden. This year only 835 applied for asylum in February and the number plummeted to 376 in the first three weeks of March. Sweden changed its policy last summer so it doesn’t automatically accept everyone from Iraq. That, and the drop in violence in Iraq, account for the decrease in asylum applicants.

Naturally, Sweden gets no credit for all it has done. Instead,

“Unfortunately we’re not surprised [at the drop in asylum applications],” said Bjarte Vandvik, Secretary-General of the European Council of Refugees and Exiles. “It was going to happen sooner or later. The lack of solidarity in Europe … has had this very unfortunate effect.”

Just like the United States and Israel. Those countries who take in refugees are criticized for not taking in everybody who wants to come. Meanwhile, other countries who don’t accept refugees are given a free pass.

 And by the way, the headline is not accurate. Sweden has not “closed its doors” to refugees. In the sixth paragraph the article notes:

…immigration statistics obtained by The Associated Press showed only 28 percent of the claims were approved in January and 23 percent in February — down from 85 percent in January 2007.

That’s not exactly closing the door, is it? But it seems that having to justify their case for asylum is an intolerable burden to people like Mustafa Azia Alwi.

And one more comment: The mayor of a Swedish town that is 7 percent Iraqi says Sweden needs immigrants because it’s a small country with a low birthrate.  As Mark Steyn pointed out in America Alone, Sweden, like other European countries, is reaping the harvest of a culture that does not value children. Its “need” for immigration is resulting in a loss of its own culture and increasing violence and dissension. Just start having babies, Swedes.

We’ve previously posted on Sweden here, here, here and here.

Congress set to recognize Jewish refugees from Arab countries

Peggy Shapiro of The American Thinker reports:

It has been sixty years since 850,000 Jews were victims of “ethnic cleansing” in 10 Arab lands, where some Jewish communities had existed for 2,500 years. The number of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands exceeds Arab refugees from Israel by more than 100,000 (United Nations Conciliation Commission, October 23, 1950). Yet, the claims of these forgotten refugees, who were never compensated for their loss of land, homes, businesses and personal property, are rarely part of the narrative.

The only refugees you ever hear of in relation to Israel are the Palestinians.  Today Congress is considering a bill to recognize the Jewish refugees.

On February 27, 2008, in a unanimous bi-partisan decision, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved H.Res 185, recognizing the plight and flight of over 850,000 Jews from Arab countries. The legislation, co-sponsored by House of Representatives by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Rep. Michael Ferguson (R-NJ), and Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY). states in part that “any resolutions relating to the issue of Middle East refugees, and which include a reference to the required resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue, must also include a similarly explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish, Christian, and other refugees from Arab countries.”

… The resolution urges the international community to treat all refugees in the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf equally and opens the public dialogue to include Jewish refugees who until now have been forgotten.

The Palestinians have been exploited since 1948 in order to stigmatize Israel. The UN treats Palestinian refugees differently from all other refugees; they have their own UN agency with different rules from the UNHCR, the agency that covers the others. Alone among post WWII refugees, the Palestinians have been kept in “camps” (now actually towns, but still often called camps for effect) rather than moved to a country of similar ethnicity. The other Arabs have wanted it that way, as it gives them an excuse to blame Israel for the refugees’ plight, rather than blame themselves for not solving the problem. During the Cold War, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization and trained and cultivated Yasser Arafat.

It’s about time we begin to fight back against the immense distortion of history that the Arabs and the Soviet Union accomplished. The lies are so numerous, and the propaganda apparatus so deeply implanted, that even this small act of Congress recognizing the Jewish refugees is almost a miracle.

Germany may accept 30,000 Iraqi Christians

The Earth Times reports:

Berlin - Germany is mulling calls for it to take in up to 30,000 Christians who have fled intimidation and violence in Iraq, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman said Saturday, confirming an account in the news magazine Der Spiegel. Iraq’s Christians, who have lived in Mesopotamia since before the advent of Islam, have fled en masse to refugee camps in Jordan and Syria and say the reduction in fighting between Shiites and Sunnis has not benefited them, with killings of Christians continuing.

Apparently these “calls” come from churches in Germany.

Interior Ministry experts in Berlin were studying suggestions from the Catholic and Lutheran churches that Germany declare a quota for resettlement by Iraqi Christian refugees, Der Spiegel said.

Just last week we posted on France taking 500 Iraqi Christians. Why don’t American churches and church-run agencies call for Iraqi Christians to be settled here? Is it because they have their hands full with all the Muslims they’re bringing in?

African asylum seekers are flooding Israel; the UN controls what happens next

Israel is in the midst of a refugee crisis. Africans from Darfur began to come in small numbers in 2005.   According to a March 27 Jerusalem Post article, the Israeli government accepted the first 600 Darfur refugees and gave them legal status.  Israelis donated goods and money, and the refugees are integrating into Israeli society.  The linked article is about these refugees. It ends with this:

“You have bad memories that you cannot forget until you die, and you have a homesickness you never lose until you die. You always want to go home,” says [Ismael] Ahmed. He hopes the situation in Darfur will improve so that his children or grandchildren will be able to return “to build the country like the Jews built Israel.” But in the meantime, he is raising his children to help build this country.

“Of course Amal [his daughter] is going into the army,” he says. “I’m going to send all my children into the army. Israel has protected us, so we have to protect it.”

Israel has a history of assimilating lots of people quickly.  But the trickle of Africans has now become a flood. A story in Haaretz reports:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the thousands of African refugees currently residing in Israel ‘a tsunami’ earlier this week, but the state has yet to fully acknowledge that they even exist. Close to 3,000 refugees are estimated to have entered Israel through the border with Egypt this year alone, bringing the number of African asylum seekers in the country to more than 6,000.

The numbers vary by source; nobody seems to have a firm idea of how many African refugees there are, just that there are many and they keep coming.  Why do they come to Israel? Here are two hints. One, the previously quoted Ismail Ahmed says (in another article):

“I was raised in Sudan to believe that Israelis are devils. Instead, I found a people are who open, tolerant and generous, in a way I never knew.”

Two, an Israeli army reservist serving on the southern border writes in the Jerusalem Post: 

They were shivering from the cold, their T-shirts and thin pants no match for the desert’s nighttime chill. Their flimsy sandals offered precious little protection from the rocks, and the last of their food and water had run out much earlier, dozens of kilometers before the border. But when we swarmed around them, the 27 Sudanese who had trekked across the Sinai Peninsula sat down and wept for joy. They were in Israel. They were safe.

The refugees had to undergo a thorough security check.

The Sudanese, apparently, had been told what to expect and took this process in stride. They knew, after all, that had the Egyptian police on the other side of the border caught them, chances were at least a few of them would have bullet holes in their backs. Once in Israel, though, they would be transferred to a holding facility to be questioned about their route through Sinai and the people who made their difficult journey possible. At the very least, they would enjoy free food and shelter in a modest tent encampment; with luck, they would be offered work on a kibbutz somewhere.

Refugees are heading to Israel because the Israelis don’t kill them. But now they may be deported. Or they may not. Olmert talked about deporting the current African refugees, then backed down. According to the Jewish Week,

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week chided the military for not doing more to return the migrants back to the Egyptian side before they are taken away from the border area. Human rights officials say it’s illegal under the Geneva Convention to expel asylum seekers before their status is checked by the United Nations.

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Olmert also prodded the Foreign Ministry to find a third-party country to which Israel can deport the illegal migrants.
What began as a couple of hundred asylum seekers two years ago from Darfur and southern Sudan has multiplied to as many as 6,000 migrants — about half of them from Eritrea — claiming they are refugees.    
The government says that only Muslims from Darfur, Sudan, qualify as genuine refugees. 

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But the presence of thousands of Africans who say their lives are at risk back home raises moral and emotional dilemmas in a country built up by Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Arab countries.

Note that sentence above: Human rights workers say it’s illegal under the Geneva Convention to expel asylum seekers before the UN checks their status.  (It’s not actually the Geneva Convention, which covers what is allowed in war; rather, it’s the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.) This means, I gather, that whoever makes it over the border into Israel gets to stay there pending a decision by the UN.

According to a map on Wikipedia, Egypt is a signatory to the Convention. Yet these refugees are eager to get out of Egypt and into Israel. In fact, it looks like most countries in the world are signatories. Just as in most areas of life, treaties and agreements mean little. It comes down to the character of a nation rather than the paper it has signed. Israelis are agonizing over what to do with the wretched people who make it over their border, settling some of them and looking for homes for the rest. Where are all the countries who are always ready to blast Israel for alleged human rights abuses?  Will they step up and help out with the Africans? Or do they just like the moral preening they can get away with at Israel’s expense?

So who is coming with the Bhutanese?

If this article is accurate, it looks like there could be others of unknown nationality resettling in the West from the refugee camps in Nepal.

KATHMANDU, 30 March 2008 - As one of the world’s largest third-country resettlement processes started this week in Nepal, with over 10,000 Bhutanese refugees scheduled to be resettled in various Western countries by the end of 2008, Bhutan has disputed that all the refugees are in fact from Bhutan.

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Sonam Tobgay, head of the policy division of the Bhutanese Foreign Ministry, told IRIN on 27 March: “It is… factually incorrect to term all the people in the camps [in eastern Nepal] Bhutanese. Bhutan cannot accept a blanket reference to all the people in the camps as being ‘refugees’ from Bhutan.”

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Tobgay said the problem of the people in the camps in eastern Nepal was not straightforward: “It is a highly complex issue with its genesis in illegal immigration, in a region marked by vast population movements, porous and open borders, poverty, environmental degradation and political instability.”

We’ve heard rumors that there is rampant corruption when United Nations employees approve refugees for resettlement; we hope that is not the case here because literally tens of thousands are expected to be brought to the West from Nepal over several years.

Some refugees have complained there has been an unclear process of selecting refugee families for interview.

This article says some of the first are headed to Arizona.    We reported several resettlement cities last week here.   Start reading back from here if you want to follow our coverage of the decision to bring Bhutanese to the US and the conflict that decision has created in the camps where many do not want to come. 

Kansas Somali refugee arrested in rape of students

Thanks to a tip from Us or Them, here is a story that our friends in Kansas will be surprised to hear (or maybe not).   A Somali refugee has been charged with intoxicating and raping two boys from a Catholic High School. I am not making that up!

 A Leavenworth substitute teacher accused of unlawful sexual relationships with high school students is a Somalian refugee in the United States under political asylum, officials said Thursday.

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Mohamed A. Dirshe, 26, has been charged in Leavenworth County District Court with three counts of unlawful sexual relations and three counts of furnishing alcohol to a minor for illicit purposes, which are all felonies.

The article goes on to tell us what a terrible story Mr. Dirshe has, as if somehow that might excuse the behavior.  I’m going to suggest that some of these tales of terror are fabricated to open the doors to the good life (complete with a college scholarship) in America.

At the age of 9, he witnessed the murder of his father, uncle and older brother outside his home in Somalia by militia men from a rival clan, according to an article in the winter 2005 edition of Aspire, the university’s alumni magazine.

Lest I am accused of shadenfreude, the situation is horrible.  However, the irony of this happening at a Catholic School, since it is Catholic Charities that is being paid to resettle refugees in Kansas will not be lost on folks in say Emporia, KS where the Somali refugee issue dominated the news for months.   Mums the word from Catholic officials.

Officials with the Leavenworth Regional Catholic Schools could not be reached for comment Thursday.

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Police are investigating whether there were more victims.

Mohammed is a very lucky fellow in one way.  If he were subject to Sharia law, it wouldn’t be long before he would be hoisted by one of those cranes with a noose around his neck as we saw in “Fitna.”

NY Times: Fraud in the non-profit world

No, you don’t say!  This article from the New York Times rounds out my troika of posts this weekend that began with Chicago non-profits getting boatloads of charitable money that go for political organizing, Chris Coen’s charges that although well paid, Chicago charities have a bad record of caring for refugees.  And, now a report that says these groups are losing billions to fraud every year.  

…. what is getting the attention of nonprofit leaders is the report’s estimate of the overall cost, which the authors put at $40 billion for 2006, or some 13 percent of the roughly $300 billion given to charity that year.

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“It’s a surprisingly large number,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who does surveys of public confidence in charities. “We really need to take a good hard look at what’s going on in these organizations.”

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The new report is based on data from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which, the report said, found that “all organizations,” whether government, for-profit or nonprofit, “lose on average 6 percent of their revenue to fraud every year.” Applying that percentage to nonprofits’ total 2006 revenue of $665 billion — donations, government payments and other income — the authors came up with the $40 billion estimate.

Read it all!    And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, good for you New York Times!

Friends of Refugees born out of Chicago experience

Last night I wrote about how your tax dollars were being used in Chicago to do “community” organizing for the political promotion of grievances by the multicultural crowd.  You know it’s a shame they don’t use all that money to help refugees and immigrants assimilate—-too busy organizing I guess!

I had recently asked Chris Coen of Friends of Refugees to tell us how he got started helping refugees after we posted this from the “Notes from the North Country” blog.  I had known that somehow Mr. Coen started helping refugees in North Dakota.     The post at “North Country” has prompted a good exchange between the blogger, Jen, and Chris Coen (be sure to read it).

So, I found it an interesting coincidence that Friends of Refugees was born in this same Chicago immigrant community that has so much taxpayer money sloshing around.  You know the one that Senator Obama was busy organizing.

Read Mr. Coen’s shocking story!

In the summer of 2001 I was driving some of the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ refugees from Fargo to Michigan to visit their friends, when we stopped in Chicago to see some of their refugee friends there. While we were in Chicago many of the refugees complained to me about how they were being neglected by their refugee resettlement agency, USCRI affiliate Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. The young refugees were placed in dilapidated, roach-infested apartments. Many of them had stomach pains and where told it was all in their head (years later we would learn that public health agencies such as Heartland Alliance’s had failed to test the Lost Boys for schistosomiasis – a stomach parasite that many of them were afflicted with). A Somali case worker at Heartland Alliance had also threatened two of the Lost Boys, saying he would deport them for complaining that the agency had done nothing to help them find jobs. Many of the refugees were also being beaten-up and/or robbed on the streets by thugs, and neither Heartland Alliance nor the government oversight agencies would do anything to intervene.

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I wrote several letters to the State Department documenting what was going on. The State Department then got on the phone with USCRI and told them to investigate themselves – an ultimately useless strategy for rooting out problems – but this is the essence of the ‘public/private partnership’ notion of refugee resettlement. The USCRI so-called investigators then flew to Chicago and wrote a report concluding I – surprise surprise – had poisoned the refugees’ minds with distrust of their agency, and that their affiliate Heartland Alliance had gone above and beyond requirements in helping the refugees.

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After that defamation report USCRI did on me to cover up their abuses I was told by the State Department people that they would be making a monitoring trip to Chicago and I could meet with them at its conclusion if I wished to. I got in my beat-up car and drove all the way to Chicago (this was just after caring for a Sudanese refugee who died from liver cancer). When I got to the expensive downtown Chicago hotel the State Department people were staying at (that’s your money) I had to pay $40 just to park the car in the hotel parking structure. The State Department people were dressed in expensive clothing and aloof. They had their buddy, the Illinois state refugee coordinator with them – a Dr. Silverman – he’s real hostile and has to get up frequently to go out to smoke. We sat down to talk and I gave the State Department people additional information I had collected from the refugees. They didn’t believe any of the complaints the refugees made that I was forwarding to them.

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Yet, I had been in the dilapidated apartments and I had seen much of it with my own eyes. The State Department monitors also didn’t believe that the refugees were being assaulted on the streets (later, using a FOIA, I would get one of their own monitoring reports from Chicago from two years prior in which the State Department people themselves documented that one of the Lost Boy refugees had been robbed and assaulted in the lobby of his apartment building – and that the resettlement agency case worker had failed to tell them about it even though he had visited the refugee in the hospital after the assault). Yet, now they claimed it was not credible that refugees were being attacked and refused to take any action. Approximately a month after this meeting a dozen of the Lost Boys were playing basketball in a nearby north-side Chicago park and were attacked by the Latin Kings gang. They were beaten with bottles, fists, and a metal rod and three of them were stabbed. (I later gathered six Chicago police reports documenting attacks on dozens of the refugees).

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After my first meeting with the government monitors, they said that I could meet them again the next day at Heartland Alliance at the conclusion of their monitoring visit. I went with another Lost Boy refugee who had been resettled by World Relief. I figured this Heartland Alliance wasn’t his agency, so he wouldn’t be in a strange position. The State Department people refused to let him in. They said, “no way”, and wouldn’t explain why he couldn’t participate in the process. At the meeting I got lectured by a Bosnian case worker who said that the Lost Boys of Sudan are actually lucky being practical celebrity refugees in the U.S., and when she came here as a refugee no one looked in on her. The State Department people said that most of what the refugees had claimed that I had told them was not true. Dr Silverman was there again, seemingly there only to “defend” Illinois as a good refugee resettlement site (i.e. “bring in more government grants and low-wage labor”), and had to run outside in the middle of the meeting for another smoke.
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At the conclusion the State Department personnel promised to send me a copy of their monitoring report when they finished it, and then I left. They then never sent me the report. I had to do a FOIA and wait about 16 months for the report. When I finally read the report I observed that they had covered up most of the neglect, abuses, and contract-cheating that had gone on (that’s your tax money at work paying for so-called government ‘monitors’).

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After that, I founded my group and got to work on the issue, seeing that the root of the problems seemed to go all the way to the top in Washington. I’ve been at it ever since. I have used my own time and my own money to help refugees to resettle. Rather than finding refugee resettlement agencies and their supposed government oversight agencies being of assistance to the resettlement efforts, I have often found them getting in the way, if not outright siphoning off public money while neglecting refugees.

You must see ‘Fitna’

Here is a link to Gates of Vienna blog which gives several links to where you can view the controversial Dutch film, “Fitna.”