Some fruits of Samantha Power’s labor in Nebraska

Yesterday, I told you about White House refugee czar Samantha Power and her foreign policy doctrine—Responsibility to Protect—which basically says war is o.k. when you are saving people.   So, the White House and the State Department were overjoyed to help the Islamist revolution in North Africa—in Tunisia, in Egypt and in Libya.

How is that working out now for the Arab Spring cheering squad at the White House?  Yesterday we learned that a leading Presidential candidate in Egypt said Christians must convert to Islam or leave the country (or pay the jizya).

We get them—not just the Christians but the Muslims as well!

We see that if things don’t go according to plan, we get the so-called “refugees” like the three chronicled in this news report from Lincoln, Nebraska.  Is that what Ms. Power means when she says “responsibility to protect?”

From KVNO Public Radio:

Lincoln, NE – The Arab Spring and accompanying violence might seem far away to most Nebraskans, but for some refugees now living in Lincoln, that devastation took place in their backyards.

Now just think about this.  The Tunisian featured in this article tells the reporter that he was already living in the US but went back for the revolution.   He says for their labors the revolution produced less freedom (we could have told him that is what happens when Islamic totalitarians take over).   So, oh well, he returned to his good life in Nebraska as a “refugee” from the Arab Spring.

“Everything we had before that could be considered the little freedom – we lost it,” Zahrouni said. “We wanted freedom, but we didn’t have freedom. We had less freedom than before So, it was really frightening. It was a long, long nightmare.”

Instead of fleeing the conflict in his country, Zahrouni chose to experience it head-on. He’d originally left Tunisia in December of 2007 when his wife was accepted into one of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s doctorate programs. But when news of the revolution first broke, he decided to return to his family in his home country, and witnessed a new beginning. Zahrouni would ultimately stay in Tunisia until the small country settled down before returning to Lincoln with his family.

[....]

“I suffered what they suffered, I’ve seen what they have seen, and I say, Guess what, they can survive it,’” he said. “If I didn’t go there (during the revolution), I would feel really bad to stay here. But now I feel comfortable and confident that Tunisia has a chance to survive, and probably, it already did.”  [But, I'll stay here as a refugee in comfy America just in case---ed]

There should be a law!  If  someone is here in the US on some other VISA, or are a “refugee,” we should forbid that person from returning to his or her “home” country to participate in revolutions by forbidding their return to the US.  And, while we are at it, anyone here formally as a refugee or asylee should be banned from returning (unless it’s a permanent return!) to the country from which he or she supposedly escaped—like Somalia or Bosnia—for visits and vacations!

Burmese champion of human rights silent on Rohingya

Aung San Suu Kyi is not supporting the Rohingyas.

For some of you, this article from the Times of India about Rohingya Muslims demanding resettlement in India may be getting too deep into the weeds, but I am posting this so that my Rohingya Reports category is kept up to date. 102 posts so far!   LOL!  I’m developing the background history for future reference when something goes wrong as the US continues to resettle Rohingya.

After many column inches of sob story, we get to this section of the Times of India report about the terror connections of some Rohingya and how some were trained in Afghanistan.

But many suspect a “hand” behind them. Their synchronized appearance, apparently out of thin air from across the country, led to a question in the Rajya Sabha with BJP’s Balbir Punj objecting to their remaining in the country and demanding a probe to identify the “organizer”. After a monthlong standoff from April between the Indian government, UNHCR and the protesters, they were given permission to stay in the country till 2015 pending a series of verifications by sundry agencies.

Alongside, a strident letter to the PM and all-who-matter from VHP leader Praveen Togadia has demanded the Rohingyas be thrown out as they were a “security risk”. Togadia, whose letter and a series of attachments are available online refers to a 2005 paper by security analyst B Raman. The paper says the Bangladesh wing of HUJI recruited a “number of Rohingya Muslims” and took them “to Afghanistan to fight Soviet and Afghan troops” in the 1980s. The VHP’s note on Raman’s paper names “24 Bangladeshi/ Rohingya mujahideen” who died during the Afghanistan jihad.

Raman also mentions that a Rohingya group is “projecting itself as HUJI Myanmar”.
The Burmese regimes accuse them of being Bangladeshi infiltrators. One of the main attacks is to red-flag the bogey of Islamization of Myanmar via these ‘Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators’. In Bangladesh, where lakhs have taken shelter, they are called Burmese. “Where do I go?” asks Khin.

In India, the call to throw out the Rohingyas is also based on reports of a number of such Muslims joining terror outfits. How much is the security risk from shelterless people mired in misery? B Raman says, “We don’t know their background. We don’t know who they were in contact with. One has to be cautious.” One of the reasons, says Raman, that Aung San Suu Kyi is not supporting the Rohingyas is because of certain Rohingya groups’ actions against the Burmese army. “While she is talking about some ethnic groupings, she has stayed quiet on the Rohingya,” says Raman, adding that they should simply be repatriated.

Maybe the Indian Rohingya illegal aliens should call the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and ask for help—after all they are pushing for more Rohingya immigration to America.  They want to show how open and with-it they are to bring Muslims to the US.   By the way, you know that murder case in Utah where a “Burmese” refugee killed a little Christian refugee girl, a reader tells me that he is Muslim, but I am still waiting to see that in print somewhere.

What happens when whites and Christians become the persecuted minorities?

Will the United Nations and the refugee industry be as eager to resettle them to America?  After all the conventional wisdom is that only white people are racists and the world is full of Islamophobes, but what about “Christophobes.”

This article in the Times Live (Johannesburg) about white South Africans increasingly seeking asylum around the world and an article recently in Newsweek by Ayaan Hirsi Ali got me thinking about all this again.

Here is news about how increasing numbers of Afrikaners, fearing for their safety in black-ruled South Africa, are seeking asylum around the world.

A South African family is desperate to remain in the US, its members claiming they cannot return home because, as Afrikaners, they will be subject to racial discrimination.

The family’s legal representative has been contacting US academics in a bid to get a scholarly opinion that would bolster the asylum application.

The family, described by the law firm as “white Afrikaner farmers”, is among dozens of South Africans who, over the past decade, have applied for asylum abroad for a range of reasons, including fear of persecution and violent crime. Some of the applications have been successful.

I had to laugh, it is so predictable, US “academics” quoted flatly deny there is any reason for whites to fear for their lives in South Africa—they are so desperately holding onto the “rainbow nation” myth created when apartheid ended and blacks came to power.  (Just type ‘rainbow nation’ into our search function and see the mess South Africa is in!).

As many as 800 whites seeking asylum!

Adriana Stuijt, a retired Dutch-born journalist who worked in South Africa, estimates that there are almost 800 South Africans living as refugees around the world.

Stuijt has a blog that monitors the number of refugees and is a member of the Afrikaner Rescue Action Fund, which was started in the Netherlands to help poor Afrikaner communities.

By the way, be sure to take note of how these white asylum seekers are being grilled in the US and consider how easy it was for this Rwandan woman to get into the US as a refugee and to become a citizen!

Christophobia indeed!

Then here is Nina Shea writing at National Review Online about a conspiracy of silence around the increasing persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.

Best-selling author, film director, women’s-rights advocate, former Dutch parliamentarian, Islamist death-threat survivor, refugee from a Somalian forced marriage, and a fierce champion of individual freedoms — that of others as well as her own — Ayaan Hirsi Ali has demonstrated her courage once more. In the cover story she penned for the current issue of Newsweek, entitled “The War on Christians,” which is excerpted in The Daily Beast, Hirsi Ali gives a tour d’horizon of the most politically incorrect subject of all human-rights reporting: the ongoing religious persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. It makes heartbreaking reading.

She criticizes the media for giving short shrift to this development, favoring instead the narrative that Muslims are the victims of religious persecution by the West. She writes:

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.

The international media does report on the isolated anti-Christian atrocity: the Nigerian church that was blown up last Christmas, the Egyptian Coptic demonstrators killed for protesting religious persecution in October, and the 2010 Iraqi church bombing (the 70th documented church bombing in that country since 2003), which killed or maimed three priests and everyone else in it, to cite but a few examples. But it rarely looks at the global pattern, or even national patterns, and their significance.

Will we be seeing the refugee lobby in DC that includes contractors such as the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, World Relief, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and so forth clamoring to resettle persecuted Christians (instead of all the Muslims they resettle), or indeed say that white South Africans are worthy of their help—I doubt it!   Why? It doesn’t fit the narrative the international Left has so successfully established.

Will Nigerians be next?

Will they be the next batch of needy people needing to get to the US through the Refugee Resettlement Program.  You watch there will soon be a drumbeat—maybe its already begun!   Here is a Nigerian writer, writing in the wake of the Muslim church bombings, to suggest a “refugee crisis” is looming.

And, by the way, we have plenty of Nigerians in the US through other legal programs (some probably have stayed beyond their visas too and are now illegal), but we haven’t taken any great number of Nigerians in the refugee program yet.

Check out WRAPS

Reader ‘Mowplsu’ sent us this link to the Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing Center where the US State Department tracks refugee movements and arrivals.  I keep forgetting about this site, so thanks to ‘Mowplsu’ for bringing it to our attention.   The average American citizen can’t see all the statistics kept at WRAPS so I have tended to forget about it.

Where to find information is a category we long-ago created here at RRW.  You might want to check it out from time to time, there are all sorts of links to agencies, reports etc. that you might find useful.

Mexican-Iraqi drug operation busted in California

The Iraqis are Chaldean Christians!

From AP at My San Antonio (Hat tip: Gary):

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Federal officials said Thursday they’ve taken down a drug and weapons trafficking ring involving members of a U.S. Iraqi community and a major Mexican drug cartel that was caught selling large amounts of drugs, guns and grenades.

Police in El Cajon said they’ve arrested more than 60 people in the takedown of the ring, whose members are suspected of being affiliated with the Chaldean Organized Crime Syndicate based in Detroit.

Smugglers were shipping drugs from El Cajon to Iraqis in Detroit, authorities said.

El Cajon and federal police say they have seized 18 pounds (8 kilograms) of methamphetamine, narcotics, cocaine and other drugs; more than 3,500 pounds (1,600 kilograms) of marijuana; $630,000 in cash; four IEDs; and more than 30 guns, including assault rifles.

In April, a Drug Enforcement Agency undercover agent was shown a hand grenade by an immigrant and was told additional grenades were available from a Mexican military source.

The cartel, Sinaloa, is Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who has become one of the world’s richest and most-wanted men since he escaped from a Mexican prison 10 years ago.

Iraqis entered US illegally

Detroit and San Diego have the largest and second-largest populations of Chaldeans in the United States. Chaldeans are descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia — what is now Iraq — and many have fled to escape persecution for their Christianity.

Officials say the Chaldean syndicate has a longstanding relationship with the Sinaloa cartel. Many Chaldeans passed through Tijuana on their way to the United States, helped by Mexican migrant smugglers, authorities said.

The investigation focused on an Iraqi social club in El Cajon that authorities said is a hub of criminal activity conducted by Iraqi organized crime.

Iraqis have been busy lately, first the Kentucky terror bust, then the Tennessee man who wants to see mommy and daddy,  then the Jersey knife attack and now this!

Where is AP reporter Matthew Lee?  If anyone sees him, tell him his Iraqis are here!

Kentucky newspaper publishes many column inches on Burmese refugees in the state

The other day I reported that the Louisville Courier-Journal led the way in reporting the Iraqi refugee alleged terror plot story, but I see they quickly published a lengthy article on Burmese Christian refugees in Kentucky I expect to divert readers away from the terrorist refugee story.

The article is the standard refugee pull-on-your-heartstrings story—poor refugees, live in camps for decades, come to America for a better life, refugee financial aid running out, on welfare,  try to keep their traditional customs alive, try to find work in meatpacking,  but wish they could go home.  The same boiler-plate story is written from coast to coast and year after year.

The article quotes Senator Mitch McConnell.  I bet if you did a little digging you would find McConnell getting campaign contributions from Kentucky meat packers who need the legal immigrant labor.   I even hear that the meat packers get a tax break for hiring a refugee!

By the way, it’s been awhile since I mentioned it, but there needs to be a way for refugees who are profoundly unhappy in the US to be returned to camps where at least they know where their next meal is coming from.   Taxpayers pay refugee airfare to the US and they are supposed to repay it, but many cannot, so they surely can’t get the airfare home—-they are trapped here.

Check out some of my 2009 posts (begin here) on the deplorable conditions in which Burmese refugees have been expected to live in Bowling Green, KY.

Egyptian who converted to Christianity can’t get into the US

Here is one guy who does deserve a visa to get into the US.  He converted from Islam to Christianity years ago and thought when the recent Egyptian “revolution” occurred he would be free to escape the Muslim “prison” he and his daughter had lived in for years.

He got out of Egypt but only as far as Syria.  Now the US (where his wife lives!) won’t let him in.  All the while, and every day, the US admits Muslim refugees from all over the world, but we don’t let this Christian refugee in—it is maddening!

From Compass Direct News:

CAIRO, Egypt, March 21 (CDN) — When the plane carrying Maher El-Gohary and his daughter, Dina Mo’otahssem, took off from Cairo International Airport last month, they both wept with joy. After spending two-and-a-half years in hiding for leaving Islam to become Christians, they were elated by their newfound freedom.

They also felt secure that once they arrived in Syria, they would quickly obtain visas to the United States and start a new life. That hope soon proved unfounded.

After spending more than a week and a half unable to obtain a visa to the United States or to any country in Europe, they realized they may have traded in the reality of being prisoners in their own country for being refugees in another. And as El-Gohary watches the weeks pass and his resources dwindle, he said the stress is almost unbearable.

Read it all.

Iraqi Christians still running for their lives from “extremists”

More on the politically correct dance around who the extremists are.  From The National:

Iraqi Christians have suffered at the hands of extremist [Muslim--ed] groups that have forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes since 2003.

Meanwhile, various Christian and Jewish groups have joined to urge more protection for Christians in Iraq and to speed up their resettlement to the US (hat tip: Judy).   From National Review OnLine:

Dr. Carl Moeller, CEO and president of the evangelical Open Doors USA, urged Congress to pass House Resolution 1725, a measure introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) last month that calls on the U.S. government to work with the Iraqi government to strengthen its security plan for religious minorities and accelerate the resettlement applications of Iraqi refugees. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on International Justice and Peace also supports the measure.

I wonder do Catholics across America know that the USCCB and Catholic Charities are bringing Iraqi Muslims to your towns and cities while Christians suffer in the Middle East?   Wouldn’t you think they might stand on principle and say they will protect the Christians first and tell the money changers in Congress and the State Department to take their money and (you know what).

Do Catholic leaders truly believe that just by being in America these ancient animosities won’t continue in American cities where Muslims and Christians are resettled together?

Minnesota: Dying Catholic Parish helps Burmese refugees

This is a story posted at The Catholic Spirit yesterday.  St. Bernard’s Parish in St. Paul, Minnesota was dying until the priest encouraged Christian refugees from Myanmar (Burma) to join his flock.

It all started a little over a year ago when one Catholic family from the Myanmar state of Karenni heard church bells ringing in the distance. The family members followed the sound to St. Bernard, where they began attending Mass regularly.

[....]

While the refugees have been a tremendous blessing for St. Bernard, making the parish a welcoming environment for them has presented some challenges, Father Anderson admitted.

[....]

Then there are challenges that naturally arise from blending different cultures. While most long-time parishioners have welcomed the newcomers with open arms, a few have struggled, Father Anderson said. [note that in the story it isn't just a culture clash with long-time parishioners but between two different ethnic groups---ed]

You can visit The Catholic Spirit and learn all about what they are doing.   Readers know that we are all for private charitable help for refugees, so the collection of clothing, especially much-needed winter coats, is wonderful.  But, I wondered, where is the federally contracted resettlement agency, isn’t appropriate clothing on their list of items to supply to refugees in their State Department contract?

Then we note that St. Bernard’s has hired a full time “refugee liason.”  Who is paying for this, the charitable members of the Parrish or the taxpayer?  I would like to know because what is described here is the work of resettlement contractors.

To further help meet the refugees’ needs, St. Bernard has created a full-time refugee liaison position. Tom Flood, former dean of students at St. Bernard High School, which closed in the spring, began his new job at the parish Sept. 1. He assists at parent-teacher conferences with an interpreter, helps the refugees get established with a doctor, walks them through the process of getting their green cards, helps them find employment, and provides a number of other services.

“I’m basically helping them get acclimated to life in Minnesota and life in the United States,” he said.

The reporter needs to tell us where the funding for this job comes from—the private charity of parishioners (which is what the story implies) or the US Taxpayer?

For new readers:  This is just one of many stories, we have written about your tax dollars funding the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities.

USCCB: No hope for Christians in Iraq, bring more to the US

Well, that is basically the gist of what the US Conference of Catholic Bishops told President Obama lately.  Check out the whole story Clerical Whispers:

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged the U.S. government to “redouble its efforts to assist Iraqis” in providing safety for its citizens, especially religious minorities.

“To meet its moral obligations to the Iraqi people, it is critically important that the United States take additional steps now to help Iraq protect its citizens, especially Christians and others who are victims of organized attacks,” said Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago in a Nov. 9 letter to U.S. President Barack Obama.

Read it all, but, I warn you, it is one of those dark websites that are hard to read.

Regular readers know that the USCCB is largely funded by you, the taxpayer, because we have written about that a zillion times on these pages (one of many recent posts is here).   The USCCB and Catholic Charities around the US are busy resettling Muslims to cities near you and could very well say to Obama, point blank, we want to resettle more Christians because they are being persecuted in Iraq and elsewhere in Muslim countries, but they are too squishy to say it.  Maybe this is about as close as they are going to get.  My fear is that the USCCB is really saying let’s bring an even larger total number of refugees (because we are paid by the head) instead of substituting the desperate Christians for some others.