Réfugiés: Attention, une préférence peut en cacher une autre (Refugee madness: Our tradition has never been an unlimited open-door policy)

Si certains veulent utiliser la laïcité, ça a déjà été fait dans le passé, contre certaines catégories de populations, c’était il y a quarante ans les juifs à qui on mettait des étoiles jaunes, c’est aujourd’hui un certain nombre de nos compatriotes musulmans qu’on amalgame d’ailleurs souvent avec les islamistes radicaux. C’est intolérable. Vincent Peillon (France 2)

Nous déclarons notre droit sur cette terre, à être des êtres humains, à être respectés en tant qu’êtres humains, à accéder aux droits des êtres humains dans cette société, sur cette terre, en ce jour, et nous comptons le mettre en œuvre par tous les moyens nécessaires. Malcom X (1964)

Ce n’est pas en refusant de mentir que nous abolirons le mensonge : c’est en usant de tous les moyens pour supprimer les classes. (…) Tous les moyens sont bons lorsqu’ils sont efficaces. Jean-Paul Sartre (les mains sales, II, 5, 1963)

L’avenir ne doit pas appartenir à ceux qui calomnient le prophète de l’Islam. Barack Obama (siège de l’ONU, New York, 26.09.12)

Ils ont été horriblement traités. Savez-vous que si vous étiez chrétien en Syrie, il était impossible, ou du moins très difficile d’entrer aux États-Unis ? Si vous étiez un musulman, vous pouviez entrer, mais si vous étiez chrétien, c’était presque impossible et la raison était si injuste, tout le monde était persécuté… Ils ont coupé les têtes de tout le monde, mais plus encore des chrétiens. Et je pensais que c’était très, très injuste. Nous allons donc les aider. Donald Trump

L’amour du prochain est une valeur chrétienne et cela implique de venir en aide aux autres. Je crois que c’est ce qui unit les pays occidentaux. Sigmar Gabriel (ministre allemand des Affaires étrangères)

Obama, franchement il fait partie des gens qui détestent l’Amérique. Il a servi son idéologie mais pas l’Amérique. Je remets en cause son patriotisme et sa dévotion à l’église qu’il fréquentait. Je pense qu’il était en désaccord avec lui-même sur beaucoup de choses. Je pense qu’il était plus musulman dans son cœur que chrétien. Il n’a pas voulu prononcer le terme d’islamisme radical, ça lui écorchait les lèvres. Je pense que dans son cœur, il est musulman, mais on en a terminé avec lui, Dieu merci. Evelyne Joslain

Christians are believed to have constituted about 30% of the Syrian population as recently as the 1920s. Today, they make up about 10% of Syria’s 22 million people. Hundreds of thousands of Christians have been displaced by fighting or left the country. Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregorios III Laham said last year that more than 1,000 Christians had been killed, entire villages cleared, and dozens of churches and Christian centres damaged or destroyed. Many fear that if President Assad is overthrown, Christians will be targeted and communities destroyed as many were in Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. They have also been concerned by the coming to power of Islamist parties in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. Patriarch Gregorios said the threat to Christianity in Syria had wider implications for the religion’s future in the Middle East because the country had for decades provided a refuge for Christians from neighbouring Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. BBC

The Orlando nightclub shooter, the worst mass-casualty gunman in US history, was the son of immigrants from Afghanistan. The San Bernardino shooters were first and second generation immigrants from Pakistan. Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood killer, was the son of Palestinian immigrants. The Tsarnaev brothers who detonated bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon held Kyrgyz nationality. The would-be 2010 Times Square car bomber was a naturalized immigrant from Pakistan. The ringleader of the Paris attacks of November 2015, about which Donald Trump spoke so much on the campaign trail, was a Belgian national of Moroccan origins. President Trump’s version of a Muslim ban would have protected the United States from none of the above. (…) As ridiculous as was the former Obama position that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, the new Trump position that all Muslims are potential terrorists is vastly worse. What Trump has done is to divide and alienate potential allies—and push his opponents to embrace the silliest extremes of the #WelcomeRefugees point of view. By issuing his order on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump empowered his opponents to annex the victims of Nazi crimes to their own purposes. The Western world desperately needs a more hardheaded approach to the issue of refugees. It is bound by laws and treaties written after World War II that have been rendered utterly irrelevant by a planet on the move. Tens of millions of people seek to exit the troubled regions of Central America, the Middle East, West Africa, and South Asia for better opportunities in Europe and North America. The relatively small portion of that number who have reached the rich North since 2013 have already up-ended the politics of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s August 2015 order to fling open Germany’s doors is the proximate cause of the de-democratization of Poland since September 2015, of the rise of Marine LePen in France, of the surge in support for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and—I would argue—of Britain’s vote to depart the European Union. The surge of border crossers from Central America into the United States in 2014, and Barack Obama’s executive amnesties, likewise strengthened Donald Trump. (…) without the dreamy liberal refusal to recognize the reality of nationhood, the meaning of citizenship, and the differences between cultures, Trump would never have gained the power to issue that order. (…) When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do. This weekend’s shameful chapter in the history of the United States is a reproach not only to Trump, although it is that too, but to the political culture that enabled him. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump may be temperamental opposites. They are also functional allies. David Frum

Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been silence (…) Liberals are normally the first people to argue that American policy should give preferential treatment to groups that are oppressed and discriminated against, but because Christians are the dominant religious group here — and the bêtes noires of domestic liberals — there is little liberal interest in accommodating U.S. refugee policy to the reality on the ground in Syria. So long as Obama could outsource religious discrimination against Christian refugees to Jordan and the U.N., his supporters preferred the status quo to admitting that Trump might have a point. On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office. This brings us to a broader point: The United States in general, and the Obama administration in particular, never had an open-borders policy for all refugees from everywhere, so overwrought rhetoric about Trump ripping down Lady Liberty’s promise means comparing him to an ideal state that never existed. In fact, the Obama administration completely stopped processing refugees from Iraq for six months in 2011 over concerns about terrorist infiltration, a step nearly identical to Trump’s current order, but one that was met with silence and indifference by most of Trump’s current critics. Only two weeks ago, Obama revoked a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy of allowing entry to refugees from Cuba who made it to our shores. His move, intended to signal an easing of tensions with the brutal Communist dictatorship in Havana, has stranded scores of refugees in Mexico and Central America, and Mexico last Friday deported the first 91 of them to Cuba. This, too, has no claim on the conscience of Trump’s liberal critics. After all, Cuban Americans tend to vote Republican. Even more ridiculous and blinkered is the suggestion that there may be something unconstitutional about refusing entry to refugees or discriminating among them on religious or other bases (a reaction that was shared at first by some Republicans, including Mike Pence, when Trump’s plan was announced in December 2015). There are plenty of moral and political arguments on these points, but foreigners have no right under our Constitution to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress’s powers in this area are plenary, and the president’s powers are as broad as the Congress chooses to give him. If liberals are baffled as to why even the invocation of the historically problematic “America First” slogan by Trump is popular with almost two-thirds of the American public, they should look no further than people arguing that foreigners should be treated by the law as if they were American citizens with all the rights and protections we give Americans. Liberals are likewise on both unwise and unpopular ground in sneering at the idea that there might be an increased risk of radical Islamist terrorism resulting from large numbers of Muslims entering the country as refugees or asylees. There have been many such cases in Europe, ranging from terrorists (as in the Brussels attack) posing as refugees to the infiltration of radicals and the radicalization of new entrants. The 9/11 plotters, several of whom overstayed their visas in the U.S. after immigrating from the Middle East to Germany, are part of that picture as well. Here in the U.S., we have had a number of terror attacks carried out by foreign-born Muslims or their children. The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were children of asylees; the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani immigrant; the underwear bomber was from Nigeria; the San Bernardino shooter was the son of Pakistani immigrants; the Chattanooga shooter was from Kuwait; the Fort Hood shooter was the son of Palestinian immigrants. All of this takes place against the backdrop of a global movement of radical Islamist terrorism that kills tens of thousands of people a year in terrorist attacks and injures or kidnaps tens of thousands more. There are plenty of reasons not to indict the entire innocent Muslim population, including those who come as refugees or asylees seeking to escape tyranny and radicalism, for the actions of a comparatively small percentage of radicals. But efforts to salami-slice the problem into something that looks like a minor or improbable outlier, or to compare this to past waves of immigrants, are an insult to the intelligence of the public. The tradeoffs from a more open-borders posture are real, and the reasons for wanting our screening process to be a demanding one are serious. Like it or not, there’s a war going on out there, and many of its foot soldiers are ideological radicals who wear no uniform and live among the people they end up attacking. If your only response to these issues is to cry “This is just xenophobia and bigotry,” you’re either not actually paying attention to the facts or engaging in the same sort of intellectual beggary that leads liberals to refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Andrew Cuomo declared this week, “If there is a move to deport immigrants, I say then start with me” — because his grandparents were immigrants. This is unserious and childish: President Obama deported over 2.5 million people in eight years in office, and I didn’t see Governor Cuomo getting on a boat back to Italy. (…) A more trenchant critique of Trump’s order is that he’s undercutting his own argument by how narrow the order is. Far from a “Muslim ban,” the order applies to only seven of the world’s 50 majority-Muslim countries. Three of those seven (Iran, Syria, and Sudan) are designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terror, but the history of terrorism by Islamist radicals over the past two decades — even state-sponsored terrorism – is dominated by people who are not from countries engaged in officially recognized state-sponsored terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers were predominantly Saudi, and a significant number of other attacks have been planned or carried out by Egyptians, Pakistanis, and people from the various Gulf states. But a number of these countries have more significant business and political ties to the United States (and in some cases to the Trump Organization as well), so it’s more inconvenient to add them to the list. Simply put, there’s no reason to believe that the countries on the list are more likely to send us terrorists than the countries off the list. That said, the seven states selected do include most of the influx of refugees and do present particular logistical problems in vetting the backgrounds of refugees. If Trump’s goal is simply to beef up screening after a brief pause, he’s on firmer ground. (…) But our tradition has never been an unlimited open-door policy, and President Trump’s latest moves are not nearly such a dramatic departure from the Obama administration as Trump’s liberal critics (or even many of his fans) would have you believe. Dan McLaughlin

Experts say another reason for the lack of Christians in the makeup of the refugees is the makeup of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N. “The Christians don’t reside in those camps because it is too dangerous,” Shea said. “They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community, and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.” “They are raped, abducted into slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous; there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees,” Shea said. Fox news

Les États-Unis ont accepté 10 801 réfugiés syriens, dont 56 chrétiens. Pas 56 pour cent; 56 au total, sur 10 801. C’est-à-dire la moitié de 1 pour cent. Newsweek

Attention: une préférence peut en cacher une autre !

Alors qu’après l’accident industriel Obama qui a mis avec l’abandon de l’Irak le Moyen-Orient à feu et à sang …

Et sa version Merkel qui a déversé sur l’Europe, avec son lot d’attentats, une véritable invasion musulmane …

Sans compter après l’expulsion des juifs et leur interdiction d’accès dans nombre de pays musulmans, la menace de la disparition de son berceau historique de la totalité de la population chrétienne …

Nos belles âmes n’ont pas, entre deux appels plus ou moins subtils à l’assassinat du nouveau président américain, de mots assez durs …

Pour condamner – même s’il oublie étrangement les fourriers saoudiens et qataris ou pakistanais dudit terrorisme – le moratoire de trois mois de ce dernier …

Sur l’entrée des citoyens de sept pays particulièrement à risque (Syrie, Irak, Iran, Libye, Somalie, Soudan et Yemen) …

Et de quatre mois sur l’accueil de réfugiés de pays en guerre ainsi que la priorité aux réfugiés chrétiens de Syrie …

Devinez combien de chrétiens figuraient dans les quelque 10 000 réfugiés syriens que les Etats-Unis ont accueillis l’an dernier ?

Tollé international après le décret anti-réfugiés de Donald Trump
Les Echos
28/01 / 17

Au lendemain de la signature d’un décret interdisant l’entrée aux Etats-Unis pour les ressortissants de sept pays à majorité musulmane, la communauté internationale a fait part de son indignation.

Les réactions ne se sont pas faites attendre. Au lendemain de la signature d’un décret suspendant l’entrée aux Etats-Unis des réfugiés et des ressortissants de sept pays majoritairement musulmans, la communauté internationale n’a pas dissimulé son indignation.

A commencer par François Hollande qui a exhorté l’Europe à « engager avec fermeté » le dialogue avec le président américain. Le chef de l’Etat français a d’ailleurs fait cette déclaration quelques heures avant son premier entretien téléphonique avec son homologue américain.

Ce samedi soir, à l’occasion d’un appel prévu entre les deux présidents, Hollande en a profité pour rappeler à Trump que « le repli sur soi est une réponse sans issue », a rapporté l’Elysée. Il a par ailleurs invité le président américain au « respect » du principe de « l’accueil des réfugiés ».

L’Allemagne et la France sur la même ligne

Plus tôt dans la journée, les chefs de la diplomatie française et allemande ont aussi exprimé leur inquiétude. « Nous avons des engagements internationaux que nous avons signés. L’accueil des réfugiés qui fuient la guerre, qui fuient l’oppression, ça fait partie de nos devoirs », a martelé Jean-Marc Ayrault.

« L’amour du prochain est une valeur chrétienne et cela implique de venir en aide aux autres. Je crois que c’est ce qui unit les pays occidentaux », a renchérit Sigmar Gabriel, nommé ministre allemand des Affaires étrangères vendredi.

Côté Royaume-Uni, Theresa May a quant à elle refusé de condamner la décision de Donald Trump. « Les Etats-Unis sont responsables de la politique américaine sur les refugiés. Le Royaume-Uni est responsable de la politique britannique sur les réfugiés », a-t-elle répondu. « Nous ne sommes pas d’accord avec ce type d’approche », a néanmoins précisé un porte-parole, indiquant que le gouvernement britannique interviendrait si la mesure venait à avoir un impact sur les citoyens de son pays.

Réactions des principaux concernés

Concerné par le décret, l’Iran a vivement réagi ce samedi. La République islamique « prendra les mesures consulaires, juridiques et politiques appropriées », a expliqué le ministère des Affaires étrangères dans un communiqué, parlant d' »un affront fait ouvertement au monde musulman et à la nation iranienne ».

L’exécutif iranien a aussi déclaré que « tout en respectant le peuple américain et pour défendre les droits de ses citoyens », il a décidé « d’appliquer la réciprocité après la décision insultante des Etats-Unis concernant les ressortissants iraniens et tant que cette mesure n’aura pas été levée. »

Pour l’instant, les autres pays visés par ce décret, à savoir l’Irak, la Libye, la Somalie, le Soudan, la Syrie et le Yémen, n’ont pas réagi publiquement. En revanche, le Premier ministre turc a affirmé que la crise des réfugiés ne serait pas résolue « en érigeant des murs ». La Turquie est le premier pays à subir de plein fouet les conséquences de la guerre civile en Syrie et l’afflux de réfugiés.

Le Canada continuera d’accueillir des réfugiés « indépendamment de leur foi »

Sans commenter directement la décision américaine, le Premier ministre canadien Justin Trudeau a affirmé la volonté de son pays d’accueillir les réfugiés « indépendamment de leur foi ».

Répondant d’autre part à des inquiétudes sur l’impact du décret sur le Canada, le bureau du Premier ministre a affirmé tard dans la soirée avoir reçu des assurances de Washington que les Canadiens possédant la double nationalité des pays visés ne seraient pas affectés par l’interdiction.

Soutien israélien

Le président américain a en revanche été applaudi par le président tchèque Milos Zeman qui s’est félicité de que le président américain « protège son pays » et se soucie « de la sécurité de ses citoyens. Exactement ce que les élites européennes ne font pas », a tweeté son porte-parole.

De même pour le Premier ministre israélien, Benjamin Netanyahu, qui a écrit sur son compte twitter : « Président Trump a raison. J’ai fait construire un mur aux frontières sud d’Israël. Ca a empêché l’immigration illégale. Un vrai succès. Une grande idée. »

Indignation aux Etats-Unis

Sur le sol américain, le décret intitulé « Protéger la nation contre l’entrée de terroristes étrangers aux Etats-Unis » a déjà fait déjà l’objet d’une plainte déposée par plusieurs associations de défense des droits civiques américaines, dont la puissante ACLU, qui veulent le bloquer.

L’opposition démocrate aux Etats-Unis a de son côté dénoncé un décret « cruel » qui sape « nos valeurs fondamentales et nos traditions, menace notre sécurité nationale et démontre une méconnaissance totale de notre strict processus de vérification, le plus minutieux du monde » selon les mots du sénateur démocrate Ben Cardin, membre de la commission des Affaires étrangères du Sénat.

Ces mesures figuraient en bonne place dans le programme du candidat républicain, qui avait un temps envisagé d’interdire à tous les musulmans de se rendre aux Etats-Unis.

Voir aussi:

Trump suspend le programme d’accueil de réfugiés et place 7 pays en liste rouge

Jacques Deveaux

GeopolisFTV

28/01/2017

Trump annonce la suspension du programme d’accueil des réfugiés le 27 janvier 2017 dans les locaux du Pentagone à Washington. © Carlos Barria/Reuters

Donald Trump tient ses promesses de campagne. Cette fois, c’est sur la protection du territoire contre la menace terroriste qu’il a signé deux décrets. L’un interdit l’accès aux citoyens de sept pays arabes, l’autre met en pause l’accueil de réfugiés de pays en guerre.

Les ressortissants de sept pays sont désormais persona non grata aux Etats-Unis. Ainsi en a décidé le nouveau président Donald Trump en fermant temporairement l’accès de son pays aux citoyens de Syrie, de l’Irak, de la Libye, de la Somalie, du Soudan et du Yemen. Objectif affirmé par Donald Trump, «maintenir les terroristes islamistes radicaux hors des Etats-Unis d’Amérique».

Il a annoncé que de nouvelles mesures de contrôle seraient mises sur pied, sans préciser lesquelles. «Nous voulons être sûrs que nous ne laissons pas entrer dans notre pays les mêmes menaces que celles que nos soldats combattent à l’étranger.»
Dans le même temps le président annonce que priorité sera donnée aux réfugiés chrétiens de Syrie.

Washington va également arrêter pendant quatre mois le programme d’accueil des réfugiés de pays en guerre. Pour l’année 2016, l’administration américaine avait admis près de 85.000 réfugiés, dont 10.000 Syriens. Elle s’était donné pour objectif d’accueillir 110.000 réfugiés en 2017, un chiffre ramené à 50.000 par l’administration Trump. Ce programme date de 1980 et n’a été interrompu qu’une fois, après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001.

Réactions indignées
Les murs qui se dressent, les barrières qui se ferment, partout dans le monde, les réactions aux premières mesures de Donald Trump se multiplient.
La plus symbolique est surement celle de la jeune Pakistanaise Malala Yousafzaï, cible des fondamentalistes talibans et prix Nobel de la paix en 2014. Elle a déclaré avoir «le coeur brisé de voir l’Amérique tourner le dos à son fier passé d’accueil de réfugiés et de migrants».

Onze autres prix Nobel et des universitaires renommés ont également lancé une pétition réclamant la reprise de l’accueil des visiteurs des sept pays visés. «Une épreuve injustifiée pour des gens qui sont nos étudiants, nos collègues, nos amis et des membres de notre communauté.»

Deux ONG, l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM) et le Haut commissariat de l’Onu pour les réfugiés (HCR), ont appelé Donald Trump à maintenir l’accueil aux Etats-Unis. «Les besoins des réfugiés et des migrants à travers le monde n’ont jamais été aussi grands et le programme américain de réinstallation est l’un des plus importants du monde», écrivent les deux ONG dans un communiqué commun.

Même le fondateur de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, s’en est indigné sur sa page, rappelant que les Etats-Unis sont un pays de migrants, à commencer par sa famille.

Conséquences
Selon A. Ayoub, directeur juridique du Comité arabo-américain contre les discriminations, les conséquences sont immédiates. Ces mesures frappent notamment des Arabo-Américains dont des proches étaient en route pour une visite aux Etats-Unis. Le regroupement de familles séparées par la guerre va aussi devenir impossible.

Voir également:

Middle East

‘Gross injustice’: Of 10,000 Syrian refugees to the US, 56 are Christian

Adam Shaw

FoxNews.com

September 02, 2016

The Obama administration hit its goal this week of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees — yet only a fraction of a percent are Christians, stoking criticism that officials are not doing enough to address their plight in the Middle East.

Of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from the war-torn country, 56 are Christians, or .5 percent.

Religious Breakdown of Recent Syrian Refugees | Graphiq

A total of 10,722 were Muslims, and 17 were Yazidis.

The numbers are disproportionate to the Christian population in Syria, estimated last year by the U.S. government to make up roughly 10 percent of the population. Since the outbreak of civil war in 2011, it is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million Christians have fled the country, while many have been targeted and slaughtered by the Islamic State.

In March, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. had determined that ISIS has committed genocide against minority religious groups, including Christians and Yazidis.

“In my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in territory under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims,” Kerry said at the State Department, using an alternative Arabic name for the group.

He also accused ISIS of “crimes against humanity” and « ethnic cleansing. »

Yet, despite the strong words, relatively few from those minority groups have been brought into the United States. A State Department spokesperson told FoxNews.com that religion was only one of many factors used in determining a refugee’s eligibility to enter the United States.

Critics blasted the administration for not making religion a more important factor, as the U.S. government has prioritized religious minorities in the past in other cases.

“It’s disappointingly disproportional,” Matthew Clark, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), told FoxNews.com. “[The Obama administration has] not prioritized Christians and it appears they have actually deprioritized them, put them back of the line and made them an afterthought.”

“This is de facto discrimination and a gross injustice,” said Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

Experts say another reason for the lack of Christians in the make-up of the refugees is the make-up of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N.

“The Christians don’t reside in those camps because it is too dangerous,” Shea said. “They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.”

“They are raped, abducted into slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous, there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees,” Shea said.

However, Kristin Wright, director of advocacy for Open Doors USA – a group that advocates for Christians living in dangerous areas across the world – told FoxNews.com that another reason is many Christians are choosing to stick it out in Syria, or going instead to urban areas for now.

“Many have fled to urban areas instead of the camps, so they may be living in Beirut instead of living in a broader camp, meaning many are not registering as refugees,” Wright said. “They may still come to the U.S. but may come through another immigration pathway.”

However, others called on the Obama administration, in light of its genocide declaration, to do more to assist Christians, including setting up safe zones in Syria or actively seeking out Christians via the use of contractors to bring them to safety.

In March, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced legislation that would give special priority to refugees who were members of persecuted religious minorities in Syria.

“We must not only recognize what’s happening as genocide, but also take action to relieve it, » Cotton said.

“The administration did the right thing by recognizing genocide, but by not taking action, it deflates it and makes it so Christians and others are not receiving any help,” Clark said. “So it’s all words and no actions, it’s just lip service on the issue of the genocide.”

This week, the ACLJ filed a lawsuit against the State Department for not responding to Freedom of Information Act requests about what the administration is doing to combat the genocide.

For Shea, the question is not just about helping refugees, but the very survival of Christianity in the 2,000-year community that has existed since the apostolic era of Christianity.

« This Christian community is dying, » she said. « I fear that there will be no Christians left when the dust settles. »

Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.

 Voir encore:

Refugee Madness: Trump Is Wrong, But His Liberal Critics Are Crazy

Dan McLaughlin

January 28, 2017

The anger at his new policy is seriously misplaced.

President Trump has ordered a temporary, 120-day halt to admitting refugees from seven countries, all of them war-torn states with majority-Muslim populations: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia. He has further indicated that, once additional screening provisions are put in place, he wants further refugee admissions from those countries to give priority to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees. Trump’s order is, in characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the Obama administration.

First, let’s put in context what Trump is actually doing. The executive order, on its face, does not discriminate between Muslim and Christian (or Jewish) immigrants, and it is far from being a complete ban on Muslim immigrants or even Muslim refugees. Trump’s own stated reason for giving preference to Christian refugees is also worth quoting:

Trump was asked whether he would prioritize persecuted Christians in the Middle East for admission as refugees, and he replied, “Yes.” “They’ve been horribly treated,” he said. “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian it was almost impossible. And the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. “So we are going to help them.”

Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been silence:

The United States has accepted 10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. Not 56 percent; 56 total, out of 10,801. That is to say, one-half of 1 percent. The BBC says that 10 percent of all Syrians are Christian, which would mean 2.2 million Christians. . . . Experts say [one] reason for the lack of Christians in the makeup of the refugees is the makeup of the camps. Christians in the main United Nations refugee camp in Jordan are subject to persecution, they say, and so flee the camps, meaning they are not included in the refugees referred to the U.S. by the U.N. “The Christians don’t reside in those camps because it is too dangerous,” [Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom] said. “They are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community, and there is infiltration by ISIS and criminal gangs.” “They are raped, abducted into slavery and they are abducted for ransom. It is extremely dangerous; there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees,” Shea said.

Liberals are normally the first people to argue that American policy should give preferential treatment to groups that are oppressed and discriminated against, but because Christians are the dominant religious group here — and the bêtes noires of domestic liberals — there is little liberal interest in accommodating U.S. refugee policy to the reality on the ground in Syria. So long as Obama could outsource religious discrimination against Christian refugees to Jordan and the U.N., his supporters preferred the status quo to admitting that Trump might have a point.

On the whole, 2016 was the first time in a decade when the United States let in more Muslim than Christian refugees, 38,901 overall, 75 percent of them from Syria, Somalia, and Iraq, all countries on Trump’s list — and all countries in which the United States has been actively engaged in drone strikes or ground combat over the past year. Obama had been planning to dramatically expand that number, to 110,000, in 2017 — only after he was safely out of office.

This brings us to a broader point: The United States in general, and the Obama administration in particular, never had an open-borders policy for all refugees from everywhere, so overwrought rhetoric about Trump ripping down Lady Liberty’s promise means comparing him to an ideal state that never existed. In fact, the Obama administration completely stopped processing refugees from Iraq for six months in 2011 over concerns about terrorist infiltration, a step nearly identical to Trump’s current order, but one that was met with silence and indifference by most of Trump’s current critics.

Only two weeks ago, Obama revoked a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy of allowing entry to refugees from Cuba who made it to our shores. His move, intended to signal an easing of tensions with the brutal Communist dictatorship in Havana, has stranded scores of refugees in Mexico and Central America, and Mexico last Friday deported the first 91 of them to Cuba. This, too, has no claim on the conscience of Trump’s liberal critics. After all, Cuban Americans tend to vote Republican.

Even more ridiculous and blinkered is the suggestion that there may be something unconstitutional about refusing entry to refugees or discriminating among them on religious or other bases (a reaction that was shared at first by some Republicans, including Mike Pence, when Trump’s plan was announced in December 2015). There are plenty of moral and political arguments on these points, but foreigners have no right under our Constitution to demand entry to the United States or to challenge any reason we might have to refuse them entry, even blatant religious discrimination. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress’s powers in this area are plenary, and the president’s powers are as broad as the Congress chooses to give him. If liberals are baffled as to why even the invocation of the historically problematic “America First” slogan by Trump is popular with almost two-thirds of the American public, they should look no further than people arguing that foreigners should be treated by the law as if they were American citizens with all the rights and protections we give Americans.

Liberals are likewise on both unwise and unpopular ground in sneering at the idea that there might be an increased risk of radical Islamist terrorism resulting from large numbers of Muslims entering the country as refugees or asylees. There have been many such cases in Europe, ranging from terrorists (as in the Brussels attack) posing as refugees to the infiltration of radicals and the radicalization of new entrants. The 9/11 plotters, several of whom overstayed their visas in the U.S. after immigrating from the Middle East to Germany, are part of that picture as well. Here in the U.S., we have had a number of terror attacks carried out by foreign-born Muslims or their children. The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing were children of asylees; the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani immigrant; the underwear bomber was from Nigeria; the San Bernardino shooter was the son of Pakistani immigrants; the Chattanooga shooter was from Kuwait; the Fort Hood shooter was the son of Palestinian immigrants. All of this takes place against the backdrop of a global movement of radical Islamist terrorism that kills tens of thousands of people a year in terrorist attacks and injures or kidnaps tens of thousands more.

There are plenty of reasons not to indict the entire innocent Muslim population, including those who come as refugees or asylees seeking to escape tyranny and radicalism, for the actions of a comparatively small percentage of radicals. But efforts to salami-slice the problem into something that looks like a minor or improbable outlier, or to compare this to past waves of immigrants, are an insult to the intelligence of the public. The tradeoffs from a more open-borders posture are real, and the reasons for wanting our screening process to be a demanding one are serious.

Like it or not, there’s a war going on out there, and many of its foot soldiers are ideological radicals who wear no uniform and live among the people they end up attacking. If your only response to these issues is to cry “This is just xenophobia and bigotry,” you’re either not actually paying attention to the facts or engaging in the same sort of intellectual beggary that leads liberals to refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Andrew Cuomo declared this week, “If there is a move to deport immigrants, I say then start with me” — because his grandparents were immigrants. This is unserious and childish: President Obama deported over 2.5 million people in eight years in office, and I didn’t see Governor Cuomo getting on a boat back to Italy.

Conservatives have long recognized these points — which is another way of saying that a blank check for refugee admissions is no more a core principle of the Right than it is of the Left.

A more trenchant critique of Trump’s order is that he’s undercutting his own argument by how narrow the order is. Far from a “Muslim ban,” the order applies to only seven of the world’s 50 majority-Muslim countries. Three of those seven (Iran, Syria, and Sudan) are designated by the State Department as state sponsors of terror, but the history of terrorism by Islamist radicals over the past two decades — even state-sponsored terrorism – is dominated by people who are not from countries engaged in officially recognized state-sponsored terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers were predominantly Saudi, and a significant number of other attacks have been planned or carried out by Egyptians, Pakistanis, and people from the various Gulf states. But a number of these countries have more significant business and political ties to the United States (and in some cases to the Trump Organization as well), so it’s more inconvenient to add them to the list. Simply put, there’s no reason to believe that the countries on the list are more likely to send us terrorists than the countries off the list.

That said, the seven states selected do include most of the influx of refugees and do present particular logistical problems in vetting the backgrounds of refugees. If Trump’s goal is simply to beef up screening after a brief pause, he’s on firmer ground.

The moral and strategic arguments against Trump’s policy are, however, significant. America’s open-hearted willingness to harbor refugees from around the world has always been a source of our strength, and sometimes an effective tool deployed directly against hostile foreign tyrannies. Today, for example, the chief adversary of Venezuela’s oppressive economic policies is a website run by a man who works at a Home Depot in Alabama, having been granted political asylum here in 2005. And the refugee problem is partly one of our own creation. My own preference for Syrian refugees, many of them military-age males whom Assad is trying to get out of his country, has been to arm them, train them, and send them back, after the tradition of the Polish and French in World War II and the Czechs in World War I. But that requires support that neither Trump nor Obama has been inclined to provide, and you can’t seriously ask individual Syrians to fight a suicidal two-front war against ISIS and the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad without outside support. So where else can they go?

Also, some people seeking refugee status or asylum may have stronger claims on our gratitude. Consider some of the first people denied entry under the new policy:

The lawyers said that one of the Iraqis detained at Kennedy Airport, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq for ten years. The other, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, was coming to the United States to join his wife, who had worked for an American contractor, and young son, the lawyers said.

These specific cases may or may not turn out to be as sympathetic as they appear; these are statements made by lawyers filing a class action, who by their own admission haven’t even spoken to their clients. But in a turn of humorous irony that undercut some of the liberal narrative, it turns out that Darweesh told the press that he likes Trump. Trump’s moves are not as dramatic a departure from the Obama administration as his critics would have you believe.

Certainly, we should give stronger consideration to refugee or asylum claims from people who are endangered as a result of their cooperation with the U.S. military. But such consideration can still be extended on a case-by-case basis, as the executive order explicitly permits: “Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) of this section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.”

Trump also seems to have triggered some unnecessary chaos at the airports and borders around the globe by signing the order without a lot of adequate advance notice to the public or to the people charged with administering the order. That’s characteristic of his early administration’s public-relations amateur hour, and an unnecessary, unforced error. Then again, the core policy is one he broadcast to great fanfare well over a year ago, so this comes as no great shock.

The American tradition of accepting refugees and asylees from around the world, especially from the clutches of our enemies, is a proud one, and it is a sad thing to see that compromised. And while Middle Eastern Christians should be given greater priority in escaping a region where they are particularly persecuted, the next step in this process should not be one that seeks to permanently enshrine a preference for Christians over Muslims generally. But our tradition has never been an unlimited open-door policy, and President Trump’s latest moves are not nearly such a dramatic departure from the Obama administration as Trump’s liberal critics (or even many of his fans) would have you believe. — Dan McLaughlin is an attorney in New York City and an NRO contributing columnist.

Voir enfin:

The Roots of a Counterproductive Immigration Policy
The liberal scorn for nationhood and refusal to adapt immigration policy to changing circumstances enables the rise of extremism in the West.
David Frum
The Atlantic monthly
Jan 28, 2017

The Orlando nightclub shooter, the worst mass-casualty gunman in US history, was the son of immigrants from Afghanistan. The San Bernardino shooters were first and second generation immigrants from Pakistan. Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood killer, was the son of Palestinian immigrants. The Tsarnaev brothers who detonated bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon held Kyrgyz nationality. The would-be 2010 Times Square car bomber was a naturalized immigrant from Pakistan. The ringleader of the Paris attacks of November 2015, about which Donald Trump spoke so much on the campaign trail, was a Belgian national of Moroccan origins. President Trump’s version of a Muslim ban would have protected the United States from none of the above.

If the goal is to exclude radical Muslims from the United States, the executive order Trump announced on Friday seems a highly ineffective way to achieve it. The Trump White House has incurred all the odium of an anti-Muslim religious test, without any attendant real-world benefit. The measure amounts to symbolic politics at its most stupid and counterproductive. Its most likely practical effect will be to aggravate the political difficulty of dealing directly and speaking without euphemisms about Islamic terrorism. As ridiculous as was the former Obama position that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, the new Trump position that all Muslims are potential terrorists is vastly worse.
What Trump has done is to divide and alienate potential allies—and push his opponents to embrace the silliest extremes of the #WelcomeRefugees point of view. By issuing his order on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump empowered his opponents to annex the victims of Nazi crimes to their own purposes.

The Western world desperately needs a more hardheaded approach to the issue of refugees. It is bound by laws and treaties written after World War II that have been rendered utterly irrelevant by a planet on the move. Tens of millions of people seek to exit the troubled regions of Central America, the Middle East, West Africa, and South Asia for better opportunities in Europe and North America. The relatively small portion of that number who have reached the rich North since 2013 have already up-ended the politics of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s August 2015 order to fling open Germany’s doors is the proximate cause of the de-democratization of Poland since September 2015, of the rise of Marine LePen in France, of the surge in support for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and—I would argue—of Britain’s vote to depart the European Union. The surge of border crossers from Central America into the United States in 2014, and Barack Obama’s executive amnesties, likewise strengthened Donald Trump.

It’s understandable why people in the poor world would seek to relocate. It’s predictable that people in the destination nations would resist. Interpreting these indelible conflicts through the absurdly inapt analogy of German and Austrian Jews literally fleeing for their lives will lead to systematically erroneous conclusions.

We need a new paradigm for a new time. The social trust and social cohesion that characterize an advanced society like the United States are slowly built and vulnerable to erosion. They are eroding. Trump is more the symptom of that erosion than the cause.

Trump’s executive order has unleashed chaos, harmed lawful U.S. residents, and alienated potential friends in the Islamic world. Yet without the dreamy liberal refusal to recognize the reality of nationhood, the meaning of citizenship, and the differences between cultures, Trump would never have gained the power to issue that order.

Liberalism and nationhood grew up together in the 19th century, mutually dependent. In the 21st century, they have grown apart—or more exactly, liberalism has recoiled from nationhood. The result has not been to abolish nationality, but to discredit liberalism.

When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do. This weekend’s shameful chapter in the history of the United States is a reproach not only to Trump, although it is that too, but to the political culture that enabled him. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump may be temperamental opposites. They are also functional allies.