The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is one of the top ten federal refugee resettlement contractors, which we have mentioned from time to time on these pages.* In 2009 they received over $13 million of your tax dollars. I didn’t see it last week, but the Center for Immigration Studies has a lengthy analysis by Stephen Steinlight (Heisting HIAS …..) of the transformation of HIAS from an organization concerned about the plight of Jewish refugees to one now deeply enmeshed in the Open Borders political movement. Frankly, virtually all of the resettlement agencies spend time and energy (hopefully not your tax dollars!) lobbying on Amnesty for illegal aliens, something I addressed here just two days ago.
The article also addresses an issue we have wondered about here as well. How can Jews support and help Muslim “refugees” reach the US and Israel when we know that Jews are right at the top of the list of infidel targets of Islamic fundamentalists? Do they honestly believe that the Muslims will say, gee these are nice Jews?
Read the whole article, but what follows are a couple of sections that interest me.
In this first section, the author reports that HIAS has apparently purposefully interchanged the words “refugees” and “immigrants” so as to confuse its supporters.
One can remain loyal to HIAS’s historical mission is by supporting a humane – and security-sensitive – refugee policy. That loyalty to the historical mission would not be compromised if one simultaneously opposed massive increases in immigration or illegal immigration – which have nothing to do with HIAS’s historical raison d’être. A principal reason many American Jews can’t see the distinction is the Jewish Establishment, with HIAS out in front, has sought to erase it in order to advance its political agenda. Engendering sympathy for refugees is far easier than for illegal economic migrants who are neither escaping oppression nor seeking to assimilate to an idealized America. Conflating the two groups is willful misrepresentation but good politics, especially in a community with a large quotient of incorrigible bleeding-hearts.
Then here, why must HIAS be involved in resettling Muslim Somalis?
Since HIAS is not only devoting its energies to promoting illegal immigration but is also now in the global refugee business, Aronoff might give more serious attention to the refugees he is aiding. If he did – taking the wild leap of faith that American or Jewish interests occasionally cross his mind – he’d surely reconsider the wisdom of bringing more Somali Muslims to the U.S., a group from a hothouse of Islamic extremism that has already spawned numerous domestic jihadists. The specter of an historic Jewish organization furthering the Islamization of America – increasing the presence in the United States of a group that hates Jews above all else – is so counterintuitive and, frankly, weird, it beggars the imagination.
And then this, Muslims to Israel!
The seeds planted by the politically correct moral stupidity of the “Save Darfur Coalition” have blossomed into a significant national security problem for Israel. Because of the influence of politically connected, wealthy liberal American Jews, the government of Israel was persuaded to give permanent refugee status to some 3,500 Darfuri Muslims – or those who claimed to be Darfuri Muslims, in any case.
* Here is a litany of complaints about HIAS. And, here is a post earlier this year about how HIAS head honcho did not get a pay cut when finances were tight— he fired staff instead. Note here they were among the lobbying groups invited to the White House in August to get marching orders on the Amnesty legislation.