Day: April 5, 2010

Writer asks will we all qualify for asylum some day?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I came across this blog posting a week ago and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since.  The writer is Dr Christopher McDowell.  He questions the underlying premises of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees in the wake of recent decisions on asylum and I am not sure he is thinking what I’m thinking—what happens when the persecuted are whites in South Africa or Jews in Sweden? I doubt that the original crafters of the 1951 Convention had those persecuted people in mind!   It seems to me that logically they will be protected and resettled to say North America to save them from Black supremacism or Muslim supremacism.

Here is Dr. McDowell’s whole post. I don’t like to re-post an entire post, but couldn’t decide where to cut it in order for readers to get the gist of it.

Some years back when I took over running the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (ICAR) at King’s College London I was rummaging through press cuttings left by my predecessor when I uncovered a piece by Matthew Parris in The Times. Matthew’s article came out at a time when the UK was leading the way in asylum intake with somewhere in the region of 100,000 people annually entering the country to make an application for refugee status. His point was that we should not be surprised about how many people were making the hazardous journey to the west for the purposes of asylum, but rather, we should be surprised by how few people were making this journey. The article pointed out the ways in which rulings, taking into account human rights laws, had progressively broadened the definition of refugee to include new categories of persecution straying way beyond the political and religious persecution envisaged in the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Well, two recent rulings would add weight to Parris’s argument. The first is the case of Brandon Huntley a South African citizen* who has been granted refugee status by the Candian Refugee Board on the grounds that the South African Government are unable or unwilling to protect him against racially-motivated violence. The second, only this week, concerns a ruling (reported in The Times online) that has shocked the German authorities, in which the the Romeikes, a well-meaning and idealistic German family who fled their homeland in August 2008, were granted asylum in the US after a federal immigration judge in Tennessee determined that they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned. The ‘belief’ in question was their preference to educate their children at home rather than sending them to the local state school. [Judy wrote about the case here.]

The Refugee Convention at 50+ remains venerable but as an ageing actress her eminence at the centre stage of international law is being usurped by the glamorous new human rights starlet. Tony Blair said repeatedly that the post-war Convention had outlived its usefulness but the question remains how far are governments prepared to go in accepting new obligations under any new international arrangements which will inevitably reflect even more closely the requirements of human rights legislation. It’s not difficult to imagine a future in which all of us could present a claim for protection overseas based on an infringment of our rights at home that would persuade some judge presiding diligently in a backwater court room.

* Huntly is a white man who has claimed persecution because of his race.

In the week since I first saw Dr. McDowell’s post we’ve seen the growing racism in South Africa, the rainbow nation, in relation to the use of the song “Kill the Boer” and the murder of an outspoken white leader (although some reports are that the death was associated with a dispute over pay, I doubt the story).  And, we have seen the increased persecution of Jews by Muslim immigrants in Sweden.

So, why not, why wouldn’t the 1951 Convention apply to Christians or Jews persecuted in Europe or Whites persecuted in South Africa?  Or, was the Convention only supposed to apply to races, religions and politically persecuted people favored by the Left?   Shouldn’t it also apply to persecuted whites or persecuted religious homeschoolers like the German family?   If that is what Dr. McDowell is saying when he says we all may qualify some day, then we are in agreement!  However, his use of the phrase “judge presiding diligently in a backwater court room” suggests he only thinks certain persecuted people should be protected—those being the ‘correct’ sort to suit the political Leftwing.

As I have said recently on these pages, I envision a day when Swedes, and Danes, and Dutchmen and even Brits like Dr. McDowell will be applying for asylum in America alone because of the rising Muslim population and the Sharia law it is bringing to Europe.  [If America survives!]

Resettle Rohingya groundswell has begun in earnest

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been following the issue of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Myanmar (formerly Burma) since January 2008.   If you scroll all the way back through our entire Rohingya Reports category to the beginning you will find this post in which I wrote about how Time magazine and the Hudson Institute both linked Rohingya “refugees” to Islamic radicalism.  Now over two years later the drumbeat to resettle the Rohingya is reaching a crescendo.

This is how it works, there is a deliberate media campaign that we have chronicled throughout 90 posts on the subject.   Now the pressure is really building.

Just in the last couple of days I see that Change.org is telling its activists to lobby the UN and the Office of Refugee Resettlement to resettle the Rohingya:

Demand action from the UNHCR and the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement* to prioritize the resettlement of the Rohingya refugees and offer them the protection they deserve.

* They should be lobbying the US State Department, but I am sure ORR will be happy to forward their demands to the federal department that makes the decisions on who gets into the US (with direction from the UN of course!).

I have just learned that American Muslim activist groups are pushing Rohingya resettlement too.  Here we have a report in which, surprise-surprise, they are also criticizing Muslim Bangladesh about its treatment of the Rohingya flowing into that country.   But, of course reading down the article the idea of resettling Rohingya to the wide open spaces of North America is presented.

Last week, the American Muslim Taskforce (AMT), an umbrella organization that includes the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), amongst other Muslim organizations in the USA, hosted a press conference in the National Press Club, Washington D.C. to discuss human rights abuses in Bangladesh. In his inaugural statement, Mr. Wright Mahdi Bray of the AMT brought up the squalid living conditions of the Rohingya refugees inside Bangladesh. In the last few years we have raised the Rohingya issue a few times with Bangladesh government, but have failed to improve the deplorable condition.

[…..]

Should the refugees choose to leave Bangladesh for a third country the government should not hinder that process either. It must also make all diplomatic efforts to find shelters for these stranded refugees in sparsely populated and prosperous countries of Europe and North America, and the Gulf states.

This is the second time in recent weeks I have seen this reference to “sparsely populated” North America.  I wonder if Change.org ever has any conflicts between its environmental activists who want to preserve American vistas and open space (not to mention, wanting clean air and water) and the activists pushing for higher populations through immigration.  I hate to break it to you, but you can’t have both especially with such high birth rates among Muslim immigrants.

Also, I’ve told you several times recently about how Rohingya refugees who have gone to Saudi Arabia have been imprisoned there, well this article from the Asian Tribune tells us more of the details of how that happened.  So much for Muslim charity!

To round out the troika this  morning.  I see that Christiane Amanpour has posted a CNN report entitled, “The forgotten people:  Rohingya refugees.”  I didn’t watch it, but I’m sure its the same old drumbeat.

We are already resettling Rohingya

Quietly and with no fanfare the US State Department has already begun resettling Rohingya Muslims to your cities, so has Canada and many European countries including the UK and Ireland. 

Tensions between Burmese Karen Christians, another persecuted minority from Burma, and the Muslim Burmese Rohingya continue to mount in resettlment cities although this goes unreported by the mainstream media that is still stuck in the American melting pot myth.

If I lived in a resettlement city, especially one with a large Burmese population, I would be asking the resettlement agencies if more Rohingya are on the way.  Those agencies have a tendency to gloss over concerns and play up the Burmese Christian refugee angle.