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.