Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) says communities overburdened with refugees, requests GAO investigation

Update July 26th:  Friends of Refugees has more commentary on this story, here.

Update July 25th:  More from Ft. Wayne including shocking statistics about the number of refugees arriving there with TB, here.

Well finally someone in Congress has noticed.   Senator Richard Lugar, the US Senator for Indiana, home to one of the most stressed refugee resettlement cities in the US—Ft. Wayne—has taken action with the release of a report this week and a request for a GAO investigation of the program!

From the Journal Gazette:

The federal government must do more to help communities like Fort Wayne that are home to thousands of refugee immigrants, according to a report released Wednesday by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

The report, given to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cited Fort Wayne numerous times as an example of the challenges facing cities that receive large refugee populations. It said many refugees have no English knowledge, many are illiterate even in their native languages and many arrive with numerous health concerns – all of which put a financial burden on the new community.

“Staff found that resettlement efforts in some U.S. cities are underfunded, overstretched, and failing to meet the basic needs of the refugee populations they are currently asked to assist. Especially in a difficult economic climate, the current structure of the U.S. resettlement system is proving a strain on local resources and community relations,” Lugar wrote in the report.

For example, Lugar listed how local health officials in Allen County “stumbled upon” increased rates of hepatitis B among the Burmese refugee population. Treating the lifelong condition added further cost to the community, according to the report.  [We told you about this and the TB rate in Ft. Wayne as early as 2007, here, in ‘Ft. Wayne freaking out!’]

Thank goodness someone in a position to do something has taken notice of the unfunded mandates the refugee program places on communities.  Hopefully the answer from Washington won’t be, let’s just throw more taxpayer money at the problem.  Maybe finally there will be a discussion about why we are importing poverty!

Toward the end of the Journal Gazette story, we see this interesting information, and something we have been wishing for too—a request for a GAO investigation.

“In the future, the administration may determine that an increase in Federal funding or decrease in refugee admissions is warranted. But the practice of passing the costs of resettling refugees on to local communities should not continue,” Lugar wrote. “The administration and Congress must ensure that the refugee resettlement system is properly structured so that it continues to be perceived as a benefit and not a burden.”

In addition to releasing the report, Lugar asked the Government Accountability Office to conduct a comprehensive review of the U.S. refugee resettlement system.

For Senator Lugar’s press release that includes a link to his report, go here.

We have written dozens and dozens of posts on Ft. Wayne and its refugee problems, use our search function for Ft. Wayne to learn more.

Note from Ann: I know I’m missing some really good stories and wish I could post more at RRW, but am really busy in Maryland for the election season, see for example, here.

Honor killings in America: in Marie Claire, of all places

I was amazed to see a cover story about honor killings in America in Marie Claire. I hardly ever look at the magazines at my hairdresser’s,  but this jumped out at me so I read the article, An American Honor Killing by Abigail Pesta. Pesta is an editor of the magazine, and this was clearly a big investigative project.

It’s the story of Noor Almaleki; Ann has reported on the case in several posts. It begins:

Around the sprawling, sunbaked campus of Dysart High School in El Mirage, Arizona, not many people knew about the double life of a pretty, dark-haired girl named Noor Almaleki.

At school, she was known as a fun-loving student who made friends easily. She played tennis in a T-shirt emblazoned with the school mascot — a baby demon in a diaper. She liked to watch Heroes and eat at Chipotle. Sometimes she talked in a goofy Keanu Reeves voice. She wore dark jeans, jeweled sandals, and flowy tops from Forever 21. She texted constantly and called her friends “dude.” In other words, she was an American girl much like any other.

But at home, Noor inhabited a darker world. She lived a life of subservience, often left to care for her six younger siblings. Noor’s father, 49-year-old Faleh Almaleki, was strict and domineering, deeming it inappropriate for her to socialize with guys, wear jeans, or post snapshots of herself on MySpace. Her responsibility was to follow orders, or to risk a beating. From her father’s perspective, the only time Noor’s life would ever change would be when she married a man he selected for her — back in his homeland of Iraq. Noor, however, had a different vision for herself. Having lived in the U.S. for 16 years, she held dreams of becoming a teacher, of marrying a man she loved, and, most importantly, of making her own choices.

So her father ran over her with his SUV crushing her face and her spine. She died of her injuries.

The fact that this was an honor killing was minimized in the media that reported on the crime. But the Marie Claire article confronts it.

Local police characterized the incident as an attempted “honor killing” — the murder of a woman for behaving in a way that “shames” her family. It’s a practice with deep, tenacious roots in the tribal traditions of the Middle East and Asia. (The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women die annually from such crimes.) Women are stoned, stabbed, and, in the recent case of a teenage girl in Turkey, tied up and buried alive. But honor killings in America are a chilling new trend. In Texas, teen sisters Amina and Sarah Said were shot dead in 2008, allegedly by their father, because they had boyfriends. That same year in Georgia, 25-year-old Sandeela Kanwal was allegedly strangled by her father for wanting to leave an arranged marriage. Last year in New York, Aasiya Hassan, 37, was murdered in perhaps the most gruesome way imaginable: She was beheaded, allegedly by her husband, for reportedly seeking a divorce. And this past spring, 19-year-old Tawana Thompson’s husband gunned her down in Illinois, reportedly following arguments about her American-style clothing.

Amazingly, honor killings in the U.S. have been largely ignored by the national media. That’s because these incidents are typically dismissed as “domestic” in nature — a class of crime that rarely makes the headlines. Since the murderer is a member of the woman’s family, there’s no extended investigation to capture the public’s attention. Also, the family of the perpetrator rarely advocates for the victim, due to either fear or a belief that the woman got what she deserved. “From the family’s point of view, if the goal is to end rumors about their female relative, the last thing they want is to have the press talk about the case,” says Rana Husseini, a human-rights activist and author of Murder in the Name of Honor. Still, the lack of media coverage or public outcry cannot erase the evidence: Honor killings have washed up on our shores.

They don’t emphasize the Muslim aspect, but they don’t completely ignore it. Their main emphasis is the crushing of a girl who wanted to become American, and the reaction of her friends and acquaintances. One friend established a Facebook group that now has almost 4,000 members, in Noor’s memory and to discuss honor killings.

My surprise at this article might be unfair — since I’ve never read Marie Claire, for all I know they might cover significant issues regularly. But to get this kind of mainstream coverage for the horrifying issue of honor killings is a big step. This is the kind of thing feminists should be covering, and I’m glad they’re starting to.

Conflict in Arizona: Africans vs. African Americans

This story shows how stupid it is to think skin color is an important category. From the article:

Africans make up a small but growing part of the black population in metro-Phoenix, which limits opportunities for interaction. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, “foreign-born Africans” number around 18,500 in Maricopa County, or 10.8 percent of the area’s black population. The refugee population in Arizona is much smaller, although that figure more than doubled from 2006 to 2009, to 4,327, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.

In a 2008 supplemental report entitled “The State of Black Arizona, Volume I,” ASU associate professor Lisa Aubrey and colleagues found that many African Americans hold new arrivals “responsible” for their ancestral enslavement and “correlate Africa . . . with poverty and feel ashamed.” Aubrey and her coauthors call today’s African Americans “old diasporans,” descendants of slaves and other earlier African arrivals. The scholars refer to modern continental Africans, including refugees who fled strife in their countries, as “new diasporans.”

Most American Blacks are descended from Africans who came here hundreds of years ago, longer ago than the ancestors of most of us arrived. It is ridiculous to suppose that they should have anything in common with newly arrived Africans. And if many of them hadn’t been conned into thinking that their African ancestry is more important than their status as Americans, nobody would try to make an issue of these differences.

Old documents discovered: Palestinian “refugees” say they were not driven out of Israel

I want to bring to your attention this item by Ruth King at her blog. It’s about interviews conducted by John Roy Carlson, the pen name of an Armenian-American investigative reporter who went undercover among Nazi groups in America in the 1930s.

Then, in 1948, presenting himself as an Armenian American, he traveled to the Middle East and – incredibly – fought in Israel’s War of Independence – on the Arab side!  Of course, he was undercover yet again, reporting honestly – but secretly – about the genocidal nature of the war against the Jews and lauding the Zionists’ courage and sacrifices.  Decades before Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” – so demeaned today among Islamists and their fellow travelers – Carlson understood the threat of Jihad not only to the nascent Israel, but to the West as well.  One of his chapter headings reads, The World of the Koran: “Islam Uber Alles.”

Then she goes on to report:

Now, another, unpublished and untitled manuscript has emerged from the Derounian collection housed at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.  It was written in the early 1960′s and consists of interviews and observations on the Arab world from Beirut to Baghdad.  Perhaps the most fascinating excerpts from the book have to do with Carlson’s sojourn in Amman, Jordan.  He interviews a number of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and, most importantly, UNRWA officials, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, established in 1949 exclusively for the benefit of Palestinian Arab refugees.  No other refugee group since then has been assigned a special UN agency.  Currently UNRWA’s budget is close to half a billion dollars.  All other refugees fall under the jurisdiction of the UNHCR (United Nations High Committee for Refugees).   Perhaps most controversial of all, UNRWA has become the unofficial trough for HAMAS.  In the words of former UNRWA General Counsel, James G. Lindsay,

“UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff. UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization’s anti-terrorist rules. No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services.”

There are some examples of the interviews — photos of the typed pages. I can’t copy them here, but the gist is that Arab families left because they didn’t want to live among Jews, or because they were told they could return and they didn’t want to be where there was fighting (remember, the Arabs started the war). Carlson asked specifically whether the Jews drove them out. He said he asked the question a hundred times and didn’t find anyone who claimed they were driven out.

Update: Here is the original source for this story, JStreetJive.

Comment worth noting: evil grows when good men do nothing

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not writing as much these days because I’m working on a political campaign,* but here is a comment we received from a Ms. Chesterman to this post about the Al-Qaeda operatives infiltrating Europe as asylees and refugees.  I thought this was too important to overlook especially as I hear this morning that another Somali has been implicated in a terrorist attack in NYC (as soon as I have a link, I’ll post it).

Here is the comment worth noting:

The old saying that goes something like this..” evil grows when good men do nothing.” its a tragedy that the actions of a few have ruined tainted the plights of the genuine refugees…but its a fact that refugees are infiltrated by the terrorists.

No matter whereabouts we are talking about them..they are very much active and using the plight of genuine refugees to push their own agenda and use open doors.

The time is gone when we can just put our heads in the sand and say that its o.k. because its not. if we dont rise up and become vigilant, we are going to be run over by Muslim Militants…i said…militants… when its over its over, and we wont have a voice.

In an effort to try and keep freedom of religion the basic right of every citizen we are also opening the door to those who have evil motives..and there is no way that we can take away freedom of religion . its a fundamental right.

So… we have to be very vigilant. To the point of seeming to be uncaring and insensitive. Believe me, there are many out there who are only too willing to use this as an open doorway.

We have a responsibility to our generation and the generations to come to see that they are safe. This war is being fought at an entirely different level…and its going to win by stealth if we dont rise up and take note..

*See Potomac Tea Party Report to follow the campaign, here is a post relating to immigration.