Day: June 1, 2012

Obama’s ‘legacy’ in Africa….

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…..and more evidence that Samantha Power’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ has gone very wrong.

Update June 4, and more gruesome evidence of Obama’s Arab Spring disaster.

I know I’m beating a dead horse, but want to be sure you all get the message.  Look to the three “humanitarian Vulcans” (Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) to blame for the destabilization of Africa.

Here is an article in Al-Ahram Weekly (an Egyptian publication) that blasts the US/Europe for among other things creating an even larger refugee crisis in Africa than had already existed.

The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems to be a low estimate. Indeed, the British Ministry of Defence was boasting that the onslaught had killed 35,000 as early as last May, and this number is constantly growing, as the destruction of Libyan state forces by the British, French and American blitzkrieg has left the country in a state of total anarchy.

[…..]

Even more indicative of the contempt for the rule of law amongst the members of the new government — a government, remember, which has yet to receive any semblance of popular mandate and whose only power base remains foreign armed forces — is Law 38. This guarantees immunity from prosecution for anyone who committed crimes aimed at “promoting or protecting the revolution”.

[…..]

This is the reality of the new Libya: civil war, squandered resources, and societal collapse, where voicing a preference for the days when Libya was prosperous and at peace is a crime, but lynching and torture are not only permitted, but also encouraged.

Nor has the disaster remained a national one. Libya’s destabilisation has already spread to Mali, prompting a coup, and huge numbers of refugees, especially amongst Libya’s large black migrant population, have fled to neighbouring countries in a desperate attempt to escape both aerial destruction and lynch mob rampage, putting pressure on resources and stoking tensions elsewhere. Many Libyan fighters, their work done in Libya, have now been shipped to Syria to spread their sectarian violence there also.

The writer, Dan Glazebrook, goes on to charge that this is all part of a new military colonialism of Africa.  He points out that the US already has advance military units in the Central African Republic, Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He doesn’t say it, but we have troops in Somalia and in Kenya as well.

I don’t know if this is all part of a military colonialism plan hatched in the White House, but we can all agree that Africa is worse off (for everyone but the Muslim Brotherhood) after the Arab Spring then before it began.  And, I, for one, see no value in American sons and daughters dying in that hellhole!

Nor do we need to bring more “refugees” here.

LGBT rights groups say Obama Administration not doing enough to get gays into US as refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not just gays, but lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals….

One of the hottest controversies on-going right now in the refugee business is the issue of saving LGBT people from persecution around the world by bringing them to the US as refugees.    Indeed the subject was brought up at the May 1 State Department scoping meeting on refugee goals for fy2013.  The subject was the centerpiece of the testimony that day by Duncan Breen of Human Rights First (oops, I see it’s LGBTI, I is for intersex).

Here is a lengthy story in the Advocate summarizing the situation and calling for the Obama Administration to not just use words but do something fast for LGBT people who are mostly being persecuted in Islamic countries.   LOL!  They didn’t say ‘Islamic’ countries, in fact they never use the words “Islam” or “Muslims” to describe the abusers of gay people.

Advocate:

Nearly six months ago, the White House unveiled a global blueprint for promoting and protecting the rights of LGBT individuals, countless numbers of whom live in countries where they are imprisoned, blackmailed, and in places like Iraq, sometimes crushed to death with cement blocks.

The State Department’s 2011 Human Rights Report, released last week, provides a grim, if incomplete, catalog of such atrocities.

[…..]

Combating such physical and political violence is central to American foreign policy, as President Obama articulated in a December 6 memorandum and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed in her seminal “gay rights are human rights” speech at the Palais des Nations in Geneva that same day. The presidential memo reflected both the growing consciousness on the issue and the concrete work already being done by the Obama administration. It also laid out ambitious objectives for one of the global LGBT rights movement’s most vexing problems: how to aid those seeking to escape violence and persecution in virulently antigay climates.

“In order to improve protection for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers at all stages of displacement, the Departments of State and Homeland Security shall enhance their ongoing efforts to ensure that LGBT refugees and asylum seekers have equal access to protection and assistance, particularly in countries of first asylum,” President Obama wrote, further instructing that federal agencies must have “the ability to identify and expedite resettlement of highly vulnerable persons with urgent protection needs.” Homeland Security, the State Department, the Defense Department, and other agencies engaged abroad have a deadline of next week to report on what progress has been made regarding the initiatives outlined in the memo.

But the goal of identifying and ultimately resettling at-risk LGBT individuals in the United States is constrained by a complex bureaucratic process. Security and medical checks involve multiple agencies and often delay processing, which can take a year or much longer — particularly in regions such as East Africa and the Middle East, where the problem of antigay violence is, ironically, most acute.

Why the word “ironically?”  Does the writer not understand that it is the fundamentalist Islamic culture in those regions of the world that is so virulently anti-gay?

Meeting next week to discuss a system for identifying and expediting the process.  I’m wondering how they can determine if someone in those cultures, where lying is a way of life, can sort out who is, and who isn’t telling the truth about their sexual orientation and whether they are being persecuted because of it.   I wonder too, if American Muslim groups (CAIR etc) are quietly opposed to bringing more LGBT people to the US?

Next week refugee groups are meeting with State Department officials to discuss expedited resettlement (a State Department spokeswoman declined to confirm the meeting, though she explained, “We frequently meet with our partners in the resettlement community and welcome the exchange of views on how we can improve our systems and processes”). For the administration to achieve its promises to LGBT refugees in harm’s way, a formalized system that is both transparent and concrete is desperately needed, advocates said.

Read it all.

The Migration Policy Institute has an article about the history of asylum claims based on sexual orientation that is worth reading.

Some fruits of Samantha Power’s labor in Nebraska

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I told you about White House refugee czar Samantha Power and her foreign policy doctrine—Responsibility to Protect—which basically says war is o.k. when you are saving people.   So, the White House and the State Department were overjoyed to help the Islamist revolution in North Africa—in Tunisia, in Egypt and in Libya.

How is that working out now for the Arab Spring cheering squad at the White House?  Yesterday we learned that a leading Presidential candidate in Egypt said Christians must convert to Islam or leave the country (or pay the jizya).

We get them—not just the Christians but the Muslims as well!

We see that if things don’t go according to plan, we get the so-called “refugees” like the three chronicled in this news report from Lincoln, Nebraska.  Is that what Ms. Power means when she says “responsibility to protect?”

From KVNO Public Radio:

Lincoln, NE – The Arab Spring and accompanying violence might seem far away to most Nebraskans, but for some refugees now living in Lincoln, that devastation took place in their backyards.

Now just think about this.  The Tunisian featured in this article tells the reporter that he was already living in the US but went back for the revolution.   He says for their labors the revolution produced less freedom (we could have told him that is what happens when Islamic totalitarians take over).   So, oh well, he returned to his good life in Nebraska as a “refugee” from the Arab Spring.

“Everything we had before that could be considered the little freedom – we lost it,” Zahrouni said. “We wanted freedom, but we didn’t have freedom. We had less freedom than before So, it was really frightening. It was a long, long nightmare.”

Instead of fleeing the conflict in his country, Zahrouni chose to experience it head-on. He’d originally left Tunisia in December of 2007 when his wife was accepted into one of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s doctorate programs. But when news of the revolution first broke, he decided to return to his family in his home country, and witnessed a new beginning. Zahrouni would ultimately stay in Tunisia until the small country settled down before returning to Lincoln with his family.

[….]

“I suffered what they suffered, I’ve seen what they have seen, and I say, Guess what, they can survive it,’” he said. “If I didn’t go there (during the revolution), I would feel really bad to stay here. But now I feel comfortable and confident that Tunisia has a chance to survive, and probably, it already did.”  [But, I’ll stay here as a refugee in comfy America just in case—ed]

There should be a law!  If  someone is here in the US on some other VISA, or are a “refugee,” we should forbid that person from returning to his or her “home” country to participate in revolutions by forbidding their return to the US.  And, while we are at it, anyone here formally as a refugee or asylee should be banned from returning (unless it’s a permanent return!) to the country from which he or she supposedly escaped—like Somalia or Bosnia—for visits and vacations!