Month: July 2012

Rohingya human rights abuse drumbeat is maddening

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 21:  Here is a piece that makes my point—check out this Saudi academic talking about how Rohingya children are being grilled naked and alive in Burma by Buddhists.   Meanwhile, we still have no explanation for reports of Rohingya immigrants imprisoned in Saudi Arabia  a country which takes no refugees!  What a bunch of lying sacks….

Readers, I know you might be getting sick of my Rohingya rants, but believe me what is going on in Burma (Myanmar) affects you where ever you are in the US, Europe, Canada, or Australia because the human rights grievance industry is building a case (beating the drum) for the West to take Rohingya refugees.

We weren’t paying attention when the same cabal pushed for the widespread dissemination of Somalis to unsuspecting and unprepared towns and cities, but they are doing it now (again!) with the Rohingya, so we must pay attention.

Of course first they are pressuring the Burmese government to recognize the Rohingya Muslims as a legitimate part of that country’s ethnic makeup. (That is their business not ours!)  If the human rights cadres and their media toadies fail, then get ready for the wholesale movement of Rohingya to the West.

When I first started our category Rohingya Reports almost 5 years ago, I would once in awhile get an alert about the Rohingya and what was happening as they (mostly boatloads of men) tried to gain illegal entry into places like Australia.  Now, the alerts are filled with one story after another of the abuse they are supposedly suffering at the hands of Buddhists.  (Never mind that Muslim Bangladesh doesn’t want them either).

The Washington Post got in on the drumbeat today with a slanted story.

* Remember as you read this that the latest round of violence began when three Rohingya men raped and murdered a young Buddhist girl back in June.  Then Buddhists killed a group of Muslim “pilgrims” (Islamic agitators???) on a bus and Rohingya rioted and burned and pillaged some villages.

* Remember as you read this that the US State Department has removed from its website any reference to Rohingya connections to Islamic extremists.

* Remember that we stalled for years (fearing the extremist element) in admitting Rohingya “refugees” to the US, but at the recent (May 1) State Department meeting, several NGOs said we need to be bringing more to the US.

So here is the WaPo today:

Every story in my alerts is now like this one—the majority Buddhists are bad, Rohingya minority are abused.

BANGKOK — Communal violence is grinding on in western Myanmar six weeks after the government declared a state of emergency there, and Muslim Rohingyas are increasingly being hit with targeted attacks that have included killings, rape and physical abuse, Amnesty International said Friday.

A government spokesman for coastal Rakhine state, which was engulfed by a wave of bloody unrest in June, called the allegations groundless and biased. Amnesty’s claims are “totally opposite of what is happening on the ground,” spokesman Win Myaing said, adding that the region was calm.

[….]

Amnesty accused both security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists of carrying out new attacks against Rohingyas, who are seen as foreigners by the ethnic majority and denied citizenship by the government because it considers them illegal settlers from neighboring Bangladesh.

No mention of what started the latest round of violence.  Both sides have equal damage, but who cares about the facts!  The Rohingya are being abused according to Amnesty.

After a series of isolated killings starting in late May that left victims on both sides, bloody skirmishes quickly spread across much of Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine state. The government declared a state of emergency June 10, deploying troops to quell the unrest and protect both mosques and monasteries. Authorities said at least 78 people were killed and thousands of homes were burned down or destroyed — with damages roughly split evenly between Buddhists and Muslims.

The worst of the violence subsided late last month, but communal violence has ground on. Now, Amnesty said, it is mostly being directed at the Rohingya population.

Here then is one bit of this article that should make us all pause and wonder what is the truth.

Win Myaing said security forces have arrested at least 100 Muslims in the northern Rakhine state town of Maungdaw, but he said the arrests were not discriminatory. Muslims account for more than 95 percent of the population in the town, he said, and it is natural they would comprise most of the arrests there.

The town is 95% Muslim, could the 5% who are not Muslims be persecuting the 95%?  I doubt it.

No matter!  Let’s send them millions (of your tax dollars) in aid!

Also Friday, the new U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar announced a donation of $3 million in food aid to northern areas of the country affected by fighting between government troops and ethnic militias.

Israel to document cases of hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We constantly hear about the Palestinian “refugees” but rarely about the hundreds of thousands of Jews transformed into refugees as they were expelled from Arab countries more than fifty years ago.   Some Israeli leaders want to be sure that information is documented before those now elderly refugees pass away.

Here is the story from Israel National News:

The Knesset’s State Control Committee held a session Wednesday on the subject of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who came to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

From 1948 to 1956 an estimated 856,000 Jews came to Israel from the Arab world. Of those, around 600,000 were refugees who had been expelled from their homes in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt.

Activist Meir Kachlon credited MK Nissim Zev (Shas) with promoting refugees’ affairs, but warned, “There are excellent intentions, but the state is not giving the right tools. The Arab world is destroying any trace of Jewish presence, we must hurry, because people are elderly and are passing on.”

Some want to make claims on those Arab countries for stolen Jewish property.

Ann Coulter on immigration: America will be California

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Coulter penned a good column this week on the changing demographics of America thanks to the Democrat’s goal of “browning America” … it is not about color it’s about the welfare mentality of the increasing number of third-worlders being admitted to the US.

Emphasis below is mine.  Be sure to read the whole column.

Coulter (hat tip: Jeannine):

While conservatives have been formulating carefully constructed arguments, liberals have been playing a long-term game to change the demographics of America to get an electorate more to their liking.

They will do incalculable damage to the nation and to individual citizens, but Democrats will have an unbeatable majority. Just like California, the United States is on its way to becoming a Third World, one-party state.

Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act was expressly designed to change the ethnic composition of America to make it more like Nigeria, considered more susceptible to liberal demagogues.

Since 1965, instead of taking immigrants that replicate the country’s existing ethnic mix, we’ve been admitting mostly immigrants from the Third World. At the same time, people from the countries that sent immigrants to this country for its first several centuries have been barred.

Eighty-five percent of immigrants now come from “developing countries.” (How are they ever going to develop if their people are all on the dole over here?)

The “browning of America” is not a natural process. It’s been artificially imposed by Democrats who are confident of their abilities to turn Third World immigrants into government patrons.

It’s worked. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 57 percent of all immigrant households in the U.S. get cash, Medicaid, housing or food benefits from the government — compared with 39 percent of native households. The highest rates are for immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (tied at 75 percent).

Isn’t the idea to get immigrants with special skills? If you can’t even get a job, by definition, you do not have a special skill. Other than voting Democrat.

There’s a strange asymmetry in how this matter can be discussed. Liberals and ethnic activists boast about how America would be better if it were more Latino, but no one else is allowed to say, “We like the ethnic mix as it is.”

That would be racist. By now no one even tries to disagree.

As I said, read it all!

The African aid racket revisited

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editors note:  I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to post that I’ve missed lately due to internet problems that have been plaguing me ever since that big Eastern storm a couple of weeks ago, so, sorry, if you have sent me story ideas and you haven’t seen them posted.   Please know that I love to get tips from readers who always find such interesting topics and make my work easier.   Here is one:

American Renaissance has a good book review  by Jon Harrison Sims (Shaking hands with the devil) of a book published in 2010 by Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist, about the humanitarian aid racket in mostly Africa and Asia. (Hat tip: Tom)  There is suffering and poverty, but are the NGO’s and government agencies padding their own pockets while fostering corruption worldwide?   Does that sound familiar?

Before I give you a bit of Sims’ review, I was reminded of the novel I read early this summer thanks also to a tip from a reader.  I read Paul Theroux’s “The Lower River,” truly one of the darkest novels I’ve ever read.   In it the main character returns to Africa late in life with a hankering to return to the village where he had, as a young man, been a happy Peace Corps volunteer.  What he finds is a nightmare after decades of corruption mostly by, you guessed it, NGOs.

Then just a reminder, that in 2009 we reported on the racket, here, in “Aid to Africa an unmitigated disaster.”

And, who can forget the wrath brought down on the head of Irish journalist Kevin Myers who said this in July 2008:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

Back to the Linda Polman book review, here is Sims (emphasis mine):

What’s wrong with humanitarian aid? The short answer to the question posed by Dutch reporter Linda Polman in the subtitle of her book is “everything.”

[….]

Miss Polman knows what she is talking about when she says foreign aid is a racket. She has tramped through countless refugee camps in Africa, interviewing aid workers, refugees, African government officials, and rebel leaders. What she found is one of the biggest con-games of our time.

That there is genuinely terrible suffering, disease, poverty, and violence across much of Africa and Asia she does not question. That western humanitarian and development aid is the answer, or even part of the answer, she does question. She thinks all it does is perpetuate poverty, fund corruption, and foster dependence. To the question “So we should do nothing then?” she answers that that would be better than what we are doing now.

Miss Polman is not the first reporter or chastened aid worker who has come to that conclusion, yet every year the money spent on humanitarian and development aid increases—she says the idea of donor fatigue is a myth—and what she calls “the crisis caravan” rolls on. Why? The short answer is money.

The biggest players in the aid game are the international non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, which get money from governments and private donors.*** There are tens of thousands of them; no one knows how many. On average, 1,000 of them descend on a humanitarian crisis zone, along with 10 United Nation agencies, and at least twice as many government aid organizations. With their flags and tents, and white Land Cruisers, relief camps are like a traveling circus.

Phantom aid!

Each year governments spend $120 billion on humanitarian and development aid, but an average of 60 percent never leaves the donor countries. It’s called “phantom aid,” and is spent on salaries, conferences, publicity, transportation, and contracts for Western businesses that make or deliver aid supplies. Miss Polman says the Americans are the worst offenders; an estimated 70 to 80 percent is phantom aid.

Read it all, here.

*** Like Church World Service perhaps?  CWS is one of the top nine federal refugee contractors and you may recognize them as the “crop walk” organizers.   I haven’t looked at a Form 990 for CWS in awhile.  Here is 2011.   Some interesting numbers:

Income $78,732,897

Government grants $39,190,629 (almost exactly 50% of their funding comes from you!)

Total salaries $15.2 million  (with pensions and benefits another $5 million)

Top two highest salaried employees with benefits:  $268,000 and $296,000

$1.3 million went to pay rent

$1.7 million went to travel (yippee!)

$2.2 million went to professional fees (whatever that is)

Update on Uzbek would-be assassin

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is a story I would have missed if I hadn’t visited VDARE and Brenda Walker’s good posts.

We’ve written on several previous occasions (here) about a Muslim from Uzbekistan with a student visa (but not attending any school!), living in Alabama and plotting to assassinate Obama.   As Walker points out, had Ulugbek Kodirov been a Tea Partier it would have been news on every network in America, but ho-hum just another Muslim immigrant.

Sentenced to 15 years, his defense says he was lonely and lured by the bad people on the internet, from Fox News:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. –  An Uzbek man who came to America pursuing an Ivy League medical degree but wound up working seven days a week at a mall kiosk in Alabama was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison Friday for plotting to kill President Barack Obama.

U.S. District Judge Abdul K. Kallon imposed the sentence on Ulugbek Kodirov, 22. He had faced up to 30 years in prison.

Written and oral court pleadings showed Kodirov, whose parents are professionals who worked for the government in his native Uzbekistan, was accepted to study medicine at Columbia University in New York but never enrolled because his English was too poor.

Read the whole story.  Columbia says they never accepted him and if his parents were professionals in Uzbekistan, why did they let him just drift on down to Alabama for work at a mall.

Looks like attorneys are already building his case to seek asylum once he serves his time.

Authorities said Kodirov was in the country illegally because he obtained a student visa but never enrolled in school. He faces deportation after his release; Bell said he could be killed when he returns home for his actions.

Not the only radical Uzbek the US has admitted. 

It is still a mystery how and why the US State Department airlifted hundreds of Uzbeks (supposed refugees) to the US against their will, but apparently for some as-yet-explained foreign policy purpose.  Here is just one post on the subject.

By the way, the refugee resettlement program is often used to help out some other Nation with their illegal aliens or to curry favor with some government that has a problem with some ethnic group.  When I sent testimony for the May 1 State Department meeting I recommended that Congress disallow the use of “refugees” to accomplish some other foreign policy objective (here, #7).