The other day I posted on the Israel-bashing by American Jewish elitist Leftwingers here. Now I see that a WaPo reader from Maryland has some good questions for the pair of refugee advocates.
Tiny Israel will die if Hetfield and Schwartz get their wish.
In reading the Aug. 4 op-ed “Strangers in Israel,” I wondered what point authors Eric P. Schwartz and Mark Hetfield were making. The column wasn’t a call to action by the United Nations, the United States or the world to help Eritreans. Except for two sentences about Sudanese refugees in Egypt, it didn’t ask why Eritreans weren’t seeking asylum in the Arab world, on the African continent or in the Muslim and Christian worlds. The point seemed to be to single out Israel for criticism.
The authors singled out Jews for not living up to the authors’ view of Judaism, as mentioned in the Bible or as promoted by Israel in general terms about refugees. There are more than 190 countries in the United Nations, representing 7 billion people, living on nearly 58 million square miles of land. Israel has a population of about 7 million, living on 8,300 square miles of land. Why are these authors not criticizing the world, the United Nations, the United States, the Arab League, the European Union, the African League, the Christian world or the Muslim world for the tragedy in Eritrea and elsewhere and the plight of their refugees, rather than criticizing Israel?
Yes! I’ve never heard this pair say boo! about Saudi Arabia for instance when that country sends asylum seekers packing! I repeat: Why do they hate Israel so much? Or, like good hypocrites everywhere on the Left, are they just using the refugee issue to bash Netanyahu?
They will be pushing for passage of the Comprehensive Amnesty bill (the Gang of Eight’s bill) that is presently stalled in Congress. If S. 744 is signed into law, or some form of it, there is expected to be a big cash payout (aka slush fund) to the refugee contractors whose job it will be to get the newly legalized aliens signed up for social services (an extension of what they do now for refugees).
Here is what CWS says on its website about the October lobbying push (day 1: they get everyone on the same talking points, and day 2: they hit the Hill):
Our goal is to gather more than 200 prominent national and local faith leaders from key states together in Washington, D.C. on October 7 and 8.
These pastors, lay leaders and grassroots organizers will join together for a day of learning and community. Strategic workshops will address immigration legislation and provide an opportunity to commit to advocating with policy makers.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that others among the major federal refugee contractorswere also holding events in Washington around that time. For new readers who might be wondering, the contractors and the feds (holding on to a myth I suppose) refer to these groups as Volags (short for Voluntary Agencies). However, they are now largely paid to do their ‘good works’ by you—the US taxpayer.
Just a reminder, it is Church World Service, as a member in good standing of the religious Left, which brought the Muslims to Lancaster, PA (see report yesterday). That is why this post is also filed in our “community destabilization’ category.
Update August 16th: The Wall Street Journal has a story, here, about gay Russians who seek asylum in the US.
There is a story from Canada yesterday that got me thinking that this could be the next big scam for Russians to get into the US and Canada. Earlier generations of Russian “refugees” claimed religious persecution in the old Soviet Union and that bought them a ticket to America.
Homosexuality is a hanging offense under Shariah Law in certain Muslim countries, but not in Russia.
Will Russia’s newest laws discouraging homosexual behavior produce the next wave? And, here is what I’ve wanted to know ever since the US refugee contractorsbegan their campaign to resettle more gays/lesbians—how do you know if he or she is lying? Are we going to have witnesses in the bedroom or simply take their word for it? Or, here is an idea, we could have people with finely honed ‘gaydar’ detection abilities interview them (I can hear the howls from our PC readers!).
A Vancouver immigration lawyer says he has seen a jump in business from Russia after new anti-gay laws came into force.
While it’s still too soon to say whether a crackdown on homosexuals in Russia will result in a spike in refugee claims from that country, lawyer Ron Hughes, who specializes in gay and lesbian asylum claimants, is beginning to notice a difference.
Hughes handles a few dozen lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) cases a year and the last time he had a Russian client was before the fall of the Soviet Union – until now.
Go to the article and read more details of recent asylum cases in Canada. However, this, near the end, was of interest to me. Whenever I see lists like this, I wonder how the Far Left (great advocates for gay rights) actually works side-by-side with the Islamic agitators in the US like CAIR.
As a matter of fact, gay activists in the US should be working side-by-side with conservative judicial warriors fighting to keep Shariah law out of American courts!
Homosexual criminality 75 countries consider consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex to be a criminal offence: Punishable by death: Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, and parts of Nigeria, Gambia and Somalia.
Punishable by jail: Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei, Burma, Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, Cook Islands, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gaza Strip, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea, Guyana, Jamaica, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Nauru, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Note 1: Jamaica has some of the toughest sodomy laws in the world short of the death penalty, with homosexual activity carrying a 10-year prison sentence.
Note 2: Homosexuality is legal in Russia, but recent new laws make pro-gay “propaganda” illegal.
Ho hum! What else is new! From Australia to Europe they are burning down detention facilities and demanding to be let in to Western countries.
The Reuters photo is from a previous (2012) detention center riot in Greece.
The latest from Greece, from AFP at TheRaw Story (in the European press, “Asian” is code for “Muslim”):
Riot police were dispatched on Saturday to put down a riot at Greece’s main migrant detention camp where detainees hurled stones at officers and set fire to their living quarters, authorities said.
Television footage showed fires blazing at the Amygdaleza detention camp outside Athens, where some 1,200 mainly Asian migrants are kept under police guard.
“We have 10 police officers injured by stones and other objects thrown at them,” a police spokesman told AFP.
Fleeing their Islamic hell-holes!
Greece is a major entry point into the European Union for migrants and refugees fleeing war-torn or impoverished countries in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
The photo is from this 2012 story about another detention center uprising. But, check out the shirtless guy—does he look more like a starving “refugee” or an Islamic soldier fit for war? Compare him to the photos at Bare Naked Islam of the “refugees” arriving in Australia, here. They must all be working out in Allah’s Afghan gym.
It’s Saturday morning and it’s usually a slow day at RRW, and I have chores to do, but couldn’t resist writing one more post when Judy sent me a Steve Sailer post from VDARE on Meskhetians (Muslim Russian/Turks).
For new readers, we got our start writing Refugee Resettlement Watch in 2007 because of those three things in my title above. Funny how things work!
You see, we had never heard of Refugee Resettlement until Church World Service’s subcontractor, Virginia Council of Churches, quietly began resettling the Meskhetians in our rural county in western Maryland. The story at the time was that Lancaster, PA was overloaded with refugees, specifically the ‘Russians,’ and CWS needed to off-load some within a reasonable geographic distance from their friends in Lancaster, PA (yes, that is the home of the Amish). Our Chief of Police reported that he called the authorities in Lancaster at the time and was told there were some crime issues and the Muslim Russian flow needed to stop for awhile.
Philadelphia where Muslim Russian Turk, Khusen Akhmedov, killed a young mother and children.
Bottomline for Washington County, Maryland is that about 200 were resettled here in the mid-2000’s (Bush Administration), but the State Department halted the resettlement when some bad PR about CWS and VCC reached the media.
Needless to say, it’s a long story and I don’t know what happened to the original group. More recently I met a real estate agent in Hagerstown (our county seat) who told me the Russian “refugees” had money to buy houses which makes us all wonder how they became “refugees” in the first place.
Now, 6 years into writing this blog comes an answer from a Russian-speaking writer to VDARE.
(Here is one post we wrote in 2008 trying to sort out why the US was resettling 18,000 Meskhetians.)
Before we quote liberally from the writer, first visit the post by Steve Sailer (also at VDARE) that prompted the Russian-speaking commenter.
A Meskhetian Turk was arrested in Lancaster (where Church World Service is the primary resettlement contractor) in July for running down a young woman and three children in Philadelphia, and killing them. A fourth child survived.
I read the Steve Sailer’s post about the Meskhetian Turks. I know a little of them, because I worked closely with them for a couple of years.
I learned that a program was looking for volunteer tutors who could speak Russian. Remembering my elders from Russia, and their neighbors, (Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians), I looked forward to helping people from Europe.
The refugees were not the Europeans I expected to meet. Instead of being European and Christian, they were Muslim Turks. With individual exceptions, the impressions I left with were not very favorable.
Because we could understand one another, they spoke very freely. Their most common sentiment, which they expressed shamelessly, was that America owed them a living; that we should support them for the rest of their lives, for all that they had been through.
This is what Meskhetian Turks have been through:
Stalin, a Georgian, ordered them deported from Georgia, once the German threat had receded. He accused them of collaborating with the Nazis. This was most likely not the reason, for the Germans never got close enough to the Meskhetians to be able to recruit them.
The Meskhetians were banished to Central Asia, to places like Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and so on, where their Muslim co-religionists live. However, even the Muslims of those regions grew to hate them. You see, the reason they were persecuted (contrary to the reason offered by the U.N., that they are “very industrious”), is that they are lazy. And indeed, natural selection has sharply honed these instincts in them. Lying and stealing are virtues.
By 1990, the Muslim republics in which they resided had had enough of them, and began expelling them. So they became “internal refugees” in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up, and the Muslim republics became independent, the Meskhetians became stateless, because the Russian Federation would not grant them citizenship. More intolerable for these Turks was the fact that the Russian government forced them to work, in exchange for food and supplies. Their very notion of “persecution”!
So began their campaign to be recognized by the UN as “internal refugees”, who could apply for asylum in other countries—and Russia was more than happy to rid themselves of the Meskhetian Turks. Turkey offered to take them, but they refused, because Istanbul would have required the men to serve in the army. The Meskhetians wanted no part of that!
So it seems they really weren’t “refugees” in the way most people think of refugees, and I’ve wondered aloud on these pages many times if they weren’t just brought here to help Russia—-to remove a thorn from its side. In fact, I testified two years in a row to the US State Department and said Congress should stop the State Department from using the refugee program for unrelated foreign policy reasons. Here is what I said:
Congress needs to specifically disallow the use of the refugee program for other purposes of the US Government, especially using certain refugee populations to address unrelated foreign policy objectives—Uzbeks, Kosovars, Meskhetians and Bhutanese (Nepalese) people come to mind.
We’ve had a run on refugee stories from PA over the last few days, if you didn’t see them go here and here.
They will be pushing for passage of the Comprehensive Amnesty bill (the Gang of Eight’s bill) that is presently stalled in Congress. If S. 744 is signed into law, or some form of it, there is expected to be a big cash payout (aka
