Day: July 14, 2015

Vice magazine gives granny (your humble blogger) more publicity about Syrian refugee concerns

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t even know what Vice magazine is, and don’t care as long as they bring more attention to the issue of the campaign by the nine major federal resettlement contractors to get 65,000 mostly Muslim Syrians distributed to your towns and cities before Obama leaves office.
Reporter Meredith Hoffman makes me laugh.  She doesn’t understand that she has admitted, as she has fun with my appearance, that in fact the NO borders activists must be very worried about the impact we are having.
As she says, my Youtube video has passed the 700,000 viewer mark (see one incredible comment from a former refugee agency employee, here).
Thanks to Meredith and Vice we may reach our 1 million viewer goal!

Yup! Granny is very concerned!

It would be wonderful if she would mention that ‘granny’ has a second video about the Senate ‘Jihad Caucus’ and 65,000 Syrians!
After her ‘humorous’ opening she gives us some important new information (see below).
Vice (dumb title:  ‘Why are Republicans so scared of Syrian refugees’).  Heck she does report that Obama’s FBI is scared too!  Emphasis below is mine:

Superimposed upon the cartoonish image of a lush neon pasture, Ann Corcoran stares through horn-rimmed glasses at her YouTube audience. The white-haired right-wing blogger is unruffled, almost grandmotherly, as she warns about a dark and insidious threat: Muslim refugees.

“I’ve become increasingly alarmed by the percentage of problematic Muslim refugees distributed around the US,” Corcoran informs viewers. “Many are forming cities within cities…where mosques are being built to consolidate, train, and promote a growing American Muslim population and its Islamic supremacist doctrine called Sharia.”

Corcoran, who runs the inflammatory anti-refugee blog Refugee Resettlement Watch, goes on to give a conspiracy-laden account of how the US government (with the help of the United Nations and shadowy Islamic charities, of course) takes in refugees from predominantly Muslim countries, and secretly “seeds” them in unsuspecting American communities.

The threat, she warns, is only getting worse: “Soon we will be settling Syrian Muslims in large numbers,” Corcoran says. “If you don’t help counter [this], we are, in my opinion, doomed. Over time this migration will be more devastating to your children and grandchildren than any terrorist attack could ever be.”

The video—which has been viewed more than 700,000 times since it was first posted in April—stirred up familiar strains of Islamophobia around the right-wing blogosphere, igniting a wave of alarm over Muslim refugees, in particular Syrians who have fled country’s five-year civil war. Both politicians and anti-refugee activists have loudly fought efforts to resettle Syrians in the US, amounting to what analysts say is the most vocal and active opposition to a refugee group in years.

Obama’s FBI testified that the Syrians cannot be properly screened:

Security analysts disagree on whether the Syrian refugee program could actually pose a terrorism risk. At a February House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, questioned whether the US had the ability to collect adequate intelligence to screen new Syrian entries, noting the lack of on-the-ground intelligence collection in the war-torn country.

“You are talking about a country that is a failed state, that does not have any infrastructure so to speak,” Steinbach told the congressional panel. “So all the data sets, the police, the intel services, that you would normally go to and seek that information, don’t exist.”

Holy cow!  Last we heard the US State Department had 3,000 Syrians in the pipeline (selected by the United Nations) and now it is up to 14,000!

 A total of 14,000 applications are currently being processed, Henshaw [Simon Henshaw, a spokesperson for the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees] said, but added that applications will likely move more quickly in the future. “We’ve been getting referrals [from the UN!—ed] for a little over a year now but we have a very slow process,” he said. “We have to build up resources and get people on the ground.”

Remember readers, the UN is not saving Christians!  And the federal contractors which include the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society are resettling mostly Muslims into your towns and cities.
Heads up Idaho, you are mentioned in Meredith’s story too!  Good work!

Minnesota concerned citizen speaks to county government leaders about refugee resettlement

~ Ann Corcoran ~ 1 Comment

Update July 26th:  See Let Freedom Ring Blog on Mr. Enos presentation, here.
The other day I mentioned the presentation made by Mr. Bob Enos from Willmar, Minnesota about the problems the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program was bringing to his town.  We now have a Youtube video of his 12-minute presentation.
It’s important in areas where resistance is developing to keep pressure on local elected bodies because although they will dodge and weave and say they have no control when the feds and the contractors come to town with the next batch of third worlders, they in fact do have some power because they can give a ‘welcoming’ signal or they too can demand answers and transparency from the federal government about the costs the program will be placing on local and state taxpayers.
Watch and listen to Mr. Enos here:

This post is archived in our new ‘Pockets of Resistance’ category.
Let’s get this video out far and wide!

As trial opens for Idaho refugee alleged terrorist, Idaho Statesman reports on refugee program

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Twin Falls, Idaho has become a “Pocket of Resistance” (federal government’s term!) to refugee resettlement where citizens are asking questions and expecting answers about the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program. (See all of our coverage on Twin Falls by clicking here.) Although the Statesman reporter is trying really hard to put a positive spin on the lengthy article, the article itself is a win for the local citizens who want answers.  A year ago there would never have even been this much attention on Uzbek refugee Fazliddin Kurbanov’s trial or the federal program that placed him in rural Idaho.

Trial began this week for alleged Islamic terrorist Fazliddin Kurbanov, a refugee from Uzbekistan. http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/trial-start-uzbek-refugee-facing-terrorism-charge-boise-0

I’ve snipped just a little bit of the article, but please go read the whole thing! By the way, all of our previous coverage of the alleged Uzbek terrorist is here.  As we have reported in the past, there is something very fishy about the admission of a large number of Uzbeks during the Bush Administration. Some observers believe that after the extremists began rioting, we brought Islamic radicals here to help out the more moderate Muslim President of Uzbekistan. I’ve even heard rumors that they were flown in with the help of the CIA.  It wouldn’t be the first time that we brought supposed ‘refugees’ here for some other foreign policy goal of the US government. We will probably never know whether there is any substance to the rumors. The Idaho Statesman:

Some 80,000 people came to the United States as refugees in 2009, nearly 1,300 of them to Idaho. One of those arrivals, an Uzbek who landed in Boise, was later charged as a bomb-making terrorist. His trial starts Monday.

Citizens want answers!

Overwhelmingly, refugee stories fall into the more positive, and typically more mundane, camp. Even so, opposition to refugees and concerns about their backgrounds persist, getting the occasional boost from new threats, incidents or shifts in refugee policy.

The recent U.S. pledge to resettle several thousand of the estimated 4 million Syrian refugees displaced by war is prompting renewed concern in Idaho. That’s loudest around Twin Falls, where the College of Southern Idaho has worked to resettle refugees since 1982. It now assists up to 300 people annually, and a local group has mobilized in protest.

“We’re not against refugees,” said Rick Martin, of Buhl, who leads the group that wants the college to end the program. “We’re against this program because there’s just so many unanswered questions that are not being addressed.”

What the heck!  Act of bias! Wendy Olson has just demonstrated her bias by suggesting that concerned citizens might be violent.

With the trial of Fazliddin Kurbanov set to start, U.S. Attorney for Idaho Wendy Olson announced on Friday that her office and other law enforcement agencies are on high alert for potential acts of bias against members of the refugee and Muslim communities.

We are told repeatedly (lectured actually!) that refugees are thoroughly screened,  but we aren’t supposed to notice every time a terrorist turns up in the refugee flow?

But what looms larger for concerned opponents is not that forest of millions, but the lone tree, such as an Uzbek in Boise who gained entry to the U.S. despite security checks that were supposed to stop him. Kurbanov is accused of planning bomb attacks at military bases and large public venues. He was arrested in May 2013 after FBI agents raided his Boise apartment and found chemicals and bomb-making components.

Measured against a population of millions, cases like Kurbanov’s are exceedingly rare but still cause for concern. The 2013 Boston bombings were committed by refugee brothers from Chechnya. With the rise of the Islamic State in the war-ravaged Syria in 2011, those who oppose refugees say greater risks could be on the horizon.

It is not just terrorism that concerns local residents…

“For our committee, even if they had said the Syrians are not coming, we would still pursue getting the college out of the refugee business,” said Martin, who with others has worked for years to install new college trustees who would end the program. “They need to focus on their core mission, which is to continue to be a center of higher learning for adults.”

Martin said his group, which counts more than 100 members on a closed Facebook page, also objects to the overall cost of refugee resettlement, its effect on the local job market and the “slumlike” conditions in which he says refugees are housed. [We hear this all the time—refugees in slums—and it’s because the contractors don’t want to spend too much money on them.  So instead of saying that we are taking more refugees than America can afford, let’s reduce the numbers, they live in slum housing.—ed]

This post is archived in our ‘Pockets of Resistance’ category as an example of the fine work citizens are doing in demanding transparency and economic accountability when refugees are resettled in local communities.  Media attention is vitally important.
An afterthought:  I just looked again at the AP story where I got the photo and realized that the title identifies Kurbanov as a “refugee.”  When I first began exposing the Refugee Program, the word ‘refugee’ was virtually never mentioned in any negative story about a refugee, let alone in a title!