Day: March 15, 2017

Sterling Heights mosque could be delayed further as local community files its own lawsuit

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

For background see our earlier post, here. And, take note that the Obama US Attorney who sided with the mosque builders was one of those asked to resign by President Trump a few days ago.
From Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily (Christians who escaped persecution in Iraq are fighting back!):

The saga of the 21,000-square-foot mega-mosque in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is not over yet.

The mayor and city council voted Feb. 21 to settle a lawsuit by a Shiite Muslim group and allow it to build a mosque in a residential neighborhood populated largely by Chaldean Christian refugees who escaped Islamic persecution in Iraq.

A companion suit against the city by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice alleging the city had denied the mosque a permit based on “anti-Muslim” sentiments in the community was also settled at the Feb. 21 meeting, paving the way for the mosque to start construction.

Nahren Anweya: “This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”

But the counter-lawsuit filed Monday argues that city officials were actually favoring the Shiite Muslims of neighboring Madison Heights while ignoring the wishes of its own citizens who were overwhelmingly against the mosque.

If built, the American Islamic Community Center, or AICC, will become the third mosque in Sterling Heights.

Second DOJ-imposed win for Muslims in less than year

It was the second bitter mosque battle in Southeastern Michigan in less than a year.

Obama’s DOJ forced a madrassa on Pittsfield Township, near Ann Arbor, and that town had to pay out $1.7 million to the mosque while sending township employees to be trained on how not to discriminate against Muslims.

After the contentious Feb. 21 meeting in Sterling Heights in which the mayor ordered police to empty the city-hall chambers before the council took a vote on the mosque deal, WND reported that the Chaldean Christians were upset and talking about a counter-lawsuit.

On Monday, they acted. They had Ann Arbor-based American Freedom Law Center, or AFLC, file a civil rights suit on their behalf against the city and Mayor Michael C. Taylor, alleging violations of state and federal law.

“The mayor and the corrupted personal interests behind him have outraged a community which is comprised of the largest minority Assyrian/Chaldean Christians from Iraq,” said Nahren Anweya, spokeswoman for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Sterling Heights. “This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”

CAIR crows and threatens:

Dawud Walid CAIR Michigan. Learn more about him here: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2438/dawud-walid-unhinged#

When the city agreed to settle the suit and allow the mosque to be built, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said the victory for the mosque should teach Michigan cities a lesson.

“We hope that this settlement, along with last year’s settlement in Pittsfield Township regarding a previously blocked Islamic school project, sends a strong message to city governments in Michigan seeking to deny zoning of religious institutions simply because they are led by Muslims,” said CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid.

An attorney for the AICC mosque, Azzam Elder, threatened to “monitor” local residents he felt were Islamophobic.

“Moving forward, we’re very concerned about some of what you’ve seen at the public hearings with some of the residents,” Elder told the Detroit News. “We’ll be monitoring what we feel (could be) potential hate groups.”

Hohmann’s story is very thorough.  I have only snipped a small portion of it, go here to learn more.
Besides the lawsuit, I’m thinking that the citizens there might follow the Rutland model and work very hard to remove (at the ballot box!) the elected officials who caved!
One of the great and lasting legacies of a naive federal refugee program is that the US State Department and its contractors have placed Middle Eastern groups who have been in conflict for centuries in close proximity to each other in American cities assuming, we can only presume, that their religious conflicts will melt away in the great (mythical?) American melting pot.

Horowitz: Where is Congress? Why are they not helping Trump on immigration?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That’s been my question too!

Here at Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz asks why Congress is not backing the President’s right to control immigration to America and determine how many refugees we admit and from where they originate.
Instead Congress is entangled in one major mess over Obamacare.  And, frankly, although important, repeal of Obamacare did not motivate voters to support Trump in the way immigration restriction did.
Here is Horowitz (emphasis mine):

Where is Congress?

Look at the House GOP’s agenda since January. It has been devoid of any substance. What other majority party with control of the White House has failed to act on a single significant issue in its first 100 days? Why are they not passing bills defending Trump’s executive order, and why are they not stripping the courts of jurisdiction over immigration?

While you are at Conservative Review, be sure to check out their very useful ‘scorecard.’ I think you will be surprised at the low scores of many members of Congress and Senators you might have once thought were conservative. https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard

Trump’s only major accomplishment thus far was the refugee moratorium and that is hanging by a thread thanks to the erroneous outsourcing of legislative and executive authority to the courts. It’s time for Trump to work with House conservatives to bolster his immigration agenda against the courts, instead of fighting conservatives to enshrine Obamacare into law.

Trump must demand that Congress back his immigration order in the April budget bill by defunding the refugee resettlement program and the issuance of any visas from the six countries on his list. House conservatives should also work with Trump to defund Obama’s executive amnesty.

Instead of threatening conservatives with primary challenges if they fail to betray Trump’s own election mandate, why not threaten to primary the RINOs for not backing his immigration agenda? Or is it easier to go after conservatives because they are politically expendable?

Read the whole column here and see how “rogue” judges are taking control of the immigration issue in America.
For more on Congress, see my tag ‘Where is Congress‘ especially on the appropriations issue!

One report: Trump Dept. of State to cut funding to UN by 50%

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

That is the news from The Hill two days ago!
Finally an elusive number I’ve wondered about for years is mentioned here:

The US pays $1.5 billion of the $4 billion annual budget of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees glass-fronted building in Geneva. Imagine what this costs to staff and run in Switzerland! American taxpayers pay 37% of it! ($1.5 billion of an annual $4 billion budget).

That is the agency of the UN choosing our refugees for your towns and cities!
The Hill:

President Trump’s administration has told the State Department to cut more than 50 percent of U.S. funding to United Nations programs, Foreign Policy reported.

The push for the drastic reductions comes as the White House is scheduled to release its 2018 topline budget proposal Thursday, which is expected to include a 37 percent cut to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budgets.***

It’s not clear if Trump’s budget plan, from the Office of Management and Budget, would reflect the full extent of Trump’s proposed cuts to the U.N.

[….]

The U.S. spends roughly $10 billion annually on the U.N., and the cuts could have the greatest impact on peacekeeping, the U.N. development program and UNICEF, which are funded by State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

The fate of other popular [?—ed] programs, like the World Food Programme and U.N. refugee operations, are less clear. The World Food Programme’s funding comes from the Department of Agriculture.

Let the wailing begin….

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the alterations would spark “chaos” if true.

Richard Gowan, European Council on Foreign Relations, said cuts would bring “chaos.” Photo: http://www.ecfr.eu/experts

“[It would] leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” he told FP, pointing to how the U.S. provided $1.5 billion of the U.N. refugee agency’s $4 billion budget last year.

“Multiply that across other humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme and you are basically talking about the breakdown of the international humanitarian system as we know it.”

More here, and then yesterday The Washington Post reported the news as well, but does not mention the UNHCR.
The Post quotes Trump’s UN ambassdor Nikki Haley as saying the following in her confirmation hearing in January. (Just a reminder dear readers that Haley works for Trump, so let’s hope she is now on the same page as the President!)

  “I do not think we need to pull money from the U.N. We don’t believe in slash-and-burn.”

***Let’s talk about USAID for a minute!

We haven’t written much over the years about the Agency for  International Development which also gives gobs and gobs of (your) money to some federal refugee contractors.
I knew the International Rescue Committee couldn’t be pulling in millions from solely seeding refugees in places like Missoula, Montana, so I checked USA Spending just now to see what they were getting from USAID. Yikes!  Here is a screen shot of one tiny portion of one page. (These are grants from 2008 to 2016).

The IRC received nearly $1 billion from US taxpayers during the Obama years!

No wonder they have money to community-organize against citizens in small city America!
 

Six transactions of 971!

 
For our complete archive on the IRC, click here.

Cut Donald, cut!

Pew: Almost 2,500 refugees from travel-restricted countries entered US since Trump took office

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Pew Research has done a handy little summary of where we stand with refugees admitted this fiscal year, but most importantly they made a useful graph of how many entered from travel-restricted countries since the first week of December, through Trump’s inauguration and up to last Friday.
There is nothing we haven’t already been talking about as we reported also from Wrapsnet over recent weeks and months, but they put it in a neat little package for your review on the eve of the 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement.
Pew Research Center:

A total of 2,466 refugees from six countries under new travel restrictions – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – have resettled in the United States since Donald Trump became president, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data. The number of refugees from the six travel-restricted countries represents 32% of all refugees who have entered the U.S. since Trump took office.

Do you see that big spike ending on inauguration day? That is because the Obama State Dept. was working night and day to get as many Muslims in to the US as possible in the week before the Trump team took over.

 
Pew continues….

Including refugees from countries with no travel restrictions, a total of 7,594 refugees have entered the U.S. during Trump’s first seven weeks in office (Jan. 21 to March 10). Of these refugees, 3,410 are Muslims (45%) and 3,292 are Christians (43%), with other religions or the religiously unaffiliated accounting for the rest.

So far in fiscal 2017 (which began Oct. 1, 2016), refugees who hold citizenship from the six restricted countries have accounted for more than a third (34%) of 37,716 refugee admissions.

More here.

President Trump has set the ceiling for the entire 2017 fiscal year at 50,000, a number we explained here is not that low!

This post is filed in our Trump Watch! category as well as ‘refugee statistics’ and ‘where to find information.’
Endnote: It is amusing to me to see research/articles like this because for years and years (I started writing RRW in 2007) no one paid any attention to the numbers, religions and ethnicities of refugees entering the US. It is nice to see so many news outlets educating the public!