Netanyahu: They can either go to the new facility or go back to their home countries.
We reported on one of the protests hereon Saturday.
Now The Times of Israel tells us that protests have continued. There were many arrests. The protestors don’t like the new law in Israel that requires that the migrants be detained in a facility each night until their asylum claims are processed, but are free to go wander around and protest during the day. Emphasis below is mine.
Hundreds of African migrants, mostly Sudanese and Eritreans, and human rights activists marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday night shouting “freedom” and “no more prison,” in protest of the implementation of the Israeli government’s policy to detain illegal migrants.
The protesters demanded they not be sent to detention facilities in the Negev and that they be granted full refugee status.
According to some reports, the number of demonstrators reached over 1,500.
[….]
The demonstration came days after migrants staged marches, on two separate occasions, in protest of their detention at the newly established Holot facility in the south.
On Thursday, close to 130 migrants protested the arrests of their fellows, who were apprehended by police during a gathering in front of the Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday.
[….]
Since last Thursday, 480 African migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, were transferred to Holot, which is located in the Negev desert and can hold as many as 3,000.
On Sunday, 250 migrants fled Holot for a sit-in in Jerusalem to demonstrate against rules keeping them in the detention center. Hundreds of migrants were arrested during the sit-in.
I’ll wager that all this protesting is not winning over the average Israeli.
The fact that the migrants are not happy with the new facility with small dining areas and recreation areas, a bed, food, freedom in the daytime, etc. says to me that they aren’t that destitute and are being egged-on by Leftists—members of the ‘human rights industrial complex’—which are eager to break down borders the world over. Breaking down Israel’s borders would be a real feather in their caps.
The facility has an open-door policy in which residents are permitted to leave the site during the day but are required to return three times for a roll call. The Holot gates are locked between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. every night, during which time all residents must be behind its fences. Around a dozen migrants were to be housed in every dorm room, and each wing, with a capacity of 140 residents, has its own dining room and recreation areas.
Here is Prime Minister Netanyahu, as always, cutting to core of the issue:
“The infiltrators who were transferred to a special facility can stay there, or return to their home countries,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Tuesday.
On the road to Beersheva before the violence broke out.
Israel built a new detention center for mostly African migrants who are claiming they are legitimate asylum seekers (as opposed to economic migrants looking for work). The facility (we told you about it here) is open for the inhabitants to leave during the day, but they must return at night. It doesn’t look like it’s working out for hundreds who got into violent clashes with police and now are imprisoned 24-7.
More than 100 African migrants/refugees left the newly instated open detention center in S.Israel and begun making their way to Beersheva in protest of the jailing of fellow refugees as well as governmental reluctance to respond to their asylum request.
The 130-strong march left the Holot detention facility for Beersheba Thursday, accompanied by police cars. The march eventually deteriorated and violent clashes with the police, as well as more then a dozen arrests, were reported.
According to the refugees, the protest was intended to demand the release of two of their compatriots who were arrested in a Jerusalem protest some two days ago. They further called from their asylum requests be reviewed individually.
Abdul, a Sudanese refugee, said “we are marching for our friends, for our freedom and for our rights. We request that the Israeli government examine our request individually, and treat us as refugees, not criminals.”
The two men whose arrest sparked Thursday’s demonstration are currently being held in the Saharonim Prison, a jail built to house asylum seekers held under directives which the High Court deemed unconstitutional.
The demonstration’s starting point – the Holot detention facility – was established as a response to the ruling and thus was built as an ‘open jail,’ from which asylum seekers can come and go during day time.
The demonstrators involved in clashes have now been sent to the real prison.
The cost of the Holot facility was roughly a million shekel and in light of the court’s ruling and recent events, it seems the State is adamant in its intent to deport African refugees who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Photo is from this account of events at Jews for Justice.
Ataka leader Bozhinov: we have a lot of our own poor people to take care of! Photo: Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
George Soros and his open-society one-worlderswill have their hands full as the unexpected (maybe not so unexpected!) flowering of the political right is coming sooner and faster than it might have if there wasn’t such a drive on (led by the UN) to pressure Europe to take in Muslims, most recently the Syrian Muslims.
Here the New York Timeswrings its proverbial hands over Bulgaria’s growing right wing power in a “news” piece filled with words meant to prejudice readers toward a leftwing view of the situation.
In fact, one interesting thing about the European rightwing is that although they are against unfettered immigration, they still believe in the social safety net that most socialist countries of Europe offer their citizens. But, here is the crux of it and it comes late in the article:
“We are not a party of xenophobes,” he (Ataka leader) said. “But Bulgaria has lots of poor people of its own that need taking care of before refugees.”
Whether it’s Europe, Canada or the US, the average citizen asks these same logical questions as I said here last week in the post about Canadian health care.
One of the most troubling questions for community members in a city or town where large numbers of refugees are arriving is—why are we doing this when we have our own needy people not being cared for?
I hear it all the time. It goes something like this: ‘we have people (Americans/our neighbors) going hungry, homeless in the streets, or the elderly in need of attention and care and yet we can bring in tens of thousands of impoverished people from elsewhere in the world? Why are our own needy so much less attractive?’
Here is the New York Times(anti-rightwing ‘opinion’ piece with my emphasis!):
SVILENGRAD, Bulgaria — After spreading turmoil and desperate refugees across the Middle East, Syria’s brutal civil war has now leaked misery into Europe’s eastern fringe — and put a spring in the step of Angel Bozhinov, a nationalist activist in this Bulgarian border town next to Turkey.
The local leader of Ataka, a pugnacious, far-right party, Mr. Bozhinov lost his seat in the town council at the last municipal elections in 2011 but now sees his fortunes rising thanks to public alarm over an influx of Syrian refugees across the nearby frontier.
Membership of the local branch of Ataka, he said, had surged in recent weeks as “people come up to me in the street and tell me that our party was right.” Ataka, which means attack, champions “Bulgaria for Bulgarians” and has denounced Syrian refugees as terrorists whom Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest nation, must expel.An Ataka member of Parliament has reviled them as “terrible, despicable primates.”
The Socialist led government is corrupt and survives with the help of the rightwing which has given the rightwing leverage to push for things like the new border fence (mentioned later in the story).
The influx of Syrian refugees has sown divisions across the European Union as the refugees add burdens on governments still struggling to emerge from years of recession. But Bulgaria is perhaps the most fragile of all the European Union’s 28 members. Modest as the numbers of refugees are here, the entry of nearly 6,500 Syrians this year has overwhelmed the deeply unpopular coalition government and added a volatile element to the nation’s already unstable politics.
The arrival of the refugees and public fury over the stabbing of a young Bulgarian woman by an Algerian asylum seeker “has opened the floodgates” for far-right nationalists, said Daniel Smilov of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a policy research group in Sofia, the capital. “They see this as their big chance.” [Note, it’s not just Syrians trying to get through Bulgaria, but African Arabs like the alleged stabber in this case—ed]
No matter how inflammatory its message or small its numbers, Ataka has had outsize leverage since inconclusive parliamentary elections in May left it critical to the survival of Bulgaria’s new socialist-led government, which has been besieged for months by protesters demanding its resignation over complaints of cronyism and corruption.
[….]
Like many populist parties in Western Europe, Ataka mixes right-wing calls for law and order and restrictions on immigration with economic policies that veer sharply to the left.
Ataka: Illegal migrants are Islamists and scroungers!
Ataka’s one constant has been its vicious rhetoric against foreigners and minorities. Alfa Television, a station operated by Ataka, denounces the refugees as radical Islamists and scroungers who will only bring violence and deeper poverty to Bulgaria.
[….]
Mr. Bozhinov, the Ataka leader in Svilengrad, said he had nothing against legal immigrants. But he fumed against those who sneaked across the thinly guarded border from Turkey, seeing them as a threat to Bulgaria’s and Europe’s security and economic well-being. They should be either sent back or moved on to richer countries willing and better equipped to take them, he said.
“We are not a party of xenophobes,” he said. “But Bulgaria has lots of poor people of its own that need taking care of before refugees.”
Whether it is Bulgaria or America, that legitimate sentiment runs deep!
I’m sure the families who lost loved ones, or the victims of the Tsarnaev brothers who will live with their injuries for life, wish they hadn’t come either.
April 2013 photo of Zubeidat and Anzor Tsarnaev speaks volumes.
A friend sent me this Wall Street Journal story about the Tsanaevs written by a Russian-speaking reporter who knew them in earlier days and I was excited to read it in hopes we would learn more about how exactly they got here. No such luck, author Alan Cullison tells us that rich uncle Ruslan helped but not exactly how. We assume they claimed persecution back home and were granted asylum as was reported earlier, but suspect that Ruslan’s wealth and connections may had sped up the process.
Here are some snippets of the article with my commentary, but please read the whole thing. Emphasis is mine:
When I first met Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now familiar as the elder of the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers, he gripped my hand like he was wringing out a rag. It was 2004, and Tamerlan had been in the U.S. for about a year, but he already had an outsize American dream. He planned to box for the U.S. Olympic Team one day, and he wanted to earn a degree, perhaps at Harvard or MIT, and to hold a full-time job at the same time, so he could buy a house and a car. I suggested he forget the house and the car during college, as most American students do. He didn’t see why he should.
[…..]
A decade ago, there was nothing about the Tsarnaevs to suggest any involvement in Islamist extremism. But they already seemed like “losers,” as their successful Americanized uncle told reporters after the attack. They were out of place in the U.S., and my relationship with them developed because they needed so much basic advice about how to get by. I didn’t sense impending danger in their household, but looking back, I can see now that I glimpsed a new type of threat to the U.S., one that we have only recently begun to confront.
Now, that last sentence (above) turns out to be a big disappointment because I eagerly read-on wondering what Cullison would say was the new type of threat the US must confront. Were budding Jihadists a new threat? Muslims generally? How about “losers?” Should we be weeding them out of the immigration process? How about the mentally unstable, are we letting too many of those in? Maybe immigrants with illusions about the grand life they would have in America should be excluded? Or, those whose cultures don’t easily assimilate? Crooks and cheats? How about boys whose moms are nuts and fathers are weak? Or, should we be worried about the threat from rich uncles connected to the CIA? All of the above? Maybe you can find the “new threat” we must confront in this otherwise entertaining narrative.
Reporter Cullison:
Then came the attack in Boston last April. And although I was stunned to hear police say that Tamerlan and his brother were the bombers, it fit with the profile of terrorists I’d encountered in my work. The failed suicide bombers I’d interviewed in Afghan prisons were mostly young men with no prospects. One told me he was planning to kill himself because he had no job or family, and some Islamists persuaded him to try to take out some American soldiers while he was at it.
Ruslan, married to the daughter of a former CIA official, helped his “loser” family get into the US. Did the rich lawyer help them through the asylum process? That is the sort of thing I want to know!
The Tsarnaevs had come to America thanks largely to Anzor’s younger brother Ruslan, who, as the family told it, was a rich and successful lawyer. He lived near Washington, D.C. and for a time was their model in adapting to the new world. I had known little about Ruslan when I was in Cambridge, but now, reporting on the family after the bombing, I learned his story.
When I met him in Washington last summer, he looked the part of the rich uncle. He picked me up in a silver Mercedes and drove me to Off the Record, a bar in the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House, where we talked for three hours.
Ruslan was indeed successful in ways that his older brother wasn’t. They grew up in the penurious former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, where Ruslan excelled in school, learned English, landed a white-collar job in the capital of Bishkek, and met and married the daughter of a retired high-ranking CIA officer, who was there advising the government on privatization. Soon he had a U.S. passport and was studying law at Duke University.
Uncle Ruslan says he tried to help Tamerlan who only got nuttier as time went on:
As Tamerlan’s options dwindled, he started to take an interest in conspiracy theories, according to neighbors and his former brother-in-law. He saw silent, unseen forces working against him. When the family’s landlord allowed me into their old apartment over the summer, I was able to examine Tamerlan’s books and a ring-binder full of articles that he had copied and marked up: material from a course on how to seduce women quickly, a manual on how to hypnotize people, some collected biographies of famous Jewish actors, and pages filled with racial theories purporting to explain why Jews were so successful. [I was surprised to see that a reporter could gain so easy access to Tamerlan’s apartment, wouldn’t you think the Justice Department would have it sealed before the trial to come.—ed]
Mom got them all into Islam, but it couldn’t be THE reason for those evil acts at the Boston Marathon because the local mosque (conveniently) says they didn’t like him either.
Zubeidat, the boys’ mother, told me that she was the one who got Tamerlan interested in Islam, because she worried he was becoming wayward and was partying too much with American friends. But even Islam didn’t give him a place in society that he could keep. In Cambridge, he was told to leave the local mosque because he couldn’t control his outbursts against speakers whom he considered too moderate, according to a spokeswoman for the mosque.
You can read the rest and note that Mom thinks maybe they shouldn’t have come to America. So is America the problem? What am I missing?
Let me know if you find the “new threat” that we have recently begun to confront? Maybe Cullison plans a part II.
As we reported here yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this past week on asylum fraud, but in his opening remarks, Chairman Bob Goodlatte signals that he is pretty happy with the Refugee program we have now.
Rep Bob Goodlatte (R-VA): “robust” refugee program to continue!
Earlier this year I made some trips to Capitol Hill to discuss with staffers the problems (as well as cost) with the program and to emphasize the need for oversight hearings and was met with a wall of resistance. Bottomline is that even if asylum fraud is open to investigation, no one on the Hill wants to get near the Refugee program with a ten foot pole.
Clearly fearing that they will be called mean “racists” and “xenophobes” for even suggesting there could be problems with the structure of the 1980 law that basically turned refugee resettlement over to unaccountable contractors, no oversight is planned (even though there were staffers who were very aware of the failings).
In fact, S.744, the Senate’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bill will expand the program and the funding for the contractors.
Chairman Goodlatte: The United States of America is extremely hospitable to immigrants, asylees, and refugees. Our nation’s record of generosity and compassion to people in need of protection from war, anarchy, natural disaster, and persecution is exemplary and easily the best in the world.
We have maintained a robust refugee resettlement system, taking in more United Nations designated refugees* than all other countries combined. We grant asylum to tens of thousands of asylum seekers each year. We expect to continue this track record in protecting those who arrive here in order to escape persecution.
As far as I know, the Refugee Act of 1980 has never been reviewed by any oversight committee of Congress. Such a review is long overdue!
*See my previous postabout the UN picking which refugees we take.
