Germany: 75 newly arrived Syrian “refugees” disappear

09/25/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been following the news from “welcoming” Germany that has agreed to take up to 10,000 Syrian refugees. The first ones arrived just two weeks ago amid much fanfare, here.

Now we see that 75 have gone missing and are believed to have been “trafficked” to Denmark further demonstrating the mess the European Union is in with “asylum shoppers” looking for a better deal in another country.

Why didn’t they like Germany? Surely they were being fed well! I can only guess it is because Germany isn’t giving permanent residency; they can only stay until the Syrian civil war is over.

So where did these poor struggling refugees with children get the cash for this escape? And, who are they, Syrian rebels with children for cover?

From The Local:

A group of 75 Syrian refugees have disappeared from their emergency accommodation, days after German authorities caught them trying to cross into Denmark.

On Sunday authorities in the north German state of Schleswig-Holstein pulled over a coach and found 85 Syrian refugees, among them 30 children, thought to have paid Italian smugglers to take them to Denmark.

All bar [but?–ed] a few of the Syrians were then housed in a temporary asylum seeker accommodation in Neumünster, from where most of them suddenly disappeared, reported NDR broadcaster on Tuesday.

Police arrested three Italian bus drivers also on board who now face charges of people smuggling after refugees on the coach said they had paid up to €6,500 for their passage across Europe.

Officers also discovered €14,000 in cash in the vehicle, but could not confirm whether this was cash passengers had paid the drivers, Zeit newspaper said.

According to the police, refugee smugglers supply customers with an “emergency telephone number” that clients can ring if their journey is interrupted and they are separated from their escorts.

It was likely that the Syrians put in the Neumünster asylum home had been supplied with such a number, NDR said.

This tactic works because the shelters are not secure, closed facilities – legally, refugees must be allowed freedom of movement. “We are not a closed establishment, residents may move freely,” centre chief Ulf Döring told the station.

He added that he was not surprised that they had vanished. Three refugees have stayed behind at the Neumünster home. Seven others are thought to still be at a different centre.

In other Syrian refugee news, the UN is pressuring France to take in Syrians.

And, in the US, a House Committee heard from Catholic contractors who said that they were scouring America already looking for cities (with existing Syrian residents) in which to place the refugees they hope they will be paid to resettle in FY2014 (which, by the way, begins in 5 days).

Speaking of 2014, any day now the Presidential Determination will be released that lays out the President’s wishes for how many (and from where ) refugees will be coming to the US. Watch for it!

See our archive on Germany with news about the growing resentment by citizens toward the mostly Muslim migrants.

Syrians march and demand asylum in Switzerland

09/23/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

It’s about the children.

Looks to me like the Syrian refugees who have taken to the streets in Bern demanding asylum are getting professional community organizing help in crafting their message.

Syrians: We have the right to live in Switzerland! Of course the photo is from Occupy.com!

We’ve reported before about the growing tension in Switzerland where the Swiss are world famous for holding on to their ‘Swiss-ness’ (Not a word I know!). Here are two recent post (click here and here).

So it’s no surprise that, as this article (Truth out) reports, their marching went largely unnoticed by the Swiss public:

BERN, Switzerland — Due to Syria’s civil war and the refugee crisis it has produced, the political standoff between asylum-seekers in Switzerland and the government body tasked with deciding their status — the Bundesamt für Migration (BFM), or Federal Migration Office — has in the last week become a standoff in a very real sense.

Since September 9, Syrian refugees impatient with what in many cases has been the BFM’s years-long lack of response to their needs have been braving the autumnal chill in an improvised camp in front of the office’s main building in Bern. Eleven of the upwards of 100 demonstrators began a hunger strike on Saturday.

The asylum-seekers — many of whom have been in Switzerland since the onset of the Syrian revolution in 2011, or longer, and around 40 of whom are children — have resolved not to leave until their status is officially decided.

[….]

The march was headed by children from the camp, one of whom sat on his father’s shoulders and gleefully led chants, in German using a megaphone, like, “We love Switzerland but Switzerland doesn’t love us. ”The moving spectacle went almost unnoticed by locals as the march wound its way through quiet neighborhoods and empty parklands along the police-approved route, from the far-flung BFM towards the Bern city center.

Sounds like Helin went to the Barack Obama International School of Communist Community Organizing!

“These children want to go to school. If they could, they would go tomorrow,” intoned Helin, a young Syrian woman who has been in Switzerland for five years [before the Syrian civil war?—ed] and has what is known as a B-permit (non-permanent residence). She has been working as a translator and liaison for the activists. “Look at them, they have a life, they have rights,” she said of the children. “Give them a future.”

See Occupy.com (what else!) for the photo and more!

Swedes express fear about future of their country as government opens the doors to Syrians

09/20/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I saw this story this morning on twitter (thanks to Fjordman). It reports the reaction of Swedes who are willing to tell the truth about what is happening to their country, albeit readers must get through 20 paragraphs or so of blather before getting to the juicy part. Blather about how “welcoming” Sweden is to immigrants, blather about how generous the socialists of Sweden are, and blather about how they are a bit annoyed at the rest of the world (the US, Russia and Israel specifically) because other countries don’t share their generosity toward immigrants.

As I see it, at least we aren’t as stupid as the Swedes, but we are working on it!

See our earlier post when Sweden announced (for Obama’s benefit) that they were letting in any-and-all Syrians who want to come and live there permanently.

My Imaginary Socialist Swede: We’ll destroy our country in the process, but we will show those stingy racist Americans what good people we are!

So about twenty paragraphs into this article, the other shoe drops!

From Digital Journal (emphasis mine);

And here’s where things get a bit sensitive, especially in such an overtly politically correct society as Sweden. Most immigrants, says Scheldt (Gothenburg resident Jonas Scheldt), are “Muslims from harsh backgrounds and traditions.”

“Approximately 10 percent of Sweden today are Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa,” Scheldt continues. “Most of them don’t work. They breed like rabbits. They want special Sharia law. They don’t want music in schools. They’re against homosexuals, abortion, human rights. Some Swedes are becoming afraid of what’s to come in the future.”

Fear for the future of their country. It’s a theme echoed by some of the other Swedes we interviewed.

“Afraid, yes that’s the right word for Swedes,” agrees Weibert.

Fear of increasing crime, which many Swedes blame on the increased immigrant population, is palpable.

“Since we are a socialist country with a ‘humane’ way of thinking, we have been creating problems for ourselves,” argues Weibert. “We have a huge problem right now with segregation and ‘hoods.’

And that’s only because we’ve opened our arms to everybody without having the ability to take care of all the people in the right way. So now we are having problems in Gothenburg with shootings, which take place almost every day now.”

“Crime has gone sky high,” concurs Scheldt. “There were five shootings last week in Gothenburg.”

Such crimes were virtually unheard of a generation ago.

There are other crimes that Swedes blame on immigrants.

“In Malmö the Jews are being persecuted by Muslims because of Israel’s wrongdoing,” adds Scheldt. “Sweden also now has one of the world’s highest rates of rape. When I was young, we didn’t have to lock our doors. Girls are afraid to walk home in the evening. There’s more violence, missing people, trafficking, drugs, killings [and] abuse of the welfare system.”

“Sweden has never been like this before,” Scheldt says. “My 75-year-old father has been knocked down and robbed twice in the past two years. My sister got stabbed.”

Maybe Sweden will wake up in time, but they have such a huge Muslim population now I doubt they can reverse their downward trajectory. But, look on the bright side—as the country dies, watching the death throes might be enough to shake some sense into other Western countries before it’s too late. That is why we write about Sweden so often.

About the photo: You can read about the mosque here at wikipedia. I had planned to use a photo of Muslim immigrants that was published with the original story this morning, but I see it’s gone. Funny how the media is so skittish about showing Muslim faces.

Illegal alien “mother ship” captured off coast of Italy

09/14/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A day at the beach in Italy: The bodies of the six drowned Eygptians were laid out on a popular beach in Catania, Sicily’s second city. Photograph: Dario Azzaro/AFP/Getty Images

Reuters has reported that Italian authorities have captured the so-called “mother ship” used recently to ferry Syrians (and North Africans) across the Mediterranean to Europe. Illegal alien crossings (with a loss of life) have increased dramatically since that Obama Administration-applauded “Arab Spring” got underway in Africa. The captured traffickers are Egyptians.

From Reuters:

ROME (Reuters) – Italian authorities have seized a “mother ship” used to traffic illegal migrants across the Mediterranean and picked up about 200 Syrians fleeing the civil war in their homeland, officials said on Thursday.

European Union and Italian patrol boats chased down the fishing boat with a crew of 15 that had been used to ferry the immigrants into international waters near the Sicilian coast, prosecutors and police said.

The vessel’s crew had already transfered the refugees into a smaller boat for the final leg of their voyage. Italian police boats collected 199 migrants, including 64 children, all of whom were Syrian.

The fishing boat was towed back to the port of Catania in Sicily. The seizure of the mother ship was a result of an investigation into the drowning of six migrants off Sicily in August, prosecutors said in a statement.

The smugglers are part of an Egyptian crime group, they said. The exact departure point of the fishing boat was still unknown.

The numbers are growing and countries on the Mediterranean are feeling the crunch—most especially Italy and Malta.

Almost 9,000 migrants reached Italy by boat between July 1 and August 10, the Interior Ministry said.

In the 12 months up to August 10, more than 24,000 came, compared with more than 17,000 in the same period a year earlier, and almost 25,000 in the 12 months before that, the ministry said.

The photo is from this story at The Guardian.

First Syrians headed to Hanover, Germany

09/12/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s note: Readers, I’ve been out of commission for a few days. I am just now trying to catch up on refugee news, so there may be other more interesting or pressing refugee/immigration issues that have happened in my absence but I am reporting as I come across alerts in my e-mail. If you have sent me a good post idea, I should find it eventually, but don’t hesitate to resend it now!

This story from Germany is all over the news for the past few days. One story along these same lines says that if the US would strike Syria militarily, it would create even more refugees and that makes sense to me.

Here is the news from Germany. One of the things that interests me about this is that these refugees are not going permanently to Germany, but it is understood from the beginning that this is a temporary arrangement.

Remember there have been demonstrations by some Germans against more asylum seekers entering the country.

From AP at The Times-Standard:

GENEVA—Germany’s relocation program for Syrian refugees is getting under way with 107 people gaining temporary new homes, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

The first group to be relocated under a German program for up to 5,000 Syrian refugees includes “women and girls at risk, people with serious medical conditions, survivors of torture or others with special needs,” said U.N. refugee agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.

Unlike the makeshift arrangements for most of the 2 million refugees that have fled Syria into neighboring countries, the program announced by Germany in March gives them the right to work under two-year residence permits that could be extended if Syria’s crisis remains unchanged.

In that regard, Germany currently has the world’s largest such relocation program for Syrian refugees, “setting an important example” for other nations, Fleming said

The first group of 107 Syrian refugees is due to leave Lebanon on Wednesday and head to Hannover, Germany, where the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, known as the U.N. refugee agency, will help them on arrival. From there the refugees are being transferred to an accommodation center in Friedland, in Lower Saxony, where they are to stay for 14 days.

During that time, they will get oriented to their new culture, including basic language training, how the schools and health works, and help in interacting with local authorities, Fleming said. After that they will leave for temporary homes across Germany, mostly small centers or apartments where they have access to schools, medical facilities and social services.

The pressure is now on the rest of the West.

The photo is from this story at The National. Update! For some reason the story and the photo have been taken down, I’ll see if I can find the photo again elsewhere.