Category: Obama

LGBT rights groups say Obama Administration not doing enough to get gays into US as refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not just gays, but lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals….

One of the hottest controversies on-going right now in the refugee business is the issue of saving LGBT people from persecution around the world by bringing them to the US as refugees.    Indeed the subject was brought up at the May 1 State Department scoping meeting on refugee goals for fy2013.  The subject was the centerpiece of the testimony that day by Duncan Breen of Human Rights First (oops, I see it’s LGBTI, I is for intersex).

Here is a lengthy story in the Advocate summarizing the situation and calling for the Obama Administration to not just use words but do something fast for LGBT people who are mostly being persecuted in Islamic countries.   LOL!  They didn’t say ‘Islamic’ countries, in fact they never use the words “Islam” or “Muslims” to describe the abusers of gay people.

Advocate:

Nearly six months ago, the White House unveiled a global blueprint for promoting and protecting the rights of LGBT individuals, countless numbers of whom live in countries where they are imprisoned, blackmailed, and in places like Iraq, sometimes crushed to death with cement blocks.

The State Department’s 2011 Human Rights Report, released last week, provides a grim, if incomplete, catalog of such atrocities.

[…..]

Combating such physical and political violence is central to American foreign policy, as President Obama articulated in a December 6 memorandum and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed in her seminal “gay rights are human rights” speech at the Palais des Nations in Geneva that same day. The presidential memo reflected both the growing consciousness on the issue and the concrete work already being done by the Obama administration. It also laid out ambitious objectives for one of the global LGBT rights movement’s most vexing problems: how to aid those seeking to escape violence and persecution in virulently antigay climates.

“In order to improve protection for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers at all stages of displacement, the Departments of State and Homeland Security shall enhance their ongoing efforts to ensure that LGBT refugees and asylum seekers have equal access to protection and assistance, particularly in countries of first asylum,” President Obama wrote, further instructing that federal agencies must have “the ability to identify and expedite resettlement of highly vulnerable persons with urgent protection needs.” Homeland Security, the State Department, the Defense Department, and other agencies engaged abroad have a deadline of next week to report on what progress has been made regarding the initiatives outlined in the memo.

But the goal of identifying and ultimately resettling at-risk LGBT individuals in the United States is constrained by a complex bureaucratic process. Security and medical checks involve multiple agencies and often delay processing, which can take a year or much longer — particularly in regions such as East Africa and the Middle East, where the problem of antigay violence is, ironically, most acute.

Why the word “ironically?”  Does the writer not understand that it is the fundamentalist Islamic culture in those regions of the world that is so virulently anti-gay?

Meeting next week to discuss a system for identifying and expediting the process.  I’m wondering how they can determine if someone in those cultures, where lying is a way of life, can sort out who is, and who isn’t telling the truth about their sexual orientation and whether they are being persecuted because of it.   I wonder too, if American Muslim groups (CAIR etc) are quietly opposed to bringing more LGBT people to the US?

Next week refugee groups are meeting with State Department officials to discuss expedited resettlement (a State Department spokeswoman declined to confirm the meeting, though she explained, “We frequently meet with our partners in the resettlement community and welcome the exchange of views on how we can improve our systems and processes”). For the administration to achieve its promises to LGBT refugees in harm’s way, a formalized system that is both transparent and concrete is desperately needed, advocates said.

Read it all.

The Migration Policy Institute has an article about the history of asylum claims based on sexual orientation that is worth reading.

Some fruits of Samantha Power’s labor in Nebraska

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I told you about White House refugee czar Samantha Power and her foreign policy doctrine—Responsibility to Protect—which basically says war is o.k. when you are saving people.   So, the White House and the State Department were overjoyed to help the Islamist revolution in North Africa—in Tunisia, in Egypt and in Libya.

How is that working out now for the Arab Spring cheering squad at the White House?  Yesterday we learned that a leading Presidential candidate in Egypt said Christians must convert to Islam or leave the country (or pay the jizya).

We get them—not just the Christians but the Muslims as well!

We see that if things don’t go according to plan, we get the so-called “refugees” like the three chronicled in this news report from Lincoln, Nebraska.  Is that what Ms. Power means when she says “responsibility to protect?”

From KVNO Public Radio:

Lincoln, NE – The Arab Spring and accompanying violence might seem far away to most Nebraskans, but for some refugees now living in Lincoln, that devastation took place in their backyards.

Now just think about this.  The Tunisian featured in this article tells the reporter that he was already living in the US but went back for the revolution.   He says for their labors the revolution produced less freedom (we could have told him that is what happens when Islamic totalitarians take over).   So, oh well, he returned to his good life in Nebraska as a “refugee” from the Arab Spring.

“Everything we had before that could be considered the little freedom – we lost it,” Zahrouni said. “We wanted freedom, but we didn’t have freedom. We had less freedom than before So, it was really frightening. It was a long, long nightmare.”

Instead of fleeing the conflict in his country, Zahrouni chose to experience it head-on. He’d originally left Tunisia in December of 2007 when his wife was accepted into one of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s doctorate programs. But when news of the revolution first broke, he decided to return to his family in his home country, and witnessed a new beginning. Zahrouni would ultimately stay in Tunisia until the small country settled down before returning to Lincoln with his family.

[….]

“I suffered what they suffered, I’ve seen what they have seen, and I say, Guess what, they can survive it,’” he said. “If I didn’t go there (during the revolution), I would feel really bad to stay here. But now I feel comfortable and confident that Tunisia has a chance to survive, and probably, it already did.”  [But, I’ll stay here as a refugee in comfy America just in case—ed]

There should be a law!  If  someone is here in the US on some other VISA, or are a “refugee,” we should forbid that person from returning to his or her “home” country to participate in revolutions by forbidding their return to the US.  And, while we are at it, anyone here formally as a refugee or asylee should be banned from returning (unless it’s a permanent return!) to the country from which he or she supposedly escaped—like Somalia or Bosnia—for visits and vacations!

White House’s Power: “doing rinkey-dink do-gooder stuff”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, would rather be making war!

Have any of you read the New York Times bestseller on President Obama by Edward Klein entitled, The Amateur?   I haven’t finished it yet but I almost fell out of bed recently when I read the chapter on White House Iraqi Refugee Czar Samantha Power.   Longtime readers may recall that I noted that Ms. Power (Mrs. Cass Sunstein), Susan Rice at the UN, and Hillary* were largely responsible for our engagement in the Arab Spring excellent-extended-adventure in Libya.  I called them Macbeth’s weird sisters in that post.

Klein confirms the role of the three in helping advance the further Islamification of Libya and quotes a White House source who calls the three the “humanitarian Vulcans.”

The gist of Power’s foreign policy (when to make war) theory is that war is o.k. for America when it is conducted to “protect” people.   She calls it the “Responsibility to Protect” described here by Stanley Kurtz; and the warmongers on the Left even have a shorthand way of referring to her doctrine as R2P.  Of course the situation in Syria and Obama’s lack of enthusiasm to protect Syrians comes immediately to mind, but that is a story for another day.

Back to Power, when European countries decided to jump into the Libyan civil war on the side of the rebels apparently Obama was reluctant to get involved, but, according to Klein, Power was itching for a fight and wanted to put her R2P to a test.   Readers here at RRW know how that turned out—tens of thousand of new refugees fled Libya into neighboring countries or tried to cross the Mediterranean resulting in even more people to protect (or is that the plan?).

As you read what Klein says be sure to remember that Power is the so-called Iraqi Refugee Czar in the White House National Security Council and that she was given the job of reforming the refugee program (which we hear nothing about these days).  Too “rinkey-dink” for Mrs. Cass Sunstein?   (Emphasis below is mine).

Klein:

Among Obama’s foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, the far-out leftist firebrand, complained that the administration’s cautious, first-dono-harm, approach to the Arab Spring had effectively sidelined her in White House Councils.  She said she’d been relegated to “doing rinky-dink do-gooder stuff,” such as advocating on behalf of beleaguered Christians in Iraq, and no longer had as much access to the President.  She was itching to get back in the fray, and she saw an opportunity in Libya.

Let me repeat that!

She said she’d been relegated to “doing rinky-dink do-gooder stuff,” such as advocating on behalf of beleaguered Christians in Iraq.

In fact she would like to do more big stuff, nothing “rinky-dink,” like maybe invade Israel as some believe she is advocating in this clip.

* Power called Hillary a “monster” during the 2008 Presidential campaign and resigned from the Obama team (for awhile).

Fighting for turf in Africa

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Every time I read one of these stories about Libya I wonder what the Obama Administration’s ‘refugee czarina’ Samantha Power is thinking now about her “responsibility to protect” doctrine.   How does that fit in with the horrific mess we are seeing in Africa in the wake of the Obama-endorsed Arab Spring?  Who are they protecting?—the African Islamist Arabs in their quest to control the continent to the detriment of black Africans?   Just watch! we will be bringing the Obama-created Chadian persecuted here soon!   Maybe that is what the responsibility to protect is all about—we help create turmoil and chaos and then it’s our responsibility to resettle the refugees!*

From Catholic Online*:

Refugees from many beleaguered African nations have found a temporary safe home in the Sahara desert. Located nearly 1,000 miles from the Mediterranean coast in Libya’s desolate southeast desert, the Kufra oasis strategically lays near the long and porous borders of Egypt, Sudan and Chad.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – “The two main hubs are Kufra and Sabha in Libya,” Emmanuel Gignac, head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Libya says. “All West African migrants are going through Sabha via Chad or Niger, and those originating from the Horn of Africa are going through Sudan to Kufra. then either directly to Tripoli or Benghazi. Those are roughly the routes.”

[….]

Migrants continue to arrive at this lucrative smuggling point for people, weapons, drugs and fuel. Both tribes are said to have benefited from the trade.

In the isolated Saharan town Kufra, guards order a few hundred migrants lined up at a detention center to chant “Libya free, Chadians out”, before they kneel down for evening prayers.

They all want their own territory for their own people (what a novel idea!)

Many dark-skinned Africans are suspected of having been mercenary fighters for Gaddafi during last year’s conflict. They risk imprisonment by Libyan militias and possible torture.

The conflict is uniquely local in Kufra. Members of the predominant Arab Zwai tribe accuse many of the marginalized, dark-skinned Tabu, who joined the uprising against Gaddafi of being from Chad and intent on establishing a regional homeland and resource monopoly.

* And, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops will be only too happy to help resettle them (for a fee) to your town!

Auntie Zeituni’s got a book too!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, it’s about being abused in America, or so says Howie Carr writing at the Boston Herald.

Readers will recall that in 2008 then candidate Obama’s long-lost dear Auntie from ‘Dreams from my Father’ fame was found living illegally (she had been ordered deported) in public housing in Boston.  A subsequent trial (where she had a hot shot lawyer) resulted in a grant of asylum in the US.  Now she has a tell-all book.   I really hope she addresses her previously reported anger at her nephew for leaving her out of White House family doings (I bet that is the elegant First Lady’s doing).

Here is Carr:

Auntie Zeituni has written a book. It’s called “Tears of Abuse,” on account of how tough she’s had it.

Have I read it? Of course not. Have you read her nephew’s best-seller — Dreams from My Ghostwriter, I mean Father? No one has — it’s sold millions of copies, but until two weeks ago, not a single reader got far enough into it to learn that Obama was a dog-eater with “composite” girlfriends.

Anyway, I have the press release on “Tears of Abuse,” which describes Auntie Zeituni’s journey to the United States “where she faces the unthinkable; failing health and quarantined in a hospital while on vacation in a foreign country.”

Vacation? Surely she meant to say “welfare.”

“As her story unfolds she becomes a resident of (a) homeless shelter and a subject of deportation.”

How dare they! Just because she’s an illegal alien, they want to deport her.

Carr is so funny, I didn’t know where to stop.  But, it’s unethical to post the whole piece, so please visit Carr’s column, here.   I might be tempted to read Auntie Z’s book to see if she has her version of events in sync with “Dreams from my father.”

Since we are on the subject of “Dreams…,” here is the answer to something I wondered about a few weeks ago when there was all the hoop-la about Obama eating dogs in Indonesia.  Muslims hate dogs—they are on the list of the ten most vile things on earth, right up there with dead bodies, feces and pigs.  So, I had been thinking that Muslims probably don’t eat them.  Here is a story from a couple of weeks ago by John Hinderaker at Powerline about Obama and dog-eating (hat tip:  Judy).  He ends his piece with this:

ONE MORE THING: Muslims don’t eat dogs. Barack Obama lived with a Muslim stepfather in a Muslim area of Indonesia. Dogs were not eaten there; presumably not in Obama’s Muslim household. So Obama’s claim in his autobiography that he ate dog in Indonesia may well be false–an error introduced by Bill Ayers or whoever actually wrote Obama’s autobiography. But it is way too late now for Obama to disavow the autobiography that he allegedly wrote.