Libya: Obama “responsibility to protect” will now be tested (on us?)

Samantha Power and the women around Obama (Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) we are told convinced Obama to back the ouster of Qadhafi in Libya based on the “new international community’s responsibility to protect.”    I was never quite sure who exactly was being protected from whom.

Here a writer in The Star from Toronto says he is hopeful that Libya will “emerge as a showpiece of the Arab Spring” (really now, like Egypt was supposed to have been?).  In your dreams!

The Star:

The sheer messiness of the moment renders premature any declarations of mission accomplished. What Canada joined — a new kind of war framed on the emerging ideal of the international community’s “responsibility to protect” — has given rise to a new kind of aftermath.

Libya is altogether different today than Iraq in 2003, or Afghanistan in late 2001. Uglier, in some ways, because of the score-settling…

So who is the target of the score-settling by Arab Islamist militias?   Dark-skinned people, that’s who.

Nowhere did the revolution’s ugly aftermath present itself as viscerally as at a Tawerga refugee encampment near Tripoli Airport, where close to 2,000 darker-skinned Libyans are living in fear of continued score-settling. Many acknowledge they fought with Gadhafi forces. But many did not. And unlike lighter-skinned Libyans who allied with the ousted regime, the Tawerga refugees have been subjected to near-blanket reprisals — most recently, at this camp, a night raid in early November involving 60 carloads of fighters from the hornet’s nest of anger that is Misurata, Tawerga’s neighbouring city.

This is one of nine Tawerga camps…

Watch for it!   The ‘responsibility to protect’ means we go to war and create a whole new bunch of refugees that need to be resettled in the West!

Bishops continue to grovel for more millions, Pelosi calls them lobbyists

Readers, I’m a Tea Partier, I don’t like Nancy Pelosi so I can’t believe I’m actually saying she is right for once!   She calls the US Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbyists with whom she agrees sometimes, and sometimes she doesn’t (here).  Readers need only search the USCCB here at RRW to see my many posts on their Washington lobbying efforts on such things as global warming and open borders, but most importantly their lobbying for your tax dollars to flow into their coffers.  It is really shameful.

A case in point is the media blitz they are putting on right now to try to wrangle a few more millions out the government because they were denied a grant this year for ONE of their many government-funded programs.

Here is what they are saying to Congress—Obama hates Catholics—but the funny thing is the USCCB is pretty far Leftists on most issues and have carried the water for Obama.

From Catholic News Service:

WASHINGTON (CNS) — A U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops program aiding victims of human trafficking was denied funding after its administrators declined to propose alternatives to a government requirement that female victims receive “the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care,” a Department of Health and Human Services official told a congressional committee

Facing at times grueling questioning from Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Dec. 1, George Sheldon, acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, said he made the final decision to award grants worth $4.7 million to three other agencies that agreed to provide access to services such as abortion, contraception and sterilization under the National Human Trafficking Victim Assistance Program.

The committee hearing was called as House members investigated why the bishop’s Migration and Refugee Services department was denied funding for its program despite receiving high scores during a review of its application for $2.5 million for another year of work and its positive track record of assisting nearly 2,800 trafficking victims and family members since 2006.

Johnny Young, executive director of the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, which contracted with government to assist trafficking victims, told Catholic News Service that his agency told Sheldon they could work with alternatives “but we didn’t offer any alternatives.”

“We just said we wouldn’t do anything that would violate church teaching,” Young said

Several Republican committee members charged during the three-hour hearing that the final decision to deny funding to MRS demonstrated an anti-Catholic bias within the administration of President Barack Obama.

The “Republican committee members” know very little about how this all works—the do-gooder lobby siphoning off tax payers dollars to largely fund these NGO’s infrastructure, offices, staff, travel, lobbying expenses, etc.

The Bishops are crying over the loss of $2.5 million of your tax dollars when they got more than $650 million from YOU (via the feds) in the last three years!

The acting assistant secretary also explained in introductory comments that HHS had awarded $650 million to Catholic organizations during the past three years, including a $19 million grant to aid foreign refugees days after the MRS grant was denied.

Of course, HHS didn’t help its case by giving USCRI money!  The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants is the same federal contractor which is screwing up in New Hampshire right now and its present president (Lavinia Limon) is the former head of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and the head of ORR now is a former VP at USCRI—a prime case of the revolving door going on between government contractors and government.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., committee chairman, quoted unreleased HHS documents that indicated that the proposal from USCRI was not recommended for funding during the review process.

New readers:  There are 11 major federal refugee contractors competing for your money for myriad programs that purport to help immigrants and refugees.  The USCCB is one and USCRI is another.

That Muslim spring thing—ain’t it great!

Over the weekend we learned that Salafist (read extremist) Muslims were clashing with minority Christians in Egypt and scores have died or were injured.  By the way, Wade Rathke and his commie union boys went to Egypt the week before last (and missed all the killing this week!) to see about “community organizing” the “democracy movement” there—how’d that work out?  (More later).

From Reuters:

In the worst violence since Hosni Mubarak was ousted, armored vehicles sped into a crowd late on Sunday to crack down on a protest near Cairo’s state television.

Online videos showed mangled bodies. Activists said some people were crushed by wheels.

Tension between Muslims and minority Coptic Christians has simmered for years but has worsened since the anti-Mubarak revolt, which gave freer rein to Salafist and other strict Islamist groups that the former president had repressed.

Then here is more of the good news for Africans in Libya thanks to NATO and the Obama Administration’s great “responsibility to protect” adventure.

Tripoli/Washington, D.C. – More than 600 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are effectively stranded at a port just outside the Libyan capital, and have been left to fend for themselves by Libyan authorities. Despite repeated attacks, harassment, and arbitrary arrests by Libyan gangs over the course of four months, they have received no protection from the National Transitional Council (NTC). Refugees International calls on the NTC and all local authorities – including the civilian councils in Janzour and Tripoli, and the Tripoli Military Council – to intervene immediately to protect the population at Sidi Bilal port and ensure their safe relocation to a temporary site.

“The men in these camps are routinely harassed and accused of being pro-Gaddafi mercenaries, the women are targets of sexual abuse. All face intimidation by armed Libyan thugs who drive into the port at night firing guns into the air,” said Matt Pennington, an advocate for Refugees International currently in Libya. “Of course, many migrants told us they don’t really want to leave Libya – since they have nothing to return to in their home countries. But even for those who want to stay in Libya, their situation is becoming intolerable.”

Then we have the World Socialists complaining about the Italian government shutting down the refugee camp at Lampedusa after the “refugees” burned it down.  Now, surprise! the migrants are being deported back to Tunisia.

Here is the World Socialists web site’s spin on Lampedusa:

The Italian government is preparing to deport hundreds of North African refugees. According to an interior ministry report of October 2, more than 600 Tunisians were to be flown from Palermo in Sicily to Tunis over the past few days. The refugee camp on the Italian island of Lampedusa was completely cleared 10 days ago.

On September 20, some 800 refugees escaped from the camp following the outbreak of a large fire. They were then hunted by police throughout the whole island, rounded up, and eventually evacuated on ferries, naval vessels and air force planes within a few days.
Some 200 Tunisians were deported immediately, and the rest taken to other Italian refugee centres. For a whole week, 352 people were detained on two ships in Palermo harbour, without being allowed any contact with the outside world. The last of them have apparently now been deported.

These people, who had already suffered dire deprivations on their Mediterranean odyssey before reaching Lampedusa, have been held in refugee camps under inhumane conditions for weeks and even months.

The camp, located in a valley behind the town of Lampedusa, was initially completely closed off from the island’s community. No journalists were allowed entry, and Carabinieri stationed on the surrounding hills made escape over the fence impossible. The people spent their time mainly waiting in cramped conditions, where they were provided with very little food and extremely poor sanitary facilities.

The site, designed to hold up to a maximum of 850 people, had been hopelessly overcrowded for years; often as many as 3,000 were crammed into it.

I guess it remains to be seen whether all this Islamic chaos will produce a positive outcome for anyone but the Muslim Brotherhood, but it sure is good for creating more refugees in need of resettlement…..

We can deport Somalis!

For as long as I’ve been writing this blog (since 2007) I’ve been led to believe that we can’t deport criminal Somalis back to Somalia, but I see that in 2005, the US Supreme Court said, sure we can!

The issue was brought to my attention this morning while reading an immigration lawyer’s plea at the Huffington Post to not deport the criminal aliens recently rounded up by ICE in the latest Obama Administration push to get the bad guys off the streets and out of your towns.  Of course, Bill Ong Hing is making the case that if they’ve served time, they should get to stay, but those rounded up recently have not served their time YET!

Here is Mr. Hing, professor of Law University of San Francisco:

With great fanfare last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced the arrest of some 3,000 convicted “criminal aliens” during a its seven-day national “Operation Cross-Check” enforcement operations. The attention-grabbing announcement emphasized that more than 1,600 had felony and highlighted seven of the arrestees who had been convictions for kidnapping, attempted murder, armed assault, or child molestation. That’s juicy information for law-and-order enthusiasts and the anti-immigration establishment.

The problem with these types of ICE actions and announcements is that they blur the picture of who makes up the so-called “criminal aliens.” Immigrants who commit crimes and are subject to deportation come from all over the world: Mexico, Asia, Canada, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The U.S. Supreme Court has even endorsed the deportation of a Somalian refugee, convicted of assault, back to Somalia, where no formal government exists. In 2002, the United States began deporting Cambodian refugees convicted of crimes back to communist-dominated Cambodia. So while ICE may indeed be rounding up and removing hundreds of so-called “illegal immigrants” who have committed crimes, the agency is also engaged in deporting lawful permanent resident aliens (those with “green cards”) and refugees convicted of crimes. And these deportees have served their sentences in the criminal justice system before being deported.

Here is the 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Jama v. ICE.

Gee, I wonder if we could save ourselves a whole lot of taxpayer money by deporting convicted Somali murderers (like this guy) back to Somalia?

By the way, as we have noted in this previous post, Canada has no qualms about sending criminal Somalis back to Mogadishu.

It’s the china shop rule—you break it you own it!

That is what Amnesty International says about Libya and that is how we also got tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees over the last four years or so—never mind that brutal dictators are gone and democracy is blossoming (well, maybe).

Here is a story from Voice of America last week that I never got around to posting:

European countries have been accused of a totally inadequate response to the refugee crisis on Libya’s borders. Hundreds of thousands of mainly sub-Saharan migrants were forced to flee Libya following the brutal crackdown on anti-government protests earlier this year.

[….]

Human rights group Amnesty International says they are being forgotten by the outside world.

Charlotte Phillips is a refugee activist for Amnesty.

“Many are from countries such as Somalia, Sudan, and Eritrea, countries where we know there are conflicts and people are being persecuted,” said Phillips. “These are people who have been displaced not just once, but twice. They’ve been forced to flee from their homes and they’ve been forced to flee again from Libya.”

Libya under Colonel Moammar Gadhafi attracted hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from across Africa and beyond.

[….]

Amnesty says just eight European countries have offered fewer than 700 asylum slots between them, and as Europe took part in the NATO bombing of Libya, it has a duty to take action.

“European countries can and must resettle refugees,” added Phillips.

Since Obama and his girls (Hillary, Samantha and Susan) helped to bring “democracy” to Libya by supporting the rebels, I assume Ms. Phillips will be telling us the same thing shortly (if she hasn’t already).

Check out how that rebel-run country is doing now, here!