The nerve! UN Secretary General goes to Saudi Arabia and says "Islamophobia" to blame for world's worst violence

02/18/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“Guterres is a perfect example of the unholy alliance between the secular Marxist left and the Islamists.”

(John Guandolo)

screenshot-305 — Saudi Arabia welcomes NO refugees, even those who are Muslim.

Newly selected UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, went to a Muslim country that refuses to resettle Muslim refugees—Saudi Arabia—and said infidels are killed because they are instigating Islamic violence by practicing free speech!

From Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily. Hohmann quotes Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, John Guandolo, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Phil Haney and me in his analysis of Guterres outrageous comments to the Saudi king:

The United Nations — under a new leader who personally oversaw the relocation of millions of Muslim refugees into the U.S., Canada and Europe — is doubling down on its “anti-Islamophobia” campaign against the West.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese socialist who headed the U.N’s refugee agency before being promoted to secretary general in January, traveled to Saudi Arabia this week where he sat with Saudi royals and cited “Islamophobia” as the reason for increasing terrorism around the world.

guterres-evil — Guterres is the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees responsible for directing thousands of Muslim refugees to your towns.

“One of the things that fuel terrorism is the expression in some parts of the world of Islamophobic feelings and Islamophobic policies and Islamophobic hate speeches,” Guterres said at a joint news conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir. [You know he is aiming these comments at Donald Trump! If we have another deadly terrorist attack he is setting it up for the world to blame Trump!—ed]

Echoing the comments of Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential campaign, Guterres said Islamophobia actually helps the Islamic State or ISIS to attract new recruits.

But the way others see it, Guterres just gave a free pass to Islamic extremists to commit acts of terror throughout the world.

michele-bachmann — Former Rep. Michele Bachmann calls UN Sec. General the “jihadist’s advocate.” If you have forgotten, Senator John McCain attempted to destroy Bachmann in 2012 when she charged that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the Obama Administration. Today McCain is working to destroy President Trump. McCain is either senile or bought, in my opinion.

It’s a lot like blaming the victim, says Phillip Haney, an Islam specialist who worked for more than a decade at Homeland Security screening immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.

“So Mr. Guterres is telling you that Islamophobia is such a great crime that you will be killed for it and terrorists will rise up because of this and it will be your fault,” Haney told WND.

“Why? Because you are an Islamophobe. It’s your fault that they’re killing you,” he said. “What’s he saying if that’s not what he’s saying?”

[….]

“No other religion enjoys such protection from criticism,” Bachmann said. “Ironically, no other religion in current times has advanced more violence, carnage and bloodshed than Islam and yet Islam’s gatekeepers demand their religion not be criticized.

“We need to recognize this is nothing more than a well-designed strategy to achieve Islamic conquest and the U.N. Secretary General is now the jihadist’s advocate.”

[….]

Guandolo said Guterres is a perfect example of the unholy alliance between the secular Marxist left and the Islamists.

I’ve only snipped a small amount of a detailed report, please go here to read it all.
See my Guterres archive here and don’t miss this 2009 post where Guterres credits Islam and Sharia Law for creating the idea of welcoming people who are persecuted.

Tell President Donald Trump to get us out of the United Nations! Click here.

NY: As refugee contractors begin to run out of federal money, they turn to state legislatures looking for millions

02/17/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We told you earlier this morning that refugee contracting agencies (see list below) are closing some of their satellite offices.
The UN/US Refugee Admissions Program is numbers-driven since refugees arrive in the US with federal funding attached to each one—administration of that money (your money) is left to the ‘non-profit’ resettlement agencies. As the Trump Administration cuts the numbers, there is commensurate reduction in funding for non-profit groups!
Here we learn in New York that the federal contractors who operate in the state are looking to state taxpayers to make up their loss of federal funding.

Why aren’t they out raising private money from all of the ‘humanitarians’ they claim want this program?

If you live in New York state you better let your state legislators know what you think!
From the Poughkeepsie Journal (hat tip:Jim):

ALBANY – Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday called for a $12 million boost in state funding for upstate’s refugee resettlement agencies.

harry-bronson — Assemblyman Harry Bronson: Wants $12 million for refugees in New York state. And, we are told this program doesn’t cost anything to state and local taxpayers!

The request for additional funding came in response to President Trump’s 120-day ban on refugee travel to the U.S., though the order has been placed on hold by a federal court.

The vast majority of refugees who resettled in New York last year migrated upstate, with about 94 percent settling outside of New York City, according to U.S. State Department data. [They didn’t “migrate” upstate they were placed there by federal refugee contractors mostly operating in secrecy!—ed]

The Mid-Hudson Refugee Solidarity Alliance has been working with the nonprofit group Church World Services to open a resettlement office in the City of Poughkeepsie since April. Church World Service has plans to place 80 refugees from Syria, Iraq and the Congo in Poughkeepsie.

[….]

The funding push was backed Wednesday by a handful of Assembly Democrats. It comes as Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers are negotiating a state budget that will top $150 billion.

“This funding will allow us to provide services and programs that will help refugee families successfully become contributing members of communities across New York state,” Assemblyman Harry Bronson, D-Rochester, said in a statement.

sean-ryan — Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo, and other lawmakers call for state help to fund refugee resettlement centers Wednesday at the Capitol’s Million Dollar Staircase in Albany. http://wxxinews.org/post/refugee-centers-ny-face-funding-crisis

Under the proposed plan, $2 million would go toward allowing refugee resettlement agencies to continue working at capacity and make up for any revenue that was lost during the 120-day ban, if re-enacted.

The Assembly members also requested $5 million to be included in the state budget to fund legal services to refugees.

The remaining $5 million would go toward allowing resettlement agencies to provide an additional 90 days of services to refugees, up from the current 90.

Certainly one thing that the present situation has highlighted is the FACT that refugee contractors are paid by the head!

“If resettlement agencies are no longer able to accept refugees for a 120-day period, they are no longer receiving funding,” Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo, said in a statement. “This will lead to staff cuts, and resettlement agencies will no longer be able to provide services to refugees who have already come to New York.”

Read on here.
See our huge archive on New York, consistently one of the top states in America to ‘welcome’ refugees.
And, see our recent posts on Poughkeepsie, here.
Be sure to keep an eye out in your state for the legislature or state assembly to try to slip funding in for non-profit groups that should have been raising private money (for their ‘religious charitable’ work) for decades!
Here are the nine major federal contracting agencies now desperate for more of your money:

SPLC announces new list of hate groups! Did you make the list?

02/17/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You don’t even have to be a group! You can be an individual hater and still be a hate group!

oreo — My group is having a little nap this morning, but we will soon have to get to work. We have a lot of hating to do today!

A few years ago, I had a great laugh when I read Daniel Greenfield talking about his new entry on their list and he wondered where his group was!
See How I became a Hate Group, here. I’m wondering the same this morning (I have a cat too!).
This is Greenfield in 2012 (a post that had me falling off my chair laughing):

When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group.

Being declared a hate group wasn’t in my plans for the day, but like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don’t even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group.

My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the “group” part, and one man and a cat don’t seem to be enough. Even when the cat is a well known bigot who hates mice, birds, car alarms that go off in the middle of the night, the plumber and sudden noises.

Still the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed, “Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield” as one of their “Active Anti-Muslim Hate Groups”….

Continue reading here.

I’m on the list this year, and I frankly never did look in previous years so don’t know when I first received this high honor!
See my other award from SPLC, here.
Here is what Mark Potok at the SPLC had to say about us:

Mark Potok, SPLC’s senior fellow for the Intelligence Report, said the jump in anti-Muslim hate groups was unsurprising after the mass shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, and the Islamophobic rhetoric of President Donald Trump during the 2016 election. [I don’t follow the logic about our role in the Orlando attack when it was perpetrated by a Muslim who hated gays.—ed]

[….]

Anti-Muslim

Anti-Muslim hate groups are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, most of them appearing in the aftermath of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Earlier anti-Muslim groups tended to be religious in orientation and disputed Islam’s status as a respectable religion. Anti-Muslim groups listed here exhibit extreme hostility towards Muslims and attribute to Islam’s followers an inherent set of negative traits.

Go here to see if you (and your pets) made the 2016 list!
If you didn’t make the ‘Anti-Muslim’ category, do not despair, because they have many many categories of haters and you might have made one of those lists!
Watch the biased mainstream (Leftist) media lap up the SPLC report as if they are a legitimate source of news.
By the way, this gives me an opportunity to remind you, dear readers, that I am a blogger (with a computer and a cat) with no organization and no staff so I can’t always get to your requests or do everything you wish I would do!
Go here for all of our previous mentions of the SPLC. As you scroll through previous posts, you will see how closely the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a federal refugee resettlement contractor, works with the SPLC.
Addendum: As I scrolled through SPLC’s list, I see they missed a lot of groups. Seriously, we should have an annual convention of all these ‘hate groups.’ It could be great fun and would be wonderful to meet you all!

Panic button as refugee contracting agencies begin to downsize as they lose federal $$$

02/17/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have a lot of catching up to do today….
Update: More here on the subject of World Relief downsizing (Nashville).
Here is Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily with a report from yesterday (I spent all day yesterday in Washington) on more news from the federal refugee contractors crying about their federal funding drying up in the wake of the Trump Administration’s slowdown on refugee arrivals.
(We also mentioned some of this news on Tuesday, here), and it is still a mystery as to why “arrivals” would begin to dry up on March 3rd (is it the money flowing to contractors that will dry up?).
Hohmann:

Refugee-resettlement agencies are scrambling to cut staff and, in some cases, close entire offices as they prepare for a reduction in refugee arrivals to the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s unfolding policy.

money_time_in_washington_dc__zina_saunders — Image from Cartoon Movement: http://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/11333

A pro-refugee group leaked an “official guidance” from the U.S. State Department to NPR Wednesday that said refugee arrivals will begin to dry up after March 3.

As WND reported last week, the one part of Trump’s embattled executive order that was not blocked by the Ninth Circuit Court, was his reduction of the fiscal-2017 cap on refugees from 110,000 set by Barack Obama to 50,000. The fiscal year ends Oct. 1.

Since 35,000 refugees have already arrived, that would mean another 15,000 would be allowed in by Oct. 1. The fact that the State Department is now saying new arrivals will end by March 3 means Trump could be planning to lower the ceiling further since it would be nearly impossible to hit the 50,000 cap in a little over two weeks.

Continue here. Hohmann goes on to report on the ‘plight’ of World Relief, one of the nine major federal government refugee contractors***.
And, then here is Katherine Rodriguez at Breitbart on World Relief:

An evangelical relief and development agency that works with the United Nations’ refugee program announced Wednesday that it will lay off 140 staff members and close five offices.

World Relief, which is one of the nine U.S. organizations that works with the UN, called the decision “a direct result of the recent decision by the Trump Administration,” citing President Trump’s executive order that capped the number of refugees allowed into the United States, the Washington Post reported.

[….]

The organization will close its offices in Boise, Idaho; Columbus, Ohio; Miami; Nashville; and Glen Burnie, Md. and lay off 20 percent of its 650 U.S.-based employees. It has 2,500 employees around the world.

Several of the nine resettlement agencies including World Relief have launched fundraisers to cover the unexpected losses they anticipate from the number of refugees admitted.

“It will impact all nine resettlement agencies, so the infrastructure for refugee resettlement in our country — built over decades, at least since the Refugee Act of 1980 — could be decimated,” Matthew Soerens of World Relief said.

Maybe Mr. Soerens doesn’t remember how low the refugee flow was in the wake of 9/11—-lower than what Trump has so far determined it will be.

World Relief received about $42 million in government grants, which amounts to almost three-fourths of the ministry’s total revenue of $62 million, according to the latest IRS filings from the ministry.

Most federal funding for World Relief comes in a one-time, per-refugee grant of $2,025, most of which gets used for expenses such as rent for an apartment and a caseworker for newly arrived refugees during their first 90 days in the country, Soerens said.

Now, the organization has to use nongovernmental funding to make up the difference.

Boo hoo!

More here.
The organization should have been raising private money for decades! In my opinion they got fat and lazy on easy-to-get taxpayer money! And, adding insult to injury, as ‘non-profit’ groups they are arrogant and unaccountable, while using our money to build their bureaucracies.

If there isn’t enough private money for their “humanitarian” work then it means there aren’t enough people in America supporting the movement of tens of thousands of impoverished people to their towns and cities!

I have some ideas on how this program could be reformed, and first and foremost, I would eliminate completely the VOLAG system.
‘Evangelists’ like Soerens (below) have never been able to adequately explain why it is the taxpayers’ Christian duty to welcome the stranger when they obviously can’t convince enough private evangelists to pony up (out of their own pockets!) for refugees coming in from the third world!

screenshot-296 — https://www.cmalliance.org/events/2015/council/speakers

***The nine major federal contractors that prefer to be called VOLAGs (that is short for Voluntary agencies, ha! ha!):

NPR: Resettlement contractors claim they have been told that new arrivals will end March 3

02/14/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“You don’t need to have a moratorium to slow the refugee resettlement program to the point where it dries up and withers on the vine.”

(Bill Frelick)

We get some juicy news here from a National Public Radio story from yesterday ….

First reporter Deborah Amos tells us that the State Department has said there will be no more refugees arriving in the US after March 3. Is that because they expect to hit the 50,000 ceiling by then? Not likely unless they plan to haul them in at 1000 a day! (We were just short of 35,000 as of this morning.) So it is unclear if this is a hard and fast date.
The resettlement contractors “shared” the official guidance they received with reporter Amos:

More than 2,000 refugees, already vetted and approved for travel, have arrived since the ruling was handed down on Feb. 9. But over the weekend, according to refugee advocates who shared the official guidance with NPR, the State Department alerted resettlement agencies that new arrivals will end on March 3.

[Readers this is an example of what Trump is up against. Here you have federal contractors taking “official” documents to a friendly reporter at NPR!—ed]

Could this notice of a March 3 halt on the program mean there will effectively be a moratorium of 7 months (the new fiscal year doesn’t begin until October 1)? We can only dream! I’ve argued that in order to spur Congress to action to reform the program, the refugee spigot would need to be closed for longer than the original 120-day proposal.
Here is more of what Amos is reporting:

The federal appeals court that blocked the president’s travel ban on people from seven majority-Muslim nations did not directly rule out two provisions in the executive order. Refugee resettlement agencies are scrambling to figure out what they will do if those provisions survive.

bill-frelick-3 — Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges did not address perhaps the most sweeping provision in the Trump order — the deep cuts in the numbers of refugees allowed to come to the U.S. President Trump slashed the refugee quota for fiscal year 2017 by more than half, to 50,000. [This is so maddening! Just because Obama wished for 110,000 for this fiscal year doesn’t mean Trump cut our usual numbers in half. 50,000 is probably just slightly less than the average annual flow since 9/11—ed]

In addition, the court did not rule on a provision that would make it easier for states and cities to veto refugee placements.

“You don’t need to have a moratorium to slow the refugee resettlement program to the point where it dries up and withers on the vine,” says Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch’s refugee program.

Let the wailing begin!
I’m too weary to write more, but if you have been working on the refugee program where you live and pushing for more transparency and involvement by state and local elected officials, you must read on.
The contractors are scared to death that state and local elected officials will play a greater role in the future, thus possibly messing up their cozy relationship with the feds. You will be especially annoyed about how they say they do extensive coordination with local officials. Yes, friendly ones!

For decades, the refugee resettlement program has been a partnership between the State Department and nine private, voluntary agencies; all but two are faith-based groups. Together, they form a nationwide bureaucracy for resettlement.

I’m going to have to remember that!—a “nationwide bureaucracy for resettlement.”
Actually three of the nine contractors are secular organizations while six are faux religious charities. True religious charities would be sacrificing their own private money to help the stranger, not reaching in to taxpayers’ wallets.