OTTAWA – Canada has taken in 1,500 Syrian refugees, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander told the House of Commons Monday.
The government had been under pressure from opposition politicians to bring more refugees to Canada more quickly.
“If they are here, where the heck are they?” NDP MP Andrew Cash asked. “Response by this government has been incredibly slow and it’s not commensurate with the tragedy unfolding.”
Alexander said the system has been improved so that refugees can get to Canada more quickly.
New readers interested in Canada’s refugee problems, go here for our archive on our “welcoming” northern neighbor.
By the way, how many Canadians (former refugees and others welcomed by Canada in years past) are fighting with ISIS now?
Thanks to Brenda Walker at Limits to Growth for her post yesterday (and reader Joanne) for sending it our way.
Note that the fake refugees are expected to pass through Turkey and remember that the US State Department announced last month that we would be taking large numbers of Syrians from Turkey.
US State Department Deputy Asst. Sec. for PRM, Simon Henshaw: Our resettlement program from Turkey will be the largest in the world. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2014/09/13/us-state-department-we-are-bringing-thousands-of-syrians-out-of-turkey-to-the-us/
The Syria/Turkey border is in such chaos that no one knows who is ISIS and who isn’t!
BERLIN – Islamic State combatants disguised as Syrian refugees fleeing the war-torn country want to enter Europe to launch terrorist attacks.
The German mass circulation Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that the “Americans succeeded in decoding locked communications of the ISIS leadership.”
The information from monitored ISIS conversations, also known as Islamic State, revealed that the terrorists cannot use airports on their way to Europe because of the strict control. Government officials confirmed the Bild am Sonntag report.
An official for German’s Interior Ministry told the paper that Germany stands in the “focus of jihadist terrorism,” but there is no indication at this time of any concrete attacks.
The Bild am Sonntag wrote,“In view of the chaotic conditions on the Syria-Turkey border, it is nearly impossible to catch ISIS-terrorists in the wave of refugees.“German security authorities estimate that 450 radical German Muslims have traveled in the direction of Syria. An official from Germany’s intelligence told The Jerusalem Post that it is difficult to track radical German Islamists leaving Germany for Syria because they do not need a visa to first land in Turkey. The southern Turkey border has been the principal point of entry into Syria for jihadists seeking to fight Assad’s regime and create a caliphate state.
See our ‘Invasion of Europe’ serieshere. Germany has been the most “welcoming” countryin the West to Syrian refugees. Being a do-gooder nation won’t save them from the likes of ISIS!
Update October 14th: Greta Van Susteren calls out “moderate” Muslims in America and asks them to repudiate ISIS for being anti-Islam if they kill Kassig, here.
Update October 13th: More of Kassig’s family history in the peace and justice movement, refugee resettlement at USA Today.
Apparently ISIS has featured an Indiana refugee worker for its next possible beheading. Peter Kassig briefly served in the US Army, but came from a family “with a long history of doing humanitarian work.”
In fact, near the end of this AP storywe learn that Peter had earlier helped with the resettlement of Burmese refugees in Indiana before making the jump to helping refugees in Syria. Longtime readers know that some cities in Indiana, especially Fort Wayne, have been completely overloaded with mostly Burmese refugees. It is one of the first overloaded cities we learned about back in 2007 and the situation there prompted former Senator Richard Lugar to ask for a GAO study of the refugee program which concluded that communities are completely unprepared for the numbers the US State Department and their contractors are bringing in. But I digress…
Will ISIS care that he was a good person helping refugees? Or, that he converted to Islam?
Family photo of Kassig delivering aid to Syrian refugees.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The parents of an Indiana man threatened with beheading by the Islamic State group are pleading with his captors to free him, saying in a video statement Saturday that their son has devoted his life to humanitarian work and aiding Syria’s war refugees.
Ed and Paula Kassig’s video was released a day after the Islamic State group’s online video threatened to behead 26-year-old Peter Kassig next — following the beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning.
That video was a heartbreaking development for Kassig’s family and friends, who had stayed silent since his capture while working to secure his release.
In the family’s video, Ed Kassig says his son, who now goes by the first name Abdul-Rahman after converting to Islam during his captivity, was captured on Oct. 1, 2013, in Syria, where he was providing aid for refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.
He says his son has grown “to love and admire” the Syrian people, after growing up in an Indianapolis family with a long history of humanitarian work and teaching.
“Our son was living his life according to that same humanitarian call when he was taken captive,” says Ed Kassig, a teacher.
[….]
Kassig focused on humanitarian work after leaving the military. While attending Indianapolis’ Butler University, he worked to help refugees from Myanmar who had resettled in central Indiana, said family spokeswoman Jodi Perras.
In my opinion, that since Kassig converted to Islam it would be in the best PR interests of ISIS to spare him—to teach the Islamic lesson: convert or die. Why the hell say that if one converts and dies anyway!
This must be having a chilling effect on those considering “humanitarian” work in the Middle East.
Update: Diana West has a much more thorough post on Sweden today, here.
The radical move is blamed on the large number of Arab Muslim migrants (other non-Arabs, like the Somalis, add to the number) who have been “welcomed” into Sweden in the last few years and now have enough of a population to sway the Socialist government there.
Al-Hijra, as readers here know, is the Islamic doctrine of conquest through immigration. No heads need to roll, they just must get into the country in great numbers, start producing the next generation and insert themselves in the democratic process. It is all about numbers!
This is one more bit of evidence to back my bet that Sweden will be the first European country to fall to the Islamists.
Sweden’s new Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced Friday that Sweden would break with the EU and recognize the state of Palestine now. http://www.cubiclane.com/2014/10/03/sweden-recognize-palestine-state-87949
Stockholm’s announcement over the weekend that it would recognize the independent state of Palestine was influenced by the vocal and growing Muslim minority in Sweden, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden charged Sunday morning.
New Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said during his inaugural address Friday that Sweden would recognize Palestine, a move that would make it the first member of the European Union to recognize a Palestinian state.
Loftven’s party, the Social Democrats, are “anti-Israeli,” ambassador Issac Bachman told Israel Radio, but another reason for the statement “is the large Arab minority, which has grown unbelievably this year.” Bachman charged that Sweden has taken in some 80,000 Arab refugees in 2014, mostly from Iraq and Syria, and claimed there were 700,000 Muslims living in the country.
“All this against a social-democratic background, which is pro-Arabic, pro-Islam and anti-Israeli,” Bachman said.
In July, the Swedish Migration Board said it estimated 62,000 Syrians would apply for asylum in the country in 2014, among 80,000 expected refugees seeking asylum in Sweden this year.
And, now here comes that intellectual bright light, Jen Psaki, over at the US State Department with harsh words for Sweden (not!):
US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psakia said the US looks forward to working with the new government of Sweden — a close partner — but called international recognition of a Palestinian state “premature.”
Meanwhile in nearby Norway, the Norwegians are trying to get rid of their Muslim trouble-makers.
Update December 9, 2015: We have much more up-to-date data and the percentage of Syrian Muslims coming into the US this fiscal year is now 99%, here.
Update November 17, 2015: This post is over a year old. We do know exactly how many Muslims are in the refugee stream arriving from Syria, it is well over 97%, see today’s post, here.
That is a question I get all the time. My best guess is that a few will be, but the vast majority will be Sunni Muslims.
My guess is based on a few facts from the past, first that of the Iraqi refugees we have resettled in recent years, the majority (we hear 62% this past year) are Muslims, and secondly, I have never seen in print any clamor from our major refugee resettlement contractors***, most of which are ostensibly Christian groups (US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee service and others), for specifically saving the Christians of the Middle East.
Now outdated map (thanks to ISIS), but it gives you some idea of the areas that were Christian. See this article about Christians fighting with Assad against the “rebels.” http://thechristians.com/?q=node/880
Maybe someone could direct me to anything where these contractors said to the US State Department—we want more Christians to resettle! My guess as to why they haven’t said that (correct me if I’m wrong and they have) is because of an overwhelming and insane desire to be politically correct and a fear of being called Islamophobes.
(Oh, and believe me, they aren’t taking mostly Muslims because they think they can convert them to Christianity, this is all about multiculturalism, diversity and inclusiveness!)
A writer (Terry Mattingly) at a website called ‘GetReligion’ addressed his question—how are refugees being chosen?—in response to the Washington Postarticle of this past week (our post here) where the WaPo tells us the State Department is processing 4,000 resettlement applications.
Mattingly found more evidence that most will be Muslims.
He says that since they will come from UN camps (after all the UN is pre-selecting for the US State Department), and the Christians are not in camps, surely the majority will be Muslims. As a matter of fact, I’ve read that many Christians are still in Syria somewhat protected by the secular Assad government.
Most Syrian refugees considered candidates for U.S. residency have been living in refugee camps or elsewhere outside Syria for a year or much longer.
And then this from Terry Mattingly (emphasis is mine):
This leads to a logical question: Who is, when push comes to shove, running these UNHCR camps? In particular, I was curious to know how this selection system would affect the cases of refugees who are part of oppressed religious minority groups. I decided to ask a veteran human-rights activist about that.
The response? Christians on the run have been avoiding these camps because they tend to be hostile to minority-faith refugees. In other words, these camps are run by those in majority forms of Islam, even if they have – logically enough – clashed with the radicalized Islamic State.
In other words, we have a major religion ghost in this story. It is likely that the current pipeline to safety is all but closed to Christiansand members of other minority faiths in this ravaged region.
***The US State Department’s nine major contractors (they have hundreds of subcontractors working for them if you don’t recognize these names in your cities):
