Tag: Syrian refugees

Dumb website asks: Should the US “welcome” 1 million Syrians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And a college professor from Northern Virginia says yes (sort of!).

Here is the question at Quora:

Should the U.S welcome 1,000,000 Syrian refugees?

The United Nations estimates that about 6,5 million people have been displaced as a result of the Syrian Civil War. Of those 6,5 millions about 3 millions have fled to countries outside Syria, with Lebanon receiving most, more than 1 million. Should the US as a larger and richer country than Lebanon, Jordan etc. help out with the situation, also as a way to gain goodwill and trust in the Muslim word?  [barf!–oh sure they are going to love us then!–ed]

Here is the answer from college professor Al Carroll.

Virginia History professor Carroll.

Note that Carroll starts to get wobbly about the 1 million number.  It is always amusing to see open borders Leftwingers squirm when you reach certain high numbers of migrants and refugees indicating that they too know there must be a limit, but are unwilling to say exactly what that number might be that could push America over the cliff.

Al Carroll, My name is Al Carroll. I’m a historian, history professor at Northern VA Community College, and author of Presidents’ Body Counts.

If the US were truly a Christian nation, this would not even be up for debate. Of course you help out those need, facing death by war, displacement, and repression. That is needed far more than more bombs or sending guns. You help out because it’s the right thing to do.

For those of us who try to be good Christians (I’m Catholic) ethnicity or religion or country of origin should not matter. For those  people who are anti immigrant or anti Muslim or anti Arab or Middle Eastern people, you can claim to be many things. But you cannot claim to be a Christian without being seen as a hypocrite when you fail to help your fellow man.

I don’t know that 1 million refugees is the right number, that this many would choose to come here. There is no reason that this number could not be split with countries in Europe that have an equally noble tradition of taking in refugees. When I was traveling in Sweden I was impressed with how many Chileans the Swedes took in during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship. But since the crisis in Syria was partly created by US support for ISIS rebels earlier and the instability brought by the US invasion of Iraq, it seems only fitting. I thought it shameful and hypocritical of GW Bush that he did not make a special effort to aid Iraqi refugees caused by his war of choice.  [LOL! No criticism of Obama who has been in charge of our Syria policy for six years and has so far brought less than 100 Syrians to the US?—ed]

See our post of last week where we reported that the US State Department has announced that the Syrians are coming.  How many will it be?

Lebanese retaliate against Syrian refugees as Syrian Sunnis behead another Lebanese soldier

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story is all over the news in the last few days so I thought I better post on it.   Lebanon has shouldered a large percentage of the burden of caring for Syrians (mostly Sunni Muslims) fleeing violence in Syria, but now as Syrian rebels (ISIS) captures Lebanese soldiers and police (reportedly beheading two), the Lebanese people are retaliating.

Of course nothing here should be considered to be a reason that the West is thus required to take in the various Muslim religious sects bringing centuries-old sectarian squabbles to your neighborhood.

This is an outdated map, but it gives you an idea. Take note that Saudi Arabia takes no refugees.

From Yahoo News:

Baalbek (Lebanon) (AFP) – The kidnap and murder of Lebanese security forces by jihadists from Syria has sparked new tensions in Lebanon, including a backlash against Syrian refugees and a string of sectarian kidnappings.

Relatives of the missing soliders and policemen, who were kidnapped during fierce clashes in the Lebanese border town of Arsal last month, have blocked roads in protest and even carried out counter-kidnaps.

[….]

The hostage crisis and beheadings have inflamed tensions in Lebanon, which is hosting more than 1.1 million Syrian refugees, and where tensions were already soaring over the four-year conflict in Syria.

The crisis has prompted a backlash against Syrian refugees in parts of Lebanon, with tents in informal camps being set alight and hundreds of Syrians sheltered in the Bekaa valley fleeing for fear of attack.

The Syrian conflict has exacerbated existing sectarian tensions in Lebanon, where most Sunni residents back the Syrian uprising and Shiites generally support Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Read it all.

Endnote:  Our post of late last week about the UN picking Syrian refugees for resettlement in America has gone ballistic on the internet.

The US will take thousands of Syrians this coming year unless citizens rise up in mass against the State Department’s soon-to-be-announced plan, but resettling even 15,000 now will make no dent in solving Syria’s or Lebanon’s problems!

See also Judy’s post yesterday—utter disaster.

Update:  British charity Oxfam says rich countries must take 5% of the 3 million Syrian refugees this year.  That comes to 179,500.  But, what strikes me as so interesting is that in articles like this one they never mention the US as among those nations.  Why is that?

Greensboro, NC: First Syrian refugees on the way there this week

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Our post of late last week where we reported that the US State Department is saying that thousands of Syrian refugees have been chosen by the UN to be resettled to your towns and cities went through the roof with thousands and thousands of readers passing it around.

They are probably flowing into other small cities as well, but the Triad offices of contractors Church World Service and World Relief-Evangelicals (two of the big nine!) seem especially adept at getting news stories planted. (Just last month see World Relief here and Church World Service in North Carolina, here.)

By the way, back in 2010 there was a huge controversy in this part of North Carolina about too many refugees with lousy care.  We wrote a three part story about the problem, which begins with this post. Local churches asked that the flow be slowed.  LOL! the series showed what a dog-eat-dog-world the world of federal refugee contracting can be!

From the Winston-Salem Journal:

GREENSBORO — The first in the current wave of Syrian refugees will arrive in the Triad this week, representatives with the organizations helping to resettle them said Friday.

Sarah Ivory, Church World Service director in the Triad, says they are working with the local Islamic Center. Photo: http://cwsgreensboro.org/2012/03/05/40under40/

A Syrian family of seven will arrive on Tuesday and will settle in Greensboro, said Sarah Ivory, the director of refugee and immigration services with Church World Service in Greensboro. The family includes five children, the youngest just 5 months old, Ivory said. The oldest is 10 years old.

Andrew Timbie, the office director for World Relief’s High Point office, said his organization is helping to resettle a family in Winston-Salem. That family also will arrive next week, although he would not provide the exact date.

“This is the first of many that we anticipate,” Timbie said of Syrian refugees.

Church World Service and World Relief work with the U.S. State Department and the United Nations to resettle refugees.

Ivory said the family coming to Greensboro is currently living in Jordan. Timbie said on Friday that he did not have a lot of background information about the family his office is assisting.

The organizations receive government money to help give refugee families fresh starts, but the goal is to help the families become self-sufficient, with the help of other community agencies.  [At least they are admitting they do it with government money, something we never saw reported in the early years of writing RRW.—ed]

[….]

Ivory said Church World Service is working with the Islamic Center of Greensboro, the Greensboro Jewish Federation and the local Syrian-American community to provide other resources to the family, such as hot meals upon arrival, clothing and diapers.

14 million refugees in the Middle East: utter disaster

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The brilliant and knowledgeable David P. Goldman writes in PJ Media:

There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new Caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population)….Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others. That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time.

Goldman has been predicting this kind of disaster in the Middle East for years.  He also writes under the pen name of Spengler after Oswald Spengler, a German historian who is best known for his book, Decline of the West.  Goldman continues:

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states, and if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the 30 Years War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

There’s a lot to be said about what we should do about ISIS and the other terrorist groups militarily, and it is being said. Here at RRW I’m wondering whether the State Department thinks 14 million refugees with nothing to go back to, rootless and dispossessed and many filled with a destructive rage beyond our comprehension, are our responsibility, a great pool of potential United States citizens.  I’m wondering if the resettlement agencies see a potential windfall and meat packers see cheap labor without end.  God help us if so. Ann has written extensively about Syrian refugees and the pressures on other countries to take them. I’m sorry, but you can’t place 11 million Syrians and 3 million Iraquis in western countries.

If there were anyone in the government looking after America’s interests, we would recognize that this catastrophe is not something we can fix.  If we’re going to help, we should be looking only to Christians and other selected religious minorities.  I wish we had the will and the strength to find them a piece of land of their own over there, but that’s a fantasy.  Goldman writes:

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas) will compete with the Caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

US State Department: UN has chosen several thousand Syrians for resettlement to America

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And so it begins!

Marie Harf at the US State Department sending out the first signals! The Syrians are coming!

As I predicted yesterday, it is coming—the announcement that we will be taking several thousand Syrian permanent refugees starting in a few weeks.  The new fiscal year begins on October 1.

I’m using the word “permanent” for a reason.  Some of the Syrians going to Europe are only going to be allowed to stay until the conflict is resolved, but our refugees are permanent.

From Middle East Monitor.  State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said this apparently in response to a question:

The United States has resettled 166 Syrians since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, a State Department official said on Thursday.

Marie Harf, US state department deputy spokeswoman, said during her daily press briefing, “The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) began in mid-2014 to refer Syrian refugees in large numbers to the United States.”

She pointed out that there are several thousands of Syrian refugees waiting to gain entry into the US, noting that the number will continue to increase.

And, we are expected to pony-up another $2 billion for the Syrian refugee crisis by the end of the year.

Don’t forget!  Back in February, the Obama Administration bowed to pressure from “human rights” lobbyists/federal contractors to relax security screening so as to accommodate a Syrian migration to America, to your towns and cities.  I can assure you that most of the Syrians admitted to the US will be Sunni Muslims.