Fearing militant attacks, law enforcers have kept close and constant surveillance on at least 40 Islamist groups in the country.
According to the intelligence department, supporters of those Islamist outfits are plotting to launch militant attacks by whipping up the masses through anti-government propaganda.
The members of law enforcing agencies were asked to remain vigilant and report anything suspicious by those Islamist organisations.
The 40 Islamist groups under intelligence watch are: International Khatme Nabuat Movement,Arakan Rohingya Force, Islamic Solidarity Font, Arakan People’s Army, Liberation Myanmar Force, Arakan Mujahid Party, Rohingya Independence Force, Rohingya Independence Army, Rohingya Patriotic Front Al-Harat-Al Islamia, Tauhidi Janata, World Islami Front, Jumaatul Al Sadat, Sahadat-e-Nabuat, Allahar Dal, Islamic Front, Jamaat As Sadat, Al-Khidmat, Hizbullah Islami Samaj, Muslim Millat, Sharia Council, Ahle Hadis Andolan Bangladesh, Dawati Kafela, Hizbul Mahdi, Bangladesh Anti-terrorist Party, Al Islam Martians Brigade, Jommiat Ahle Hadis Andolon, Jommiatul Ehzia Utraz, Hayatur Ilaha, Sattabad, Anjumane Talamize Islamia, Kalemar Jamaat, Tazir Bangladesh, Forkan Movement, Sahaba Parishad, Ketal Bahini, Eshar Bahini, Al Fahad, Horkatul Mujahidin, Mujahidin-e-Tazim, Jadid Al-Kayda, Al Markajul Al Islami and Jamatul Falaiya.
Intelligence sources said the parties are mainly active in the Baitul Mukarram Mosque area and Chittagong district.
The Chittagong district is where tens of thousands of Rohingya are living.
Why do we care?
We care because the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the largest of the top nine federal refugee contractors)testifiedthat they want to resettle Rohingya from Bangladesh to your towns!
Here is what Anastasia Brown told the US State Department on May 15th, in her testimony for the USCCB:
…we strongly believe that the Rohingya in Bangladesh should receive a Priority Two designation from the U.S. government, allowing them to be resettled as members of a persecuted group. [Meaning that someone need only say, I am Rohingya so therefore I am persecuted.—ed]
This is our 147th post in our Rohingya Reports category. We have followed the “humanitarian” agitators public relations campaign to bring more Rohingya to the West ever since we began RRW in 2007.
Before I get to today’s news, please please pay attention! I’ve been writing about the Rohingya Muslims of Burma for more than five years. We have (to date)145 posts in a special category we set up just to chronicle the recent history of the Rohingya in Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh and elsewhere because we could see that one day there would be a push to bring them to America.
***Update and an afterthought!*** If you are from somewhere other than the US and think this story doesn’t apply to you, think again! Just search “Rohingya and your _____country” and see if they are already arriving where you live. We know Rohingya have gone to Ireland, Canada, Australia and India among others.
It is your classic case of the media in cahoots with NGOs developing a false victim’s status for the troublesome Islamists as a drumbeat is built to demand that the West take them as “refugees” to your towns and cities.
USCCB: Bring them to America!
Below is what the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) spokeswoman told the US State Department at the hearings we attended on May 15th. The USCCB is the largest of the nine major federal refugee contractors. This is directly from the official testimony of the USCCB as presented by Anastasia Brown:
The most important hope for the Rohingya in Bangladesh and other places is that they achieve a status that will allow them to live normal lives. Given the limited options for this population, we strongly believe that the Rohingya in Bangladesh should receive a Priority Two designation from the U.S. government, allowing them to be resettled as members of a persecuted group. [Meaning that someone need only say, I am Rohingya so therefore I am persecuted.—ed] While the Rohingya have not received this designation, other refugee minorities of Burma have….[Here she is referring to Christian Burmese we have been resettling by the thousands. Brown is essentially saying, we Catholics gotta be fair to the Muslims!—ed]
We applaud the U.S. government’s resettlement of a small number of Rohingyas out of Malaysia and Bangladesh.However, the need is much greater than this. We encourage the US government to continue to work for a solution with the government of Bangladesh which would allow resettlement to start, and we believe that a P-2 designation for those in the camps would facilitate this. We also encourage the U.S. government to look at expansion of resettlement for Rohingya and other refugees that have reached Indonesia, to avoid onward movements by boat towards Australia.
Why is Burma’s ethnic violence a problem that the US must attempt to solve by bringing refugees to America? Indeed, as much as we feel sorry for Australia, why is Australia’s boat people problem ours to solve?
If Brown and others get their way, the next huge Muslim wave (after Somalis) to America will be Rohingya! And, remember that the contractors are paid by the head to resettle refugees—the more they bring, the more they get of your tax dollars.
Readers must contact your elected officials in Washington and tell them Burma’s ethnic conflicts are not our problem and do not allow Rohingya migration to the US!
The Muslim Issue has this photo, but I can’t find it anywhere else at the moment. I’m wondering if it appeared in early versions of the story and has since been removed and replaced with photos of burning mosques!
So here is the latest from Burma. Hat tip: The Muslim Issuevia twitter.
YANGON—Houses and mosques were set ablaze by mobs in a town in eastern Myanmar after a Buddhist woman was allegedly “torched” by a Muslim man, authorities said Tuesday, in a fresh bout of religious violence.
An ethnic Shan-Muslim man was arrested after he “torched” a woman selling petrol, a police officer in the Shan State capital of Lashio told AFP under the condition of anonymity.
A town official confirmed the arrest of the Muslim man who he said had “torched a woman with petrol,”
A curfew was imposed late Tuesday to disperse angry mobs of local people—including Buddhist monks—who had “destroyed some houses and mosques,” the official added, also declining to be named.
“Fires have been put out at some places in the town… the situation is under control now,” the official said, adding soldiers have been deployed to enforce the curfew.
The woman, an ethnic Shan-Buddhist, was taken to hospital, but neither official could give details of her condition.
The article goes on to list the Rohingya grievances as is the usual case in any media story coming out of this ethnic conflict.
Human Rights Watch has accused Myanmar’s authorities of being a party to ethnic cleansing over the violence, which killed some 200 people and saw mobs set fire to whole villages.
Myanmar’s reformist President Thein Sein this month vowed to uphold Rohingya rights, while opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday made a rare intervention in the incendiary issue to condemn a ban on Rohingya having more than two children in strife-torn Rakhine.
On this last point, we have written many times that Aung San Suu Kyi has previously remained silent angering the pro-Rohingya ‘rights’ agitators. There are many stories in the last few days that she has spoken out on the two-child policy for Burmese Muslims. But, truth be told, just as anywhere in the West, Muslim Rohingya are producing more children then Westerners and everyone knows it’s just a matter of numbers and time.
By the way, China’s one-child policy is a reason Chinese migrants (even men!) use to ask for a grant of asylum in the US.
As we reported here, the Office of Refugee Resettlement recently released its Annual Report to Congress for 2009(four years late!). To save you from going through its nearly 200 pages, I’m from time to time going to bring you some nuggets. Already I’ve told you two place we could start cutting the bloated federal budget by cutting grants for “healthy marriages” and for “ethnic community based organizations” which are essentially little ‘Acorns’—community organizing outfits funded by you.
Wait till I tell you about those special savings accounts for refugees. Did you know that you are putting your money into their private savings accounts laundered through non-profits?
I hope to have a couple of things for you today, including the savings accounts, here is the first. If you go to Appendix C of the report, you can learn all about the Big Nine federal contractors who monopolize the program. There were ten in 2009 as the State of Iowa was being phased out.
Here is the contractor and the number of refugees it brought to your towns and cities in 2009 (remember they are being paid by the head!):
Numero uno!
Church World Service: 6,602 (plus helped 10,806 Cubans and Haitians)
Episcopal Migration Ministries: 4,792
Ethiopian Community Development Council: 3,874
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society: 2,306
International Rescue Committee: 11,547
Iowa Dept. of Human Services: 426
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service: 10,129
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants: 7,166
US Conference of Catholic Bishops: 22,417 (11,064 Cubans and Haitians)***
World Relief (National Association of Evangelicals): 7,264
For more on these mostly “religious” non-profits read a report at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) which I missed in March of last year, here. Looks like in my survey of 2009, the Catholics are number 1 followed by the secular IRC, and with the Lutherans coming in at number 3. (Although that depends on whether you count Church World Service’s Cubans and Haitians).
Says the always diplomatic CIS:
It is to the United States’ credit that our nation has, from her founding, provided a safe haven for the unjustly persecuted. However, even well-meaning efforts require accountability and should be balanced against other important, competing priorities. Without appropriate balance and oversight, helping refugees shifts from being a worthy humanitarian gesture in truly exceptional cases to an avenue for government largesse, enriching private bureaucracies while feeding public cynicism.
Readers, there is no oversight of the refugee resettlement program.
***Endnote: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is pouring $millions into their political immigration platform, as we learned a few days ago at the Washington Post.Are they using taxpayer money? Remember they are paid by the head for all those refugees they are resettling.
Update January 26th: The Nashville Scenedoesn’t like Barnett’s commentary, attacks Barnett Alinsky-style. They are so predictable.
On the heels of my post yesterday about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops “National Migration Week” comes this zinger of an opinion piece from longtime observer of the federal government’s refugee resettlement program, Don Barnett, published in The Tennesseanalso yesterday (highlights are mine):
Refugee resettlement was once the work of self-supporting charities that invested their own resources and were directly responsible for outcomes. Today, it is the work of federal contractors who spend public resources and have no responsibility three months after the refugee has been “resettled.”
A July Government Accountability Office report, “Refugee Resettlement — Greater Consultation With Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program,” is critical of refugee contractors and how they place refugees in local communities across the U.S. In particular, the report cites lack of adequate consultation with local “stakeholders” before placing refugees in a community. The agencies that resettle refugees are compensated from 17 different federal programs tailored to refugee resettlement, as well as from numerous nonspecific grants and programs at the federal and state levels.
The largest resettlement contractor is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which resettles refugees through its affiliate, Catholic Charities.
As the GAO report notes, a network of contractors, known as “voluntary agencies,” “selects the communities where refugees will live. … Voluntary agencies consider various factors when determining where refugees will be placed, but few agencies we visited consulted relevant local stakeholders, which posed challenges for service providers.”
The report found that “… most public entities such as public schools and health departments generally said that agencies notified them of the number of refugees expected to arrive in the coming year, but did not consult them regarding the number of refugees they could serve before proposals were submitted to the (U.S. State Department).”
Since striking a deal in 2008 to manage the federal dollars for other, smaller refugee contractors in the state, Catholic Charities of Tennessee effectively runs refugee resettlement in Tennessee. Today, only 35 percent of its annual budget is dedicated to nonrefugee social services. As the GAO report notes, for organizations such as Catholic Charities, “funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
Sure enough, resettlement in Tennessee went up dramatically after 2008. In fact, since 2009, Tennessee has taken an average of about 1,450 refugees per year, a 62 percent increase over the average number resettled from 2004 to 2008. The total number of refugees resettled to the U.S. actually went down at the same time that Tennessee’s number of resettled refugees went up.
More refugees mean more government services, since the contractors assist the refugees for only three months or less in the vast majority of cases. Most refugees go into TennCare for varying periods of time. TennCare and other welfare programs such as Families First are used by refugees at much higher than average rates and are partially supported by state taxpayer dollars.
Refugee resettlement is very profitable for the nonprofits.There is a reason why refugee resettlement is Tennessee Catholic Charities’ biggest mission. All of its non-refugee social services are smaller, less lucrative and almost all are shrinking from year to year. Ironically, its national motto is: Working to Reduce Poverty in America.
USCCB took in an astonishing $72.1 million in revenue from refugee resettlement alone in 2011, 97 percent of which came from government contracts, grants and earnings from federal refugee programs. A significant portion of this money does not have to be shown as having been spent on refugees. In other words, millions flow to the contracting agency with no strings attached.(My personal favorite in this money racket: USCCB received $3.7 million in 2011 as a commission for collecting on the loans made by the U.S. government to refugees for airline tickets to the U.S. USCCB is under no obligation to spend any of this money on refugees.
Federal contractors will always act like federal contractors. But is it too much to ask refugee contractors to cover at least a portion of the costs borne by Tennessee taxpayers today? Is it too much to ask for more of a voice for the taxpayer who, after all, is the main stakeholder in this program?
January 6th to the 12th was the big week when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops ginned up its pro-amnesty political indoctrination campaign with National Migration Week.
Mind you, the Bishops can pressure the Catholic flock however they wish, it’s a free country (for now!), but it’s when they take taxpayer money to do their “charitable” and political work then it becomes every taxpayer’s business.
Before you read the excellent discussion of their latest parishioner indoctrination campaign by Dominique Peridans at the Center for Immigration Studies please visit this comprehensive review of the Bishops finances by Thomas Allen at VDARE.
Allen:
….in fact USCCB independently raises only about 2% (two percent) of its $72.1 million total revenues. The rest comes from contracts, grants and earnings from federal programs.
Also, we have written extensively here (see our archive!) over the years about the USCCB as one of the top nine federal contractors resettling refugees to your towns (and their lobbying for other issues as well, including global warming) while feeding from the federal trough.
Ecclesiastes offers a rather honest and blunt appraisal of human life, and seeks to articulate basic human truths. Chapter 1, verse 9 of the book in the Hebrew Bible reads “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!” Now, human truth, if indeed truth, is trans-situational, that is to say, can be applied to host of situations.
The situation in this case to which this truth can be applied is that of National Migration Week (January 6-12), sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops through its Migration and Refugee Services Offices. I perused the promotional materials, almost naively hoping to find a few nuggets of newness, some refreshing insight, a slightly more holistic perspective being put forth. “Nothing is new under the sun” here.
In fact, it is striking to read how the American Catholic Church’s pastoral proposals regarding immigrants display how hardened the Church’s “official position” is becoming: presented as a given. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever that the issue is complex and there is no margin of freedom granted to the laity to discern varying responses to the issue.
Against the spiritually magnificent, yet concretely vague backdrop of “welcoming Christ in the stranger” (drawn from Christ’s own exhortation in Matthew 25:35), the document restates the American Catholic Church’s presumption that any perspective different from that which it articulates is characterized by in-hospitality.The document then invites the reader to labor for a “conversion of hearts and minds” in those who hold these differing perspectives.
To what one must convert? Comprehensive immigration reform. In this campaign (and beyond it), the bishops hope to help Catholics at the parochial level to enact local expressions of such reform and to incite Catholics at the national level to promote such reform.
Bishops: Border enforcement is “meanness.”
Not only are the bishops very concrete and very specific in their proposals, they are unabashedly political. They are in the business of a “broad legalization program”. In their minds, charity can only and must work this way. An enforcement-only approach (which no one is really proposing, but which they confuse with an enforcement-first approach) they decry as antithetical to charity – and, according to their expertise, a failure. So much money is being devoted to meanness!
