State Dept. Press Briefing, Part IV, so what happened to the Christians?

State Dept. Press Briefing, Part IV, so what happened to the Christians?

Posted by acorcoran on February 14, 2008
http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com

I hope this is my last post on the State Dept. Press briefing of February 4th. You can see Parts I to III here.

We had been told all along that one major purpose of the original Kennedy bill on Iraqi Refugees was to assure that religious minorities and others would have a way to escape persecution by the majority Muslim population particularly those who want to see Iraq run according to Sharia law. (To be completely honest this isn’t how Kennedy would describe it.)

The original bill spelled out those who needed protection and resettlement to the West: Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Jews, Sabean Mandeans, Yazidis, Bahais and others. It also made special mention of gay and lesbian Iraqis. All that is gone now and in the February 4th press briefing there was not one mention of the Christians or other specifically persecuted refugees. I contacted Senator Lieberman’s office (he was a chief sponsor of the Kennedy bill) to see what happened to the minority reference and was told they didn’t know and I would have to go to Kennedy to find out. Yeh, right.

Previously we reported that a fact finding mission to Jordan heard evidence that Iraqi Christians were actually being turned away by Muslim employees of the United Nations. See Judy’s post here and go back to read the entire article by Ken Timmerman. I’m not going to be cagey. The Islamist agenda is to get more Muslims into the United States and other western countries.

So, lest you think that somehow the Kennedy “Refugee Crisis in Iraq” Act could help solve the problem of specific minority persecution, this exchange at the press briefing sets the record straight on who determines who comes to America—-the United Nations.

QUESTION: And what was the other thing I asked? About how you become a refugee. Like, how do you qualify to be a refugee?

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MS. SCIALABBA [Homeland Security]: You have to have a well-founded fear of persecution based on one of the five grounds: race, nationality, membership in a particular social group, religion, political opinion [this is the description of refugee generally and not specific to the Kennedy bill]. Any number of stories can fit that definition. I mean, if you lost your house because of your political opinion and you can’t find anyplace else to live, you don’t have anywhere else you can go, you could be a refugee based on that.

Then this is actually amusing if it weren’t so serious. Terry Rusch the head of refugee admissions at Population, Refugees and Migration quickly sets the record straight. You just can’t show up at the US Overseas Processing Entity (OPE). You must go through the UN.

MS. RUSCH: But even in – if I may, given access to the program, it’s not that somebody who’s lost their house can just show up at our OPE and say, “here I am.” Given the size of the world’s refugee population, we want to focus the resources that are available on those that are the most vulnerable.

Most of the refugees that come into the United States, and indeed in most other resettlement countries, have been referred by UNHCR, who has the mandate of the international community to look out for the needs of refugees worldwide. They determine when, in their dealings with individual cases, who are most in need of this particular durable solution, resettlement in a third country.

So, we are back to square one, the Muslim United Nations employees can choose who they want to resettle in America.