by:
Raymond Ibrahim
Obama recently lashed out against the idea of giving preference to
Christian refugees, describing it as “shameful”: “That’s not American.
That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,”
loftily added the American president.
Accordingly, the administration is still determined to accept 10,000
more Syrian refugees, almost all of whom will be Muslim, despite the
fact that some are ISIS operatives, while many share the ISIS worldview
(as explained below).
Yet right as Obama was grandstanding about “who we are,” statistics were released
indicating that
“the current [refugee] system overwhelmingly favors Muslim refugees. Of
the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far, only 53
are Christians while 2,098 are Muslim.”
Aside from the obvious—or to use Obama’s own word,
“shameful”—pro-Muslim, anti-Christian bias evident in these statistics,
there are a number of other troubling factors as well.
For starters, the overwhelming majority of “refugees” being brought
into the United States are not just Muslim, but Sunnis—the one Muslim
sect that the Islamic State is
not persecuting and displacing. After all, ISIS—and most Islamic terrorist groups (Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Hamas,
et al)—are all Sunnis. Even Obama was arguably
raised a Sunni.
In this context, how are Sunnis “refugees”? Who are they fleeing?
Considering that the Obama administration defines refugees as people “
persecuted by their government,” most of those coming into the U.S. either aided or at least sympathized with the jihad against Assad (even if they
only revealed their true colors when the time was right).
Simply put, some 98% of all refugees belong to the same Islamic sect
that ISIS does. And many of them, unsurprisingly, share the same
vision—such as the “refugees” who recently murdered some 120 people in
France, or the “refugees” who
persecute Christian minorities in European camps and settlements.
(None of this should be surprising considering that Al Azhar—the Sunni
world’s most prestigious university of Islamic law, which co-hosted
Obama’s 2009 “A New Beginning” speech—was recently
exposed as teaching and legitimizing all the atrocities that ISIS commits.)
As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on
their non-Sunni religious identity—not by Assad, but by so-called
“rebel” forces (AKA jihadis)—many of them are being denied refuge in
America.
Thus, although Christians were approximately 10 percent of Syria’s
population in 2011, only one percent has been granted refuge in America.
This despite the fact that, from a strictly humanitarian point of
view—and humanitarianism is the chief reason being cited in accepting
refugees, Obama’s “compassion”—Christians should receive priority simply
because
they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East.
At the hands of the Islamic State, which supposedly precipitated the migrant crisis, Christians have been repeatedly
forced to renounce Christ or die; they have been enslaved and raped; and they have had
more than 400 of their churches desecrated and destroyed.[i]
ISIS has committed no such atrocities against fellow Sunnis, they who
are being accepted into the U.S. in droves. Nor does Assad enslave,
behead, or crucify people based on their religious identity (
despite Jeb Bush’s recent, and absurd, assertions).
Obama
should further prioritize Christian refugees
simply because his own policies in the Middle East have directly
exacerbated their plight. Christians and other religions minorities did
not flee from Bashar Assad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muamar
Gaddafi’s Libya. Their systematic persecution began only
after the
U.S. interfered in those nations in the name of “democracy” but
succeeding in only uncorking the jihadi terrorists that the dictators
had long kept suppressed.
Incidentally, prioritizing Christian refugees would not merely be an
altruistic gesture or the U.S. government’s way of righting its wrongs:
rather it brings many benefits to America’s security.
(Unlike Muslims or even Yazidis, Christians are easily assimilated into
Western nations due to the shared Christian heritage, and they bring
trustworthy language and cultural skills that are beneficial to the “war on terror.”)
Finally, no one should be shocked by these recent revelations of the
Obama administration’s pro-Muslim and anti-Christian policies. They
fit a clear and established pattern of religious bias within his
administration. For example:
- When inviting scores of Muslim representatives, the State Department is in the habit of denying visas to solitary Christian representatives.
- When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for several months and then sent back to the lion’s den to be enslaved, raped, or murdered.
- When the Nigerian government waged a strong offensive against Boko Haram, killing some of its terrorists, Secretary of State John Kerry fumed and called for the “human rights” of the jihadis (who regularly slaughter and rape Christians and burn their churches). More recently, Kerry “urged Tajikistan not to go overboard in its crackdown on Islam.”
- When persecuted Coptic Christians planned on joining Egypt’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood revolution of 2013, the U.S. said no.
- When persecuted Iraqi and Syrian Christians asked for arms to join the opposition fighting ISIS, D.C. refused.
- When the UN Security Council held a meeting to discuss the genocide against
Christians and other minorities, although “many high level delegations
from UN member states addressed the Security Council meeting, some at
the Foreign Minister level, the United States failed to send … a high
ranking member of the State Department.”
Most recently, as the White House works on releasing a statement
accusing ISIS of committing genocide against religious minorities such
as Yazidis — who are named and recognized in the statement — Obama
officials are arguing that Christians “
do not appear to meet the high bar set out in the genocide treaty” and thus likely not be mentioned.
In short, and to use the president’s own words, it is the Obama
administration’s own foreign and domestic policies that are “shameful,”
that are “not American,” and that do not represent “who we are.”
Yet the question remains: Will Americans take notice and do anything
about their leader’s policies—which welcome Islamic jihadis while
ignoring their victims—or will their indifference continue until they
too become victims of the jihad, in a repeat of Paris or worse?
Raymond Ibrahim is author of
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians
