TRUMP TO PRIORITIZE CHRISTIAN REFUGEES, REVERSING OBAMA POLICY
Agencies’ ‘fake humanitarianism’ blamed for emphasis on Muslims only
WND.com
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America soon may be headed in a new direction in refugee policy.
President Trump is supporting the idea of a 120-day moratorium on new refugees so the government has time to form a plan that prioritizes Christians suffering from religious persecution.
Leo Hohmann, who has reported extensively on the refugee issue as a WND reporter, said the shift in focus would be a move in the right direction.
“Focusing on persecuted Christians for resettlement would mean that America retakes the moral high ground and honors the principles it was founded upon, those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he stated.
“Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, according to Open Doors, Voice of the Martyrs and a host of other aid organizations, so why have we made them the last priority? We’ve focused instead on what are mostly fake refugees, Sunni Muslims who in large part are the source of the persecution around the world, not the victims.
“Those Sunnis who have been displaced by the civil war in Syria should never have been resettled permanently in the West but taken into temporary shelters in the region, then repatriated after the war is over.”
Hohmann noted former President Obama showed very little sympathy for the plight of Christian refugees. In his brand-new book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” Hohmann tells the story of Robert DeKalaita, a Chicago immigration lawyer who has successfully gotten many Chaldean Iraqi Christians asylum in the United States. The Obama administration charged DeKalaita with “falsifying” and “embellishing” asylum applications to make it appear the Iraqi Christians’ situations were worse than they really were.
Not long after DeKalaita’s supposed embellishments occurred, ISIS came to power and swept across Iraq and Syria, slaughtering Christians in its path. The European Union declared a genocide against Christians was in progress in the Middle East. But the Obama Justice Department didn’t let that affect its prosecution of DeKalaita. They convicted the lawyer, who now faces up to 35 years in federal prison.
In his book, Hohmann also contrasts the Obama administration’s treatment of Christian border crossers and Muslim border crossers. In the spring of 2015, a group of 27 Chaldean Christians from Iraq tried to enter the U.S. across the southern border. They were detained and held for six months. Five of them were charged criminally for falsifying their asylum applications, and the rest were deported by the Obama administration.
Hohmann points out those 27 Christians, unless they managed to gain asylum in Europe, were most likely returned to Iraq, the place from which they had fled their Muslim persecutors.
Meanwhile, when a group of Somali Muslims showed up at the southern border in the spring of 2015 asking for asylum, they were put on a Department of Homeland Security bus and driven to a detention center in California. The standard procedure for such asylum seekers, as Hohmann relays in his book, is for them to be processed, given physicals, assigned to an asylum hearing and then allowed to go free into the American city of their choosing. The vast majority never show up for their asylum hearings and few ever get deported.
And Somalia is on the State Department’s watch list because its residents, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, are known for their vitriolic hatred of America.
The Obama administration had its priorities backwards, according to Hohmann.
“The resettlement agencies affiliated with various Christian and secular organizations – groups like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, World Relief, Church World Services and the International Rescue Committee – often like to talk about rescuing the most vulnerable in the world,” he said. “Yet they virtually ignore the plight of the persecuted religious minorities, Christians and Yazidis, in Muslim-dominated areas. Shame on them. No wonder they face backlash from a growing number of Americans who see through their fake humanitarianism.”
Carl Gallups, a Baptist pastor and author of “When the Lion Roars: Understanding the Implications of Ancient Prophecies for Our Time,” said while the Bible admonishes God’s people to treat refugees in a humane way, it would be best for the American social fabric if most of the refugees the nation accepts were Christian.
“A certain degree of deference should be given to Christian immigrants and refugees – without imposing a strict religious test upon the totality of those that desire to come to our nation legally,” Gallups told WND.
“Our national heritage is distinctly one of a historically traceable Judeo-Christian foundation. People who are the most willing to adapt to that foundational heritage and its ideals would, naturally, be ones who would be most likely to succeed as contributing members of our American culture and national future.
“Of course, it cannot be denied that Christians in the Middle East have been one of the main targets of the horrendous attacks of ISIS. The number of refugees, dead and orphaned from among that Christian community is staggering. Even the New York Times reported that Christianity was being ‘exterminated’ in the Middle East. In fact, they actually ran an article asking, ‘Who will stand up for the Christians in the Middle East?’ Donald Trump has answered their call.
“So it stands to reason that if the United States were going to give deference to anyone for refugee status within our borders, it would be to Christian immigrants rather than Islamic ones. The chances of their assimilation into our overall culture would be exponentially higher than the chances of Islamic assimilation – as has already been proven.”
William Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, said he and his organization support H.R. 390, the Iraq and Syria Genocide Emergency Relief and Accountability Act of 2017. The bill, introduced by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., would target assistance to minority groups being persecuted by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – including Christians and Yazidis. Not included would be Sunni Muslims.
“This has been the problem,” Murray told WND. “Christians have been at the back of the bus during this entire slaughter in Iraq and Syria. The Sunnis are not victims of genocide. The Christians are the victims of genocide, and they should be treated appropriately.”
Murray, author of the book “Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning,” acknowledged that while most persecuted Christians will ultimately remain in the Middle East, it will be good if more of them start to come to America.
“There are many families that have been so decimated by the Islamic State that it’s going to be very difficult for them to reestablish themselves there,” he said. “And while the majority of Christians do want to stay, there are many families with special needs that would be better off if they were able to come to the United States.”
Murray, who travels to the Middle East every year to hold Christmas celebrations for Christian refugees, said he recently visited a Christian town of about 75,000 people in Iraq. ISIS had completely destroyed the town, leaving all 75,000 inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere.
“The town will need to be rebuilt from the ground up,” Murray said sadly. “It’s going to be virtually impossible for every single resident to move back there. I stood in the ruins of the destroyed churches. I was in the destroyed homes, and by the way, the Islamic State are more thieves than anything else. Every single home was looted. Anything that had a Christian reference, a Christian image, was of course destroyed. These families are going back with nothing but the clothes on their back.”
Hohmann also conceded that many persecuted Christians want to remain in the Middle East, and that’s a good thing, in his view.
“By leaving they accede to the Islamic domination of the region that has been going on for hundreds of years,” Hohmann said. “These Christians’ roots in the land predate the invention of Islam by Muhammad, and we should encourage, support and protect those who wish to stay in the Middle East. To empty the Middle East of its Christian inhabitants will in the long run present more problems for America and the cause of freedom in that region.”
Hohmann pointed to a recent backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies that concluded it is foolish for the U.S. to resettle a “lucky few” refugees in America when it could help millions of refugees by empowering them to help themselves where they are now.
Murray said it would be nice if an “appropriate” number of Christian refugees were admitted to the United States. He noted that while Syria’s population is 10 percent Christian, less than 1 percent of Syrian refugees admitted under the Obama administration have been Christian. He hopes Trump will change that dynamic.
“At the very least, I would hope that Trump’s program would make this proportional, and in the best situation, that the victims of genocide, particularly the women that have been mutilated and raped and whose children have been abused, would be allowed to have a home in the United States,” Murray said.
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http://www.wnd.com/2017/01/trump-to-prioritize-christian-refugees-reversing-obama-policy/