It was standing-room only at a
council meeting in semi-rural Pickens County, South Carolina, Monday night, as
residents flooded the chambers, many of them interested in one topic – the
potential of Syrian Muslim refugees being resettled in their county.
On Sunday in Twin Falls, Idaho, more
than 100 people marched through town with signs and U.S. flags, protesting
refugee resettlement in their town and demanding that a local community college
shut down its resettlement office.
On Oct. 6 in Redlands, California, a
woman affiliated with a local tea-party group stood up at a city council
meeting and voiced her concerns about possible Muslim refugees being injected
into the community from Syria.
In St. Cloud, Minnesota, a group of
concerned citizens became visibly upset at a town hall last Tuesday when Gov.
Mark Dayton announced that anyone who is not comfortable with that state’s
growing diversity, including its expanding Somali refugee population, “should
find another state” because Minnesota’s economy “cannot expand based on white,
B+, native-born citizens. We don’t have enough.”
Dayton said he was aware of the
racial tensions in St. Cloud with regard to Somali refugees.
“If you are that intolerant, if you
are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state,” he said, as reported
by the Daily Globe. “Find a state where the minority
population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going
to be again.”
All of these developments have
pro-immigrant groups worried about the growing “backlash” against America’s
fast-growing population of recent immigrants and refugees from Muslim lands in
the Middle East and Africa.
From Syria alone, there will be
10,000 coming over the next year, and at least that many more in 2017. The
Obama administration wants to bring nearly 200,000 refugees from all nations to
the U.S. over the next 24 months.
And the organizations that rake in
millions of dollars in government cash working on these resettlements are
getting nervous that their plans are coming under growing scrutiny at the local
level.
That much is evident by examining
the presentations lined up for a major pro-immigration conference set in New
York City in December. The conference includes break-out sessions on how to
counter the growing “backlash” against refugees, “particularly Muslim
refugees,” according to organizers of the National Immigrant Integration
Conference.
Countering
the backlash
The theme of this year’s conference
is “New American Dreams,” picking up the theme of the White House Taskforce on
New Americans, which aims to convert 5 million refugees and recent immigrants
into “New Americans” armed with full citizenship and voting rights.
But every day more Americans are
finding out how the refugee resettlement program works, and most of them don’t
like what they see, says refugee watchdog Ann Corcoran, author of the Refugee Resettlement
Watch blog.
People are holding protest rallies
in Idaho and petition drives in North Dakota. They’re approaching their city
and county leaders with questions in California, Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Minnesota. And in South Carolina, grassroots activists are educating their local
leaders and asking them to block the arrival of refugees. It happened Monday
night in Pickens County, where the county council voted unanimously to block
funding for any federal refugee resettlements, citing costs and security
concerns.
“Technically, they don’t have any
legal way to stop them, but the federal government is unlikely to send refugees
where they know they won’t be welcomed,” Corcoran told WND. “This is what
people need to understand. At the national level, there is no legal recourse.
People will talk about the 10th Amendment and states’ rights, but it’s never
been tested.”
But Corcoran said there is plenty
that citizen activists can do at the grassroots level to cause problems for
pushers of refugee resettlement. An informed citizenry is their “worst
nightmare,” she said.
This is an industry that, until
recently, had operated below the radar in nearly 200 cities across 48 states. A
network of church groups, nonprofits and foundations has worked quietly with
the federal government and the United Nations to bring more than 3 million
foreign refugees into the United States since 1990, about half of them from
Muslim-dominated countries with heavy jihadist populations like Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria. It is also a system that is inherently biased
against the most persecuted group of refugees in the world – Christians,
Corcoran said.
More than 97 percent of the nearly
2,000 Syrians resettled in the United States so far have been Muslim, for
instance.
In an effort to counter the pushback,
the issue will be taken up at the nation’s largest pro-immigrant conference
Dec. 13-15 in New York City. An entire breakout session will address the
growing challenges to Muslim resettlement in the United States.
The planners of the session, titled “Understanding
and Addressing Today’s Organized Backlash Against Muslim Immigrants and
Refugees,” accuse anyone who opposes the
“transformation” of their community through Muslim immigration of
being “Islamophobic.”
Those “fueling” the pushback against
refugee resettlement will be “identified,” and a plan of attack will be put
forth. The following are the exact words from the conference program
guide:
“This session will explore the
resurgence of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and activism and the
recent use of Islamophobia to undermine refugee resettlement. This new
development has implications for receiving communities and for refugee
resettlement, particularly of Muslim refugees. How does this backlash against
resettlement fit within the broader attacks on Muslims in the U.S. and what are
the best ways to respond? Who are the key actors fueling this campaign and how
is their message spreading? Hear from experts from the Muslim community and
from refugee resettlement leaders about this new challenge and potential
responses.”
The “experts” from the Muslim
community are likely to be affiliated with the Council for Islamic-American
Relations or CAIR, a Muslim civil liberties organization with ties to the
international Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. These ties are documented in the
court records of the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest
terror-financing trial ever conducted on U.S. soil. See
WND’s Rogue’s Gallery of terror-connected CAIR officials.
As for the “key actors” who are
fueling the pushback against refugees, critics say law-abiding Americans
concerned about the safety and security of their communities have every right
to speak out and ask questions.
Dr. Mark Christian, a former child
imam born into a prominent Muslim family in Egypt who later broke away from the
Islamic faith and became a Christian, said the “key actors” driving the
backlash against Muslim immigration are the Muslims themselves.
“They are using their Twitter
accounts on a daily basis to communicate their agenda of hatred against Jews
and Christians, and by their actions in Europe, in Israel and throughout the
Middle East where they are killing non-Muslims,” Christian said. “People are
afraid when they see what Muslims are doing on a regular basis in their own
countries – in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Pakistan against the Christians and
in Israel against the Jews. The main reason for their fear is they see what’s
happening in the Middle East, and they don’t want that to be transferred to
their state, their city, their neighborhood.”
Christian called it “an atrocity” to
“blame the messenger” instead of looking at the main message of violence that
is going out from Muslims worldwide.
“Should we be hiding the truth?
Should we be putting our heads in the sand?” Christian asked. “So go talk about
global warming and the whales not having enough salt in the sea and you will be
invited to their next event, because John Kerry says climate change helped
cause the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS.”
Secrecy
preferred - The local democratic process –
where local residents attend local meetings and ask pointed questions of their
local elected representatives – is deemed offensive to the refugee re-settlers,
Corcoran said. They would rather meet behind closed doors with pre-invited
“stakeholders,” but citizen activists are demanding more transparency in the
refugee resettlement process.
“I have a bird’s-eye view of it
because I hear from so many different places around the country. So I am very
encouraged at what I am seeing,” Corcoran told WND. “They clearly are scared or
they wouldn’t be dedicating an entire session to this at their biggest
conference of the year. In the one little description, they used the word
‘Islamophobe’ repeatedly, so we see what their strategy is. They will attempt
to denigrate and demonize anyone who questions why their local community is
being transformed demographically without so much as a public hearing, let
alone a vote of the public.”
Demonizing
the opposition - This strategy of demonization is
playing out with limited success around the country.
On Oct. 6, a tea-party group
approached the city council in Redlands, California, and asked
representatives on the council to put out a plan for keeping the city safe from
any potential Syrian refugee resettlements.
The Redlands
Daily Facts reported that Victoria Hargrave, a local
resident affiliated with the tea party, stood up at her local council meeting
and said, “Our nation is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and we value freedom
of speech, freedom of religion and property rights as protected by the
Constitution.” She said Muslims reject these values and are coming to America
to impose Shariah law.
The local newspaper followed up by
calling the regional CAIR leader, who berated Hargrave and those she
represented as ignorant bigots. “This paranoia and phobia is rooted in a
combination of ignorance and bigotry,” Hussam Ayloush, executive director of
the Los Angeles CAIR chapter and chairman of the Syrian American Council, told
the newspaper about the Redlands tea-party concerns.
The Islamic Community Center of
Redlands invited the public to an “Open Mosque Day” in the wake of Hargrave’s
comments at the council meeting. Mohammad Hossain, founder of the Islamic
Center of Redlands, said the refugees are “homeless and have nothing, so
everybody has a duty to help them – that they would be grateful and not
commit violence.” “I wonder,” mused Corcoran, “would the mosque and CAIR be
involved at all if we were saving mostly Christian Syrians and not resettling
mostly Muslims, as we are now?”
Changing
America by changing its people - The conference
in New York will offer another breakout session on “How
new waves of Asian and African migration are transforming receiving communities.” The term “Asians” includes those from the Middle East
including Iraq, Iran, Burma, Afghanistan and Pakistan – all of which are
sending Muslims to the U.S.
In this session, the presenters brag
about how they are “transforming” communities and creating “shifts in influence”
that lead to “changing the narrative on immigration” by sending “new waves” of
Muslims from the Middle East and Africa into communities nationwide.
While the backlash against Muslim
refugees has started to resonate with some local officials in conservative
areas of the nation, others remain dead-set on bringing in more refugees from
some of the worst jihadist hotbeds of the world, such as Syria, Afghanistan and
Somalia.
And they’re not all Democrats like
Dayton in Minnesota.
GOP Gov. Nikki Haley of South
Carolina told her state’s concerned citizens she “trusts” the federal
government’s vetting system and is not concerned that terrorists could
infiltrate the ranks of refugees. This despite the fact that a top FBI
counter-terrorism agent testified before the House Homeland Security committee
on Feb. 11 and said vetting refugees from a “failed state” like Syria was
virtually impossible.
Republican Gov. Rick Snyder of
Michigan has asked the federal government to send more Syrian refugees to his
state. In the comments section of the Detroit
News article that reported Synder’s efforts to
convince the Obama administration to send his state more Syrians, the vast
majority of readers were not in agreement with their governor’s plans:“… the
boy blunder, will do anything to help the democrat voter base … yet as a
Service Connected veteran I cannot get an anti-biotic for a impacted tooth,”
wrote one reader, Elmo Hickey.
“We have people going hungry and
homeless vets … and look at our seniors … sad … quit worrying about
all these people. We need help here … we pay taxes … they don’t … wake up,”
wrote Linda Taylor.
“What is Snyder’s plan for keeping
political Islam out of Detroit and addressing it elsewhere in Michigan? He
better have a plan because he is opening the door to many who will not respect
our Constitution or our political system. I suggest you call his office and see
what kind of response you get. As usual, he has not thought this trough
assessing the probable consequences,” wrote Clifton Dawley.
Vincent Jo said, “We don’t have the
money to care for our own citizens. Why are we bringing in more? Saudi, Iran,
UAE, etc., need to step up and shelter their own. They are filthy rich.
Michigan has no money. The feds have no money.
Just say NO!” - Another reader,
Johnson Landis, chimed in with, “How about fixing the roads instead?” Mayors beg for more refugees Besides
the many governors like Dayton, Haley and Snyder, 18 mayors across the nation are also begging the federal government
to send them more Syrian refugees. One such mayor is Ed Pawlowski of Allentown,
Pennsylvania. As
NPR reported Monday, Pawlowski said he received
more than 2,000 email messages within 24 hours when he announced his intent to
“welcome” Syrian refugees to his town. He said most of the messages came from
outside his city.
At a recent informational meeting
put on by a Lutheran-affiliated resettlement agency in Allentown, the agency
“got more than they bargained for” when a group of tea-party activists showed
up, reported
the Morning Call. People started asking questions
about costs to local school and health systems, and security concerns about
potential terrorists. “So half the meeting turned out to be about whether there
would be terrorists coming or not,” Corcoran said. “It was beautiful. Democracy
in action.”
A check of the IRS
tax return for the Lutheran Family and
Children Services of Eastern Pennsylvania shows that its CEO, Luanne Fisher,
makes $400,000 a year and three other staffers bring home six-figure salaries.
Almost $9 million of the nonprofit’s $14 million in revenue went to salaries,
pensions, benefits and management, not to the refugees. Of its $14 million in
revenue, $13.5 million comes from government grants.
Read letter signed by 18 mayors explaining why they
want more refugees sent to their cities. - Spreading the burden - Corcoran points
out that because so many cities and towns have balked at receiving refugees,
the resettlement industry is increasingly looking to spread refugees out beyond
the major cities. “They’re running out of places to put them,” she said, and
that’s why even small towns are being asked to share the burden.
Small cities like Twin Falls, Idaho;
Fargo, North Dakota; and Spartanburg, South Carolina, have seen a war of words
break out in recent months between those who want to “welcome the stranger” and
those who suggest a more cautious approach.
Johnnelle Raines, a local activist
in Pickens County, South Carolina, said she has immersed herself in the refugee
issue over the past two months, learning all she can about it and relaying the
facts to her local council members. She said they were reluctant at first but
the more they read and educated themselves, they decided the program would
import the problems of the Third World into an area that already has enough of
its own problems.
“I know it’s a national problem, but
the only thing I can do anything about is local. Trying to make sure the people
in Pickens County are aware and trying to counter what I consider to be
propaganda, that they’ve all been vetted and they’re all wonderful people,”
Raines told WND. “Most people don’t want to delve in and learn the truth, but I
am grateful that our council did.”
Raines said she believes many
refugees from Muslim-dominated countries will not assimilate well into American
culture. “Muslims are using Christians as a way to infiltrate, using our good
nature, our Christian values, using that against us,” she said. “And in my
opinion, it’s all about money, too. Judas betrayed Jesus for money, and there
is so much money involved in this program. Everyone is getting their share, and
they’re betraying the people of the United States. In my opinion, it’s
borderline treason. So I got involved in this pretty hot and heavy. The one
place I felt I could make a difference is in my local community.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/refugee-pushback-growing-in-multiple-states/
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