Posted tagged ‘Yazids’

No Refuge for the Victims of Jihadist Genocide

June 3, 2016

No Refuge for the Victims of Jihadist Genocide, Front Page MagazineJoseph Klein, June 3, 2016

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President Obama sharply criticized the suggestion that persecuted Christians be given preference for admission as refugees.   He said that “when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted… that’s shameful.”  Obama added: “That’s not American, it’s not who we are.” 

The Obama-Trudeau policy of opening doors widely to Muslim refugees, while allowing hardly a crack to open for the Christian and Yazidi victims of jihadi-inspired genocide, is risky, to be sure. It is also immoral.

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The Obama administration is rapidly accelerating its admission and resettlement of Syrian refugees.  The administration is well on its way to meeting its target of taking 10,000 Syrians into the country by the end of the current fiscal year on September 30th.  In the first five months of 2016, 2,099 Syrian refugees have been admitted, compared with 2,192 for the whole of 2015, according to a report by CNS News. However, only a very tiny percentage are Christians, a beleaguered minority who are facing genocide in their home country. The Obama administration is immorally discriminating against Christian Syrian refugees.

“Out of the 2,099 Syrian refugees admitted so far this year, six (0.28 percent) are Christians,” CNS reported.  Ten (0.3 percent) are Yazidis. Over 99 percent are Muslims. And the trend line is worsening as the year progresses.  Last month, only two Christians (0.19 percent) were admitted compared to 1,035 Muslims.

Christians are estimated to have made up approximately ten percent of the total Syrian population at the outset of the conflict in Syria, according to the CIA Factbook. As Christians have come under attack by both the regime and jihadist groups, including ISIS, the Christian population in Syria has declined.

Patrick Sookhdeo, the founder and international director of the charity group the Barnabas Fund, which has worked to rescue Syrian Christians, said: “In Aleppo, to give you one illustration, there used to be 400,000 Christians four years ago. Today there may be between 45,000 and 65,000.”

Yet, according to data compiled by the U.S. State Department Refugee Processing Center, only 47 Syrian Christians have been admitted to the United States in all that time – slightly over 1 percent of the total number of Syrian refugees admitted. The current rate of Christian admissions is running far below even that miniscule level.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

After receiving significant pressure, the Obama administration finally yielded to the obvious. Secretary of State John Kerry declared last March that the Islamic State has been committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities in the Middle East.

Note that while Kerry included Shiite Muslims on his list of ISIS’s genocide victims, Sunni Muslims were not included. Nor should they be, considering the fact that ISIS jihadists are themselves Sunni Muslims. Al Qaeda jihadists are Sunni Muslims. The ideology of Wahhabism fueling the jihadists’ reign of terror, exported by Saudi Arabia, is of Sunni Muslim origin.

Therefore, one would think that Christians and other targeted minorities would receive preference for refugee status in the United States, not Sunni Muslims. Think again. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, approximately 96% of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States by the Obama administration have been Sunni Muslims.

President Obama sharply criticized the suggestion that persecuted Christians be given preference for admission as refugees.   He said that “when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted… that’s shameful.”  Obama added: “That’s not American, it’s not who we are.”

It is President Obama’s Syrian refugee policy that is both “shameful” and “not American.” It has amounted to what is in effect a “religious test,” vastly favoring the one group of migrants from Syria who needs refugee protection the least– Sunni Muslims. Moreover, some of these Sunni Muslims are bringing their Wahhabi jihadist ideology with them.

Whatever self-righteous statements Obama, Pope Francis and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon make regarding the moral responsibility of Western nations to admit many more refugees, there is no moral imperative to commit cultural suicide. That is perhaps why the Dali Lama warned a German newspaper this week that “too many” refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are heading into Europe. He knows of the problems Buddhists have been having with their own Muslim populations. He is also aware of the history of many Buddhist countries that were converted to Islam, including Afghanistan where invading Muslims overran the native Buddhist and Hindu populations.

We don’t even have to look as far as Europe to see what can happen to a culture under the increasing influence of Islamization. For example, the Muslim population in Canada is growing faster than that of any other religion. A majority of Muslims already living in Canada have favored being able to live under some form of sharia law, and a number of local governments have made accommodations in that direction.

Now enters the Barack Obama of Canada, Justin Trudeau, as Canada’s new prime minister. His Liberal government is hoping to admit 50,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016. 25,000 Syrian refugees have been admitted in just four months.  Trudeau also appointed Member of Parliament and senior adviser Omar Alghabra, a sharia law supporter who has denied that Hamas is a terrorist group, as Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Alghabra was born in Saudi Arabia, but emigrated to Canada from Syria several decades ago.

While Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper had prioritized the admission of persecuted Christians, Yazidis and Kurds, Trudeau said that he will “absolutely not” continue that practice. He and Obama are in sync that saving persecuted Christians from an ongoing genocide is less important than reaching out to Muslim refugees as proof of the country’s diversity and inclusiveness. When the two leaders met at the White House last March, they were effusive in mutual admiration for each other’s compassion towards the refugees. However, they are oblivious to the enhanced security risk to both countries they have created.

For example, some of the recently arrived refugees in Canada were welcomed last February with a call for jihad by the Imam of a Muslim congregation in Edmonton, Alberta, who was previously a “scholar” at al-Azhar theological school in Egypt:

“O Allah! Strengthen the mujahideen [jihad fighters in the path of Allah] everywhere, make their hearts firm and strong, let them hit their targets, give them victory over their enemies.

“O Allah! Destroy the oppressors.

“O Allah! Destroy your enemies, the enemies of religion (Islam).”

The Obama-Trudeau policy of opening doors widely to Muslim refugees, while allowing hardly a crack to open for the Christian and Yazidi victims of jihadi-inspired genocide, is risky, to be sure. It is also immoral.

Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy

September 5, 2015

Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy, The Declination, The study of a civilization in decline

(A powerful narrative. — DM)

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.

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As some of my readers know, I am part Armenian by ancestry. It used to be a thing that didn’t enter into my daily thought process, for I am also partially of English descent and am fully American, in culture, language and appearance. Armenians can generally tell that I am of Armenian ancestry, but few others can. But as militant Islam made its presence felt, increasingly in recent years, that identity has resurfaced because of the connection my own family has to the affair.

Then I saw this photo of a drowned Syrian boy:

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Leftists would have you believe that us on the Right have no empathy. We wish to deny the endless migrations away from crisis areas in the Islamic world and that, they would tell us, is incompatible with human rights, dignity, empathy and so on.

My grandfather told me stories of Armenia (Armenians, then, lived throughout Anatolia), which he remembered only dimly. For he had been only a few years old when my family escaped, just ahead of the genocide in the dying Ottoman Empire. Mostly, he remembered it through the stories told in the Armenian exile community.

Entire villages were erased, all the inhabitants slaughtered, the buildings burnt to the ground, the movable wealth stolen and melted down. Nothing of them remained. In the days before the genocide, two dialects of the Armenian language existed, colloquially referred to as the Western, or Anatolian, dialect and the Eastern dialect. The Western dialect has mostly gone extinct, spoken only by a few elders in the diaspora. My grandfather could speak it, but my mother knew only a few words. Only the Eastern dialect survives. Half of Armenia ceased to exist.

These were hardy Christians who had survived on the edge of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds for centuries. They had fought alongside Greeks and Crusaders. They were among the earliest — perhaps the very first — nations to convert to Christianity. They spoke an ancient language, a variant of the Indo-European language set that appears distantly related to Greek, and unrelated to any other.

Islam nearly erased them.

Now that Christians in the Middle-East are approaching extinction, the new target is the insufficiently Muslim. The Yazidis with their syncretic half-Muslim religion, or the Kurds who elevate their own nationalism over their religion (a rarity in the Muslim world).

I feel for them. I really do. In fact, I cannot tell you how much it pains me to see these things. On my grandfather’s knee, I heard the stories of Armenian survivors. In particular, one woman stands out. She was a child when the Turks came for her family, but she was comely and pretty. Her parents and brothers were killed and she was sold as a slave for a wealthy Turk’s harem. Her story of survival and escape was terrifying to me as a child, and it instilled a sense of resolve where Islam was concerned that has not abated to this day.

Can you imagine this? Seeing your family slaughtered, and only surviving to be used as a sex slave by those who did the deed? Blacks in America lecture me about my White privilege, saying that their ancestors were slaves. Mine were slaves much more recently than theirs. Mine were slaughtered wholesale.

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.

I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.

But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.

And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.

There were tears in my grandfather’s eyes, at times, as he recounted the things he knew. And I know what his reaction would be to this boy’s death. He would feel empathy and sadness, far more acutely than the moral busybodies of Progressive Leftism. But then he would turn off the TV and tell me the truth: that we could not help them without also dooming ourselves to the same.

So, Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.

For if we do not, it could be my son laying on that distant beach, and that I will not allow.