On August 1 I reported here at PJ Media about the ongoing Obama administration discrimination against non-Muslim Syrian refugees, noting that at that time, fewer than one percent (43 of 6,877, or 0.7 percent of the total) of refugees admitted to the U.S. as of July 31 were Christians, Yezidis, and other Syrian religious minorities.
For the month of August, 3, 159 Muslim and 30 non-Muslim refugees were admitted to the U.S. – again, fewer than one percent.
And so far for September (as of today, 9/10), the numbers are even more depressing: 749 Muslim and just 2 Christian refugees, with non-Muslim admittance representing just 0.2 percent of the current monthly total.
So year-to-date, of 10,817 Syrian refugees admitted 10,742 were Muslim, and just 75 were non-Muslim (0.7 percent), while non-Muslim minorities in Syria make up at least 12 percent of the population.
During a media conference call just days after my August report, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), both the Obama administration officials and the media were incurious and apparently unconcerned about the ongoing discrimination of non-Muslim minorities.
In fact, only one media outlet asked about the problem.
Coordinator:
Absolutely and as a reminder if you would like to ask a question you can press Star 1 on your phone and record your name when prompted. Our next question comes from Lauren Ashburn with EWTN. Your line is open.
Lauren Ashburn:
Thank you very much and thank you for taking my call. The percentage of those Syrian refugees who have been let into the country – what percent are Muslims? Do you have that breakdown?
Anne Richard:
Yes, most are Muslims over 99% are Muslims.
Lauren Ashburn:
And then what percent are of religious (execution) are fleeing (because they) say religious persecution?
Anne Richard:
I don’t have that breakdown for you.
And that was the entire substance of the discussion about why so few non-Muslim refugees were being admitted.
The USCIS-sponsored conference call was just days before the State Department released its annual international religious freedom report, which said that genocide was being carried out by the Islamic State against Christians, Shia and Yezidis.
This echoes statements by Obama administration officials this year, including the assessment by Secretary of State John Kerry back in March, where he said the attacks by the Islamic State against religious minorities constituted genocide:
“My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims,” he said, during a news conference at the State Department.
Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, “selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations,” executed Christians “solely for their faith” and also “forced Christian women and girls into slavery.”
“Without our intervention, it is clear that those people would have been slaughtered,” he said.
And yet Kerry’s statement was only made AFTER the House of Representatives unanimously passed House Concurrent Resolution 75 declaring that the Islamic State was engaged in genocide.
Despite these genocide pronouncements — the first officially made by the U.S. since the Darfur genocide in 2004 — the State Department has taken no apparent measures to address the discrimination against non-Muslims in their Syrian refugee program.
In fact, during last month’s USCIS conference call, Assistant Secretary of State of the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration Anne Richard admitted she didn’t even have a breakdown on the number of admitted Syrian refugees escaping religious persecution.
Apologists for the Obama administration claim that the problem is with the UN which selects the refugees, and not the State Department.
And yet there is no indication that the State Department even finds the discrimination against Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in their Syrian refugee resettlement program a concern, let alone takes measures to correct the problem.
GOP congressional leadership has been absent on this issue as well. When H.Con.Res. 75 was passed in March, House Speaker Paul Ryan touted the House’s leadership on the issue.
Speaker Ryan also says that a religious test for entering the country is contrary to American values:
A religious test for entering our country is not reflective of America's fundamental values. I reject it. pic.twitter.com/DdsYj2XoLS
— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 31, 2016
But Speaker Ryan has remained silent as non-Muslim Syrian refugees are discriminated against in the State Department’s refugee resettlement program.
The implications from the data are unmistakable. And those numbers show that so far this month, the problem is only getting worse with 0.2 percent of all Syrian refugees admitted from the religious minorities the State Department says are subject to genocide by the Islamic State.
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