The Obama administration this week reached its goal of taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees by Oct. 1, but unfortunately, very few of the new arrivals are Christian. According to CBN, “the official count for the fiscal year reached 10,126 resettled Syrians when 224 refugees arrived Monday.” Only a small handful of those reaching our shores are Christian.
Although 1 million Christians have fled Syria, Christians comprise only 0.51 percent of the refugee total. More than 98 percent of those allowed into the United States this fiscal year are Sunni Muslims, the largest Islamic sect in Syria comprising 74 percent of that population.
Some Christians believe the Syrian Christian immigration numbers should be much higher; the percentage of those allowed into the United States should reflect their percentage of the population in Syria.
Last September, President Obama pledged to increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed to enter the United States. He set a goal of 10,000, six times the number of those allowed to enter the U.S. in FY 2015 when a total of 1682 were admitted – that compared to only 105 Syrian refugees admitted in FY 2014.
Although Christians are 10 percent of the Syrian population, only 100 Syrian Christian refugees have been allowed to enter the United States since the start of the civil war more than five years ago.
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) maintains that part of the reason for the disparity is because only 15 percent of Syrian refugees are in formal U.N. camps. The reason Christians avoid the camps is reportedly because they don’t feel safe there among hostile Muslim refugees.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice expressed the administration’s satisfaction with the program in a statement yesterday: “Today, I am pleased to announce that we will meet this goal more than a month ahead of schedule. Our 10,000th Syrian refugee will arrive this afternoon,” Rice said.
Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland, on the other hand, said on “Varney and Co.” Tuesday that what we are witnessing in the Middle East amounts to Christian genocide — and the United States is complicit. McFarland made the comment after Stuart Varney reported that only 52 of the Syrian refugees who have been allowed in the country this year are Christians.
“The Christians in the Middle East are being discriminated against and crimes [are being] committed against them for three reasons,” McFarland explained. “One — ISIS has targeted them specifically for mass genocide. Two — when they flee and try to go into the refugee camps, the Muslims are kicking them out of the refugee camps. And three– we’re not letting them into this country.”
She added, “it is Christian genocide and we are complicit.”
Rev. Ibrahim Nseir, pastor of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Presbyterian Church in Aleppo, told Fox News in May: “We are facing terrorist action in the whole geography of Syria. They are destroying our churches, killing and kidnapping Christians, stealing our homes and our businesses.”
Christians made up nearly a third of the Syrian population in the 1920s, according to Fox. By 2011, Christians in Syria numbered only 2.2 million, or less than 10 percent of the nation’s population. After years of civil war, experts now estimate that the Christians make up less than five percent of the population.
Yet Obama doesn’t consider this persecuted minority to be a priority — because any sort of “religious litmus test” for admitting Syrian refugees would be “un-American” and “contrary to our values.”
The Obama administration has yet to announce its goal for next year, but immigration observers expect the number to be set at 20,000. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she’d like to see the number increased to 65,000.
In the meantime, a poll conducted in 2015 found that 1 in 5 Syrians support ISIS and a third of them support the Al-Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Since Sunnis are 3/4rs of the population and Shiites and Christians aren’t likely to support either group, this really means that Sunni Muslim support for both terror groups is even higher than these numbers make it seem.
The Obama administration let in 9,945 Syrian Muslims this year and Hillary wants to bring in a whopping 65,000 next year. Do the math and vote accordingly.
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