Slightly edited version of article originally published under the title “Exposed: Obama’s Love for Jihadis and Hate for Christians.”
Rather than welcoming Iraqi Christian asylum-seekers, the Obama administration has imprisoned many of them. |
Obama recently lashed out against the idea of giving preference to Christian refugees, describing it as “shameful.” “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” loftily added the American president.
Accordingly, the administration is still determined to accept 10,000 more Syrian refugees, almost all of whom will be Muslim, despite the fact that some are ISIS operatives, while many share the ISIS worldview (as explained below).
Yet right as Obama was grandstanding about “who we are,” statistics were released indicating that “the current [refugee] system overwhelmingly favors Muslim refugees. Of the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far, only 53 are Christians while 2,098 are Muslim.”
Aside from the obvious—or to use Obama’s own word, “shameful"—pro-Muslim, anti-Christian bias evident in these statistics, there are a number of other troubling factors as well.
Nearly all Syrian ‘refugees’ admitted to the U.S. are Sunni Muslims.
For starters, the overwhelming majority of “refugees” being brought into the United States are not just Muslim, but Sunnis—the one Muslim sect that the Islamic State is not persecuting and displacing. After all, ISIS—and most Islamic terrorist groups (Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, Hamas, et al)—are all Sunnis. Even Obama was arguably raised a Sunni.
Simply put, some 98% of all refugees belong to the same Islamic sect that ISIS does. And many of them, unsurprisingly, share the same vision—such as the “refugees” who recently murdered some 120 people in France, or the “refugees” who persecute Christian minorities in European camps and settlements. (None of this should be surprising considering that Al Azhar—the Sunni world’s most prestigious university of Islamic law, which co-hosted Obama’s 2009 “A New Beginning” speech—was recently exposed as teaching and legitimizing all the atrocities that ISIS commits.)
As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on their non-Sunni religious identity—not by Assad, but by so-called “rebel” forces (AKA jihadis)—many of them are being denied refuge in America.
Thus, although Christians were approximately 10 percent of Syria’s population in 2011, they comprise only 2.5 percent of those granted refuge in America. This despite the fact that, from a strictly humanitarian point of view—and humanitarianism is the chief reason being cited in accepting refugees, Obama’s “compassion"—Christians should receive priority simply because they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East.
At the hands of the Islamic State, which supposedly precipitated the migrant crisis, Christians have been repeatedly forced to renounce Christ or die; they have been enslaved and raped; and they have had more than 400 of their churches desecrated and destroyed.[1]
Obama’s policies in the Middle East have directly exacerbated the plight of its Christians.
ISIS has committed no such atrocities against fellow Sunnis, they who are being accepted into the U.S. in droves. Nor does Assad enslave, behead, or crucify people based on their religious identity (despite Jeb Bush’s recent, and absurd, assertions).
Obama should further prioritize Christian refugees simply because his own policies in the Middle East have directly exacerbated their plight. Christians and other religions minorities did not flee from Bashar Assad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muamar Gaddafi’s Libya. Their systematic persecution began only after the U.S. interfered in those nations in the name of “democracy” but succeeding in only uncorking the jihadi terrorists that the dictators had long kept suppressed.
Incidentally, prioritizing Christian refugees would not merely be an altruistic gesture or the U.S. government’s way of righting its wrongs: rather it brings many benefits to America’s security. (Unlike Muslims or even Yazidis, Christians are easily assimilated into Western nations due to the shared Christian heritage, and they bring trustworthy language and cultural skills that are beneficial to the “war on terror.”)
Finally, no one should be shocked by these recent revelations of the Obama administration’s pro-Muslim and anti-Christian policies. They fit a clear and established pattern of religious bias within his administration. For example:
- When inviting scores of Muslim representatives, the State Department is in the habit of denying visas to solitary Christian representatives.
- When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for several months and then sent back to the lion’s den to be enslaved, raped, or murdered.
- When the Nigerian government waged a strong offensive against Boko Haram, killing some of its terrorists, Secretary of State John Kerry fumed and called for the “human rights” of the jihadis (who regularly slaughter and rape Christians and burn their churches). More recently, Kerry “urged Tajikistan not to go overboard in its crackdown on Islam.”
- When persecuted Coptic Christians planned on joining Egypt’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood revolution of 2013, the U.S. said no.
- When persecuted Iraqi and Syrian Christians asked for arms to join the opposition fighting ISIS, D.C. refused.
- When the UN Security Council held a meeting to discuss the genocide against Christians and other minorities, although “many high level delegations from UN member states addressed the Security Council meeting, some at the Foreign Minister level, the United States failed to send ... a high ranking member of the State Department.”
Most recently, as the White House works on releasing a statement accusing ISIS of committing genocide against religious minorities such as Yazidis — who are named and recognized in the statement — Obama officials are arguing that Christians “do not appear to meet the high bar set out in the genocide treaty” and thus will likely not be mentioned.
In short, and to use the president’s own words, it is the Obama administration’s own foreign and domestic policies that are “shameful,” that are “not American,” and that do not represent “who we are.”
Yet the question remains: Will Americans take notice and do anything about their leader’s policies—which welcome Islamic jihadis while ignoring their victims—or will their indifference continue until they too become victims of the jihad, in a repeat of Paris or worse?
Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
