Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/13/2015 23:14 -0400
For the past several weeks it seemed as if Germany had truly become the promised land for Mideast asylum seekers, primarily those seeking to escape the Syrian civil (and global proxy) war, but according to various media reports, also a material number of “ISIS-linked terrorists.” Then it all came crashing down earlier today when Germany’s beloved by all refugees “Mutti” said genug, and with one decision shut down the border with Austria in the process unraveling decades of customs-union progress (following promptly by the Czech Republic doing the same, with Italy expected to follow suit in the hours ahead).
Ironically, just as Europe is shutting its doors to Syrian refugees, the US is opening its own.
On Friday, Obama said that the United States will admit 10,000 Syrian refugees for resettlement over the next 12 months, following criticism that America is not doing enough with Europe’s migrant crisis.
How will this take place logistically? As AFP notes, “this would represent a huge increase in the number of families arriving on US soil. In the more that four years since fighting erupted barely 1,800 Syrians have been welcomed here.” Which is why the French wire service did a brief summary of the various steps involved in admitting a record number of Syrians on US soil.
Here are the key points:
- How will Obama’s promise be delivered and what hurdles are keeping the refugees from arriving sooner
More than four million people have fled the fighting in Syria since 2011 and most are living in camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq, where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees registers them. Some 18,000 of these people — chosen because they are the most vulnerable whether through family circumstances, injury or disability – have been referred to the United States for resettlement. Officers from the Department of Homeland Security fly from Washington to the camps and conduct interviews with candidates, seeking to weed out what a US official called “liars, criminals and terrorists.” Each case file is reviewed by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s terrorist screening center, the DHS, the Department of Defense and “other agencies” – US intelligence.
“Refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States,” another State Department official told reporters.Meanwhile they receive medical tests and those with communicable diseases, most commonly tuberculosis, are given treatment before they can travel to the United States, often delaying the process.
Currently the procedure takes between 18 and 24 months from the time UNHCR recommends a refugee for resettlement and that person’s flight to America.
It is not clear how much the screening process for Syrians costs, but the US government spent $1.1 billion last year resettling 70,000 people from around the world, or almost $16,000 per head.
- Can the process be sped up?
Critics note that if the United States takes two years to screen each of the 10,000 refugees Obama has promised to welcome none will have arrived before he leaves office.
But, according to a US official, thousands of cases are already in the pipeline and will hopefully now be processed faster.
“We have been resettling Syrian refugees in small numbers since 2011 and it was only in June of 2014 that UNHCR started submitting large numbers of referrals, between 500 and 1,000 per month,” she said.
“Those referrals have come pretty steadily since last June to the point where we now have a critical mass. We at the State Department have already prepared the cases for more than 10,000 people.”
* * *
But the most important question on the minds of most Americans is the following:
- Where will the “lucky” 10,000 Syrian refugees go?
Well, once refugees are approved, the State Department pays the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to fly them to the United States. Refugees sign a promissory note to repay their airfare once they are established, and they are met at the airport by members of one of nine non-government resettlement agencies contracted by the State Department.
There are around 180 resettlement centers dispersed across the United States, where NGO workers help the new arrivals settle in and find work and accommodation in their first 30 to 90 days.
Those who have relatives in the United States will sometimes be assigned to live near them, and most go to cities like Atlanta, San Diego or Dallas where rents are more affordable than in New York or San Francisco.
Others end up in smaller cities like Boise, Idaho or Erie, Pennsylvania, but regardless of where they are taken they are free to move once they find their footing. After 90 days new arrivals are no longer eligible for the State Department-funded support through the resettlement agencies, but some join support programs run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
* * *
So where are these 180 resettlement center? They are shown on the map below:
The full list can be found in the 35-page document sourced from the Refugee Processing Center.
* * *
All this, we again remind readers, just so a Qatari gas pipeline can cross Syria and enter Europe, ending Gazprom’s monopoly over European gas demand.
A Refugee Crisis Made In America
Submitted by Philip Giraldi via TheAmericanConservative.com,
On April 29th, 2008 I had a Saul on the Road to Damascus moment. I had flipped open the Washington Post and there, on the front page, was a color photo of a two year old Iraqi boy named Ali Hussein being pulled from the rubble of a house that had been destroyed by American missiles. The little boy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and had on his feet flip-flops. His head was hanging back at an angle that told the viewer immediately that he was dead.
Four days later on May 3rd a letter by a Dunn Loring Virginia woman named Valerie Murphy was printed by the Post. Murphy complained that the Iraqi child victim photo should not have been run in the paper because it would “stir up opposition to the war and feed anti-US sentiment.” I suppose the newspaper thought it was being impartial in printing the woman’s letter, though I couldn’t help but remember that the neocon-dominated Post had generally been unwilling to cover anything antiwar, even ignoring a gathering of 300,000 protesters in Washington in 2005. Rereading the woman’s complaint and also a comment on a website suggesting that the photo of the dead little boy had been staged, I thought to myself, “What kind of monsters have we become.” And in truth we had become monsters. Bipartisan monsters wrapped in the American flag. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions was “worth it.” She is now a respected elder statesman close to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
I had another epiphany last week when I saw the photo of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach like a bit of flotsam. He was wearing a red t-shirt and black sneakers. I thought to myself that many Americans will shake their heads when looking at the photo before moving on, more concerned about Stephen Colbert’s debut on the Late Show and the start of the NFL season.
The little boy is one of hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to get to Europe. The world media is following the crisis by focusing primarily on the inability of unprepared local governments to deal with the numbers of migrants, asking why someone somewhere can’t just “do something.” This means that somehow, as a result, the vast human tragedy has been reduced to a statistic and, inevitably, a political football.
Overwhelmed by thousands of would-be travelers, Hungary suspended train service heading towards Western Europe while countries like Serbia and Macedonia deployed their military and police along their borders in a failed attempt to completely block refugees. Italy and Greece have been overwhelmed by migrants arriving by sea. Germany, to its credit, is intending to process up to 800,000 refugee and asylum applications, mostly from Syria, while Austria and Sweden have also indicated their willingness to accept many more. Immediate neighbors of the zone of conflict, notably Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are hosting more than three million of those who are displaced, but the wealthy Arab Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia have done little or nothing to help.
Demands for a European unified strategy to deal with the problem are growing, to include sealing borders and declaring the seas off of preferred departure points in North Africa and Asia to be military zones where undocumented ships and travelers will be intercepted and turned back. One also has to suspect that the refugee crisis might be exploited by some European politicians to justify NATO “humanitarian” intervention of some sort in Syria, a move that would have to be supported by Washington. But while the bickering and maneuvering goes on, the death toll mounts. The recent discovery of 71 dead would-be migrants who suffocated in the back of a locked truck found in Austria, to include five children and a toddler, horrified the world. And that was before the dead three year old on the Turkish beach.
Many of the would-be migrants are young men looking for work in Europe, a traditional enterprise, but most of the new arrivals are families escaping the horrors of war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Their plight has been described in the media in graphic terms, families arriving with nothing and expecting nothing, fleeing even worse conditions back at home.
The United States has taken in only a small number of the refugees and a usually voluble White House has been uncharacteristically quiet about the problem, possibly realizing that allowing in a lot of displaced foreigners at a time when there is an increasingly heated debate over immigration policy in general just might not be a good move, politically speaking. But it should perhaps be paying some attention to what caused the problem in the first place, a bit of introspection that is largely lacking both from the mainstream media and from politicians.
Indeed, I would assign to Washington most of the blame for what is happening right now. Since folks inside the beltway are particularly given to making judgements based on numerical data they might be interested in the toll exacted through America’s global war on terror. By one not unreasonable estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.
There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.
The number of internally displaced within each country is roughly double the number of those who have actually fled and are seeking to resettle outside their homelands. Many of the latter have wound up in temporary camps run by the United Nations while others are paying criminals to transport them into Europe.
Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war. The invasion of Iraq created a power vacuum that has empowered terrorism in the Arab heartland. Supporting rebels in Syria has piled Pelion on Ossa. Afghanistan continues to bleed 14 years after the United States arrived and decided to create a democracy. Libya, which was relatively stable when the U.S. and its allies intervened, is now in chaos, with its disorder spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa.
Everywhere people are fleeing the violence, which, among other benefits, has virtually obliterated the ancient Christian presence in the Middle East. Though I recognize that the refugee problem cannot be completely blamed on only one party, many of those millions would be alive and the refugees would for the most part be in their homes if it had not been for the catastrophic interventionist policies pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States.
It is perhaps past time for Washington to begin to become accountable for what it does. The millions of people living rough or in tents, if they are lucky, need help and it is not satisfactory for the White House to continue with its silence, a posture that suggests that the refugees are somehow somebody else’s problem. They are, in fact, our problem. A modicum of honesty from President Barack Obama would be appreciated, perhaps an admission that things have not exactly worked out as planned by his administration and that of his predecessor. And money is needed. Washington throws billions of dollars to fight wars it doesn’t have to fight and to prop up feckless allies worldwide. For a change it might be refreshing to see tax money doing some good, working with the most affected states in the Middle East and Europe to resettle the homeless and making an honest effort to come to negotiated settlements to end the fighting in Syria and Yemen, both of which can only have unspeakably bad outcomes if they continue on their current trajectories.
Ironically, American hawks are exploiting the photo of the dead Syrian boy to blame the Europeans for the humanitarian crisis while also demanding an all-out effort to depose Bashar al-Assad. Last Friday’s Washington Post had a lead editorial headlined “Europe’s Abdication,” and also featured a Michael Gerson op-ed urging immediate regime change in Syria, blaming the crisis solely on Damascus. The editorial railed against European “racists” regarding the refugee plight. And it is not clear how Gerson, an evangelical neoconservative former speech writer for George W. Bush, can possibly believe that permitting Syria to fall to ISIS would benefit anyone.
We Americans are in something approaching complete denial about how truly horrible our nation’s recent impact on the rest of the world has been. We are universally hated, even by those who have their hands out to receive their Danegeld, and the world is undoubtedly shaking its head as it listens to the bile coming out of the mouths of our presidential candidates. Shakespeare observed that the “evil that men do lives after them,” but he had no experience of the United States. We choose to dissimulate regarding the bad choices we make followed up with lies to justify and mitigate our crimes. And still later the evil we do disappears down the memory hole. Literally.
In writing this piece I looked up Ali Hussein, the little Iraqi boy who was killed by the American bomb. He has been “disappeared” from Google, as well has the photo, presumably because his death did not meet community standards. He has likewise been eliminated from the Washington Post archive. The experience of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984 immediately came to mind.
by Karl Denninger
And Here We Go
You had to be completely stupid to not expect this:
The Syrian operative claimed more than 4,000 ISIS gunmen had been smuggled into western nations – hidden amongst innocent refugees.
The ISIS smuggler, revealed the ongoing clandestine operation is a complete success.
Islamic State is believed to be actively smuggling deadly gunmen across the sparsely-guarded 565-mile Turkish border and on to richer European nations, he revealed.
They’ve now allegedly shown up in Germany with an ISIS flag — at least according to this source. (see below)
Here it comes fools…… and if we allow MaObama and his minions to import any of these jack-a-wads to this nation we deserve what happens when they come here.
Is the picture real? Not sure, but the image is not unique to that site; it has appeared elsewhere including in materially-higher resolution — and there is plenty of question as to its provenance. At least one copy I found floating around had a sub-sampling profile implying it came from a HD video stream with an earlier date, which would imply the image was taken to support the story rather than the image being the story.
HOWEVER, the question at the bar isn’t whether the image is contemporary or not. The question is simply this: Is the Syrian operative real and did they really smuggle 4,000 ISIS gunmen into Western Europe?
In support of that question there are multiple other sources with the same general story and more detail, including a claim that the Germans have arrested an “asylum seeker” and seized boxes full of Syrian passports.
The “refugees” from Syria and ISIS controlled areas are overwhelming young healthy Muslim males yet those being persecuted in Syria and the rest of the ISIS areas are the general Christian peoples living there, almost none of whom are in the refugee crowd invading the west.
That should tell you everything you need to know about it if you are capable of anything above a rudimentary level of critical thinking.
Let’s infect ourselves with smallpox it will be quicker .
Fuck Catholic Charities, fuck Lutheran Social Services.
Send them to Oakland, Camden, and Ferguson.
Goddammit, those goat fuckers are coming pretty close to my home, 45 miles away.
LMAO, our benevolent leaders are sending these muzzies to Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford? Bwahahaha! Perfect! That just what the local Homo-Erectus’ need, is some fresh meat. Especially Bridgeport, holy shit. The local savages will pause in their daily murdering, raping and stealing long enough to note the ‘refugees’ settling in, and then pounce on them. Perfect!
Connecticut – that hole fucking state has been niggered. Towel heads vs. neegrows.
Anyone wanting to know why the Catholics are asshole-deep in this shit need only reference the number AA-1025.
Send them all to D.C.
Start with OBozo gets the first family then each and every Congressman. and from there the heads of all the burocracy. IRS – EPA – TSA etc. from there all Gov workers.
An interesting letter from Chuck Grassley to John Kerry. I wonder if he will get the answers he seeks regarding the situation, or will Obama just strong arm his way through this.
http://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/judiciary/upload/Refugees%2C%2009-11-15%2C%20letter%20to%20Kerry%2C%20follow%20up%20to%20consultation.pdf
What burns me is Faux said all illegals are ‘entitled’ under the US constitution.Pure BS.They got squat because they are illegal.They are there to displace US citizens and crush the middle class by Obama and congress,powers that pull their strings.People,time to CUT the strings!
Don’t be surprised when the muslim rape gangs are preying on any female in Amurica who is not in a Burka, they are after all allowed by their faith to rape women at will in the countries they have conquered; as they are now doing in as in Sweden, Britain and Norway (where they commit 100per cent of the rapes, 90 percent which are against non muslim women. Expect a surge of rapes followed by a surge women getting their concealed carry permits (at least in the free states) followed by a surge of dead, would be Jihadi rapists.
Time to move to Guam
Refugee Crises At Dangerous Tipping Point As Hungary Makes Arrests, Germany Loses Patience
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/15/2015 07:48 -0400
“I’m not happy. I had to leave Syria — I love Syria, but so much killing there.”
That’s from 17-year old Mohammed Al-Hamdan who made it across the Hungarian border with Serbia at a railroad crossing near the village of Roszke before it was closed on Tuesday. As NBC reports, “just before Hungarian police closed the railroad crossing, a Syrian family ran down the tracks trying to make it through, the patriarch screaming to his wife and small children, ‘Yallah, yallah!’ — Arabic for ‘Let’s go!’” Before closing the “popular” passage, Hungary had reportedly begun hauling migrants on to trains and shipping them straight to the Austrian border. “The situation is that after crossing the border these people have arrived at the collection point in Roszke, where there is no official procedure, people are just being collected. Earlier these people were being taken to the registration points … this is not happening now, but rather, buses are taking people from the collection point to the Roszke train station according to our information,” a UNHCR spokesman told Reuters.
Of course even for the migrants who were “lucky” enough to be rounded up and shipped to Austria as opposed to being stranded behind Hungary’s new migrant-be-gone fence, their fate is far from certain. As The New York Times noted on Monday, Austrian officials have now sent “2,200 soldiers to help reinforce the eastern border.”
The rush to get into the Hungary came as the country largely completed a four meter, razor wire fence meant to cut off the flow of refugees and channel them to official registration centers where they can apply for asylum. “If their applications are refused,” BBC says, “they will now be returned to Serbia rather than being given passage through Hungary.”
Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs says “official and legal ways to come to Hungary and therefore to the European Union remain open.”
“All we ask from all migrants [is] that they should comply with international and European law,” he added.
There’s a certain extent to which Hungary’s frustrations are understandable. For many refugees, the path to the German “promised land” goes through Hungary, and the means the flow of people is daunting.