Faith Front Page Politics U.S. WorldWND Exclusive
Obama launches PR campaign to change America's idea of refugees
Comparisons to pilgrims, other immigrants 'outrageous'
By Leo Hohmann
Published November 27, 2015 at 8:04pm
President Obama speaking last Monday at the G-20 Summit in Turkey (White House photo)
The Obama administration and its refugee contractors have unleashed a public relations blitz designed to convince the American people that thousands of Muslim "refugees" from Syria, Iraq and other jihadist hotbeds will be good for the country, equating the "refugees" with Pilgrims who came to escape religious persecution.
Repeated references will also be made to the Statue of Liberty and its moniker, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," and America's "history as a place of refuge."
But the Paris attacks changed everything.
Obama's plans to import tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from jihadist battlefields in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan had flown mostly under the radar of the average American.
But when 130 people were killed while watching soccer and partying at a rock concert in Paris, the world took notice of who carried out the attacks. At least two of the eight terrorists entered Europe among the ranks of refugees flooding in from Syria and other countries in the Middle East.
ISIS itself has promised it would exploit this avenue into the West, and Paris proved the terrorist organization meant what it said.
Polls in the wake of the attack showed a clear majority of Americans did not want to accept any Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq. More than 30 of the nation's governors quickly responded to the backlash against Obama's plan to bring 10,000 mostly Muslims from Syria, on top of tens of thousands of Muslims already coming every year from Somalia, Iraq, Burma, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which have active jihadist movements.
So the Obama administration, along with heads of state in Europe, instead of backing down from their plans to "welcome" refugees, doubled down on their efforts.
Part of that effort is the now obvious propaganda campaign coming out of the White House and the media.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson released a propaganda video of his own on Nov. 24, a four-minute montage that critics such as refugee watchdog Ann Corcoran say includes several half-truths and outright lies.
For instance, Johnson says in the video that each Syrian refugee undergoes the most thorough background check of all travelers into the U.S. Using a fictitious Syrian woman named "Reema," Johnson says she will undergo a biometric and biographical investigation that is cross-checked with data from law enforcement. But he fails to mention that his own DHS officials have admitted under oath in congressional hearings last month that they have no law enforcement data to check on the vast majority of Syrian refugees and that more than 90 percent of Syrians who apply for refugee status are approved.
"This is nothing but White House propaganda," said Corcoran, author of the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog.
Watch the 4-minute video on refugees put out by the White House and narrated by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson:
Johnson also says most of those coming from Syria are women and children but admits they will be selected by the United Nations, which is led by known anti-American elements. Even the U.N.'s own data on refugees flooding into Europe shows that the majority are men, not women and children. They are coming from many of the same U.N. refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon from which refugees are being sent to the U.S.
More than 1.5 million Muslims have been imported into the U.S. since 1990 through the U.N. refugee resettlement program. That does not include the hundreds of thousands of others who come on student visas and employment-based visas.
To counter the negative publicity about Muslim refugees following the Paris attacks, the administration needed to counter with its own media blitz, packaging the emotion-packed narrative of desperate "widows and orphans" alongside a legal argument that the states have no authority to reject Obama's refugee plan.
But there are more than a few weak spots in these arguments – in fact, there are gaping holes, say critics.
'Outrageous comparisons'
Paul McGuire, a Christian author, pastor and former radio host in southern California, said comparing Islamic refugees to previous waves of American immigrants is a distortion of history.
"They came here to work, not with a hostile ideology or religious belief that requires them not to assimilate. The comparison is outrageous," said McGuire, co-author of "Babylon Code: Solving the Bible's Greatest End Times Mystery," a new release about the globalist agenda and it use of migration, the environment and other issues to wear down the sovereignty of nation-states.
"Prior to the Paris attack, the governments of Sweden, France, Germany, the U.S., were all putting out the same narrative – we must be welcoming of refugees, preaching compassionate and cheering it on, and our president continues to cheer it on, knowing that a huge percentage of them are militant Islamists," he said. "Knowing the majority of them are males of military age, that's why there is something very strange about this whole thing."
First of all, the U.S. does not even choose its own refugees. That is done by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
And the private contractors who resettle the refuges in more than 180 American cities and towns do not ask the cities and towns if they will accept them. The refugees are brought there secretly without so much as a single public hearing or even an ad in the local newspaper. As soon as they arrive, they are signed up for food stamps, Medicaid and temporary cash assistance, as the families are placed in subsidized housing and their children educated for free in public schools. The refugees are placed on a fast track to full citizenship, including voting rights, within five years.
So-called humanitarian 'experts' get paid by feds to resettle refugees
As part of the PR blitz, representatives of the nine resettlement contractors – six of them affiliated with religious organizations such as the evangelical World Relief, the Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran churches and one Jewish organization – have been interviewed by media as though they are independent experts offering charitable aid. But they are hardly unbiased experts.
As Corcoran points out these contractors are paid "by the head" with taxpayer dollars for every refugee they resettle.
"They get paid almost $2,000 per refugee and get to keep at least $750 of that," she said.
"The humanitarian angle is really just a cover," Corcoran told WND. "They put on their white hat of humanitarianism as a cover for the whole thing. It's one of the ways the left works. They are masters at that. Even 25 years ago, I was trying to save my farm from the National Park Service, and we had to battle these people who said all they wanted to do was save the hallowed ground from development. Private people weren't allowed to own the land, in their eyes; only government can own it. But that was couched in the wrapping of saving history. It's the same with the refugee movement. It's changing America by changing its people, but they couch it in humanitarian terms."
Most persecuted Syrians – Christians – get left behind
Also, the humanitarian argument of "rescuing" persecuted Muslims from ISIS also does not hold water, because the most persecuted of all people groups in the Middle East are the Christian minorities being hunted and killed by ISIS in what many are calling a genocide. The Obama administration never mentions them, and has only brought 53 Syrian Christians so far to America as refugees, compared to more than 2,100 Syrian Muslims.
Then comes the issue of "vetting" the refugees. Obama and his refugee resettlement contractors never fail to mention that refugees are the "most highly scrutinized" of all people who come to America, taking sometimes up to 18 or even 24 months of background checks before they are admitted.
That mantra no doubt leaves most Americans feeling comforted that their government has things under control and won't allow any terrorists into the county. What they don't say is that top counter-terrorism officials in the FBI and Homeland Security have issued repeated warnings that they can't screen the Syrian refugees because they have no data available to check their backgrounds. These warnings have come from the head of the FBI, James Comey, as well as one of his top counter-terrorism experts, Michael Steinbach.
Obama, Johnson lies exposed in congressional record
Under tough questioning at a congressional hearing last month, the Obama narrative of strict vetting also did not hold up.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., had on the witness stand before his subcommittee on immigration one of the top officials responsible for screening refugees.
Matthew Emrich, associate director for Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the Department of Homeland Security, was asked by Sessions if his department had access to even a single database in Syria that could provide solid background records on refugees to confirm a refugee is who he says he is.
"Can you name a single computer database outside of maybe some of our own very small but valuable intelligence databases for Syria that you can check against? Does Syria have any?" Sessions asked.
"The government does not, no Sir," Emrich answered.
Sessions pointed out from various press reports that Syrian passports can be purchased on the black market for as little as $200.
Media campaign will intensify
But Corcoran said Americans should expect to see the media campaign continue in the weeks ahead as the Obama administrations seeks to brainwash the public into accepting its false narrative of desperate widows and orphans.
"Pro-Syrian Muslim groups and the federal resettlement contractors are putting in motion a campaign like no other especially since they have learned that the majority of Americans don't want the U.S. State Department to bring in 10,000 Syrian, mostly Muslim, refugees and scatter them throughout the country," she said.
"They think if they utter the word 'robust' in regard to the vetting process, the public will say – well, then by all means let them in."
In three U.S. opinion polls published by Bloomberg, NBC News and the Washington Post/ABC News this month, 53 to 56 percent of respondents said no more Syrian refugees should enter. One reason cited by many respondents is a concern that Islamic State terrorists could slip through the U.S. refugee vetting process.
Jenny Yang, a Washington lobbyist for World Relief, was spinning the Syrian refugee story for Voice of America, in just one example of how the media blitz is being rolled out.
World Relief, which is part of the National Association of Evangelicals, is one of the nine federally funded resettlement contractors out in force in defense of their role in bringing in mostly Muslim Syrian refugees (98 percent so far are Muslims).
And U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told a Georgetown University audience last month that the Syrian Christians are not persecuted because the "regime" of Bashar al-Assad is protecting them and, therefore, the U.N. is focusing on sending Sunni Muslims to American cities. This flies in the face of independent assessments from groups like Open Doors, which has called the treatment of Christians in Syria and Iraq a "genocide" being carried out by ISIS and other jihadist groups.
Many of the Christian men have been beheaded, shot or crucified if the refuse to convert to Islam. Their women are then sold into sex slavery.
Obama said last week that America should never have a "religious test" for refugees seeking a safe haven. Yet, that appears to be exactly what his administration has implemented when it comes to the Syrian refugee program, say advocates for persecuted Christians. What else could explain the fact that 98 percent of the 2,200 Syrians allowed into America so far are Muslim?
President Obama makes a social media push to convince Americans of the need to take in Syrian refugees (Photo: Twitter, White House)
Germany infiltrated by thousands of terrorist 'refugees'
Meanwhile, ISIS fighters continue to slip into Europe posing as refugees.
In Germany, a top federal police chief told the Austrian Press Agency Thursday that his agency is now aware of at least 7,900 ISIS fighters who have entered Germany, most of them through the refugee ranks.
McGuire says the Obama plan to import a known terrorist threat while hiding under the cover of humanitarian relief is only being swallowed by the most gullible in American society.
"You claim to want to protect the people from terrorism, you have troops in the streets, and then you invite refugees to come from an Islamic jihadist battleground. It's irrational, and no politician could be that stupid," he said. "So there's got to be a greater reason for them coming in, and the authorities in Europe fully know what the result is. It's going to be more violent terrorism, so the decision to keep allowing them in is so irrational and so illogical that nobody could be that stupid. So, therefore, there has to be another agenda."
The issue of "vetting" is a distraction because, as was the case with one of the female attackers in Paris, she was described as a party girl who was radicalized in less than a month. It can happen very fast, so why bring in the very people who are most susceptible to radicalization – young Muslims?
McGuire said if Obama and the U.N. were really concerned about the humanitarian aspect of the Syrian civil war, they would be pushing for Saudi Arabia and the other wealthy Gulf states to accept Syrian refugees. They have taken none, and the U.N. would rather send them to Europe and America where they can learn jihad from radical mosques funded by Saudi Arabia while the Saudi royal family gets to keep its doors closed.
"The internal radicalization process is key, because there are people all over the U.S. who are training these young people in jihad and terrorism. It's a core theological tenet, but the media here and in Europe, they give an inherently biased narrative," he said. "If you become more devout in Islam, you tend to become more hateful. So you have the media not telling the truth and then every commentary on TV where this is discussed is always accompanied by the false narrative, then followed by an on-air editorial by a news anchor or guest expert who says that's the tiny minority, and the overwhelming majority are peaceful and desperate people who just want to come in to start a new life – a complete fabrication."
Leo Hohmann
Leo Hohmann has been a reporter and news editor at WND as well as several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas. He also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. His latest book is "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration And Resettlement Jihad."
DHS insider spills beans on Ilhan Omar criminal charges for marrying brother
Watch: Heavily armed black militia marches through suburban city, demands reparations from whites
New star among top baby-boy names in Minnesota
U.S. Muslim population expanding 'rapidly'
U.S. woman stabbed 14 times by Somali explodes police narrative