Tag: Kurds

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Should Kurds Who Smuggled Across Borders to Evade Coronavirus Quarantine or Patronized the Hitler Restaurant Be Admitted to US?

 

Breaking today is a report that over 500 Kurds have been smuggled into Kurdistan from Iran to evade the 14-day quarantine imposed because of the outbreak of coronavirus in Iran:

“Iran has become the Middle East epicenter of the outbreak of the virus, with the latest official figures standing at 245 infections and 26 deaths. Iraq has so far confirmed 6 cases of coronavirus, 5 of whom were among Iraqis who had recently visited Iran.” 

Both Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Governor Lee have been adamant about their commitment to the Kurds.

Governor Lee says he won’t “turn his back” on Kurds he claims “walked alongside and fought alongside our soldiers.” This was one of his reasons for consenting to continuing refugee resettlement in Tennessee and ignoring explicit instructions in the President’s Executive Order.

The President said refugee resettlement was supposed to be an opt-in program for the state and the local governments. The President said both the state and local governments each individually had to consent. Instead, Bill Lee said he was consenting for the whole state and as a result, made it an opt-out program for Tennessee counties.

Marsha also believes U.S. taxpayers are beholden to Kurds who claim they were in some way connected, however loosely or remotely, to America’s fight against ISIS. Marsha is so convinced of the need to reward these Kurds that she is co-sponsoring a bill to fast track their arrival to the U.S. whereupon they can qualify for all types of public assistance programs.

A leaked State Department memo indicated that the administration was opposed to Marsha’s bill for a variety of reasons including a concern about super-accelerated vetting, which the State Department wrote, “fails to accommodate vital national security screening.”

Serious questions should be raised about admitting Kurds, Syrians or Iraqis in the face of the region’s outbreak of coronavirus.

Along with that, it seems reasonable to question an individual’s patronage of the “bustling” Hitler Restaurant in Duhok, the capital city of the Kurdistan region.

The restaurant, opened in 2018, kept the Hitler name until deputy head of the Legal Committee in the Kurdistan Parliament, objected. The basis of his objection was not that the restaurant was named for Adolf Hitler, the evil genocidal socialist who murdered, through execution and cremation, over 6 million Jews. No, the legislator’s objection was based on not wanting to offend Germany because “[w]e have to take into account the fact that Germany helped us in the fight against Daesh [ISIS].”

The head of the [Duhok Chamber of Commerce] said that while Hitler may be reviled in Europe, people in the Kurdistan Region are not concerned about him.

“Maybe for the German nation and Europe who suffered a lot under Hitler, it will not be accepted or welcomed,” Ayad Hassan told Rudaw. “But for this region, it will not be an issue to [name a business after] someone who has done good or bad things in history.”

Other Kurds said “it is better to have a restaurant named after Hitler than an alcohol shop.” 

As much as the restaurant owner and others interviewed downplayed the Hitler Restaurant name, it was reported in 2018, that Jews remaining in the Kurdistan region “keep their Jewish identity hidden for fear of persecution.

Even though Nashville Kurdish refugee Drost Kokoye arrived in the U.S. as a young child and was raised here, she has put her hatred of all things Jewish on full display using social media, anti-Jewish campus groups, and pro-HAMAS rallies.

It’s seems reasonable to question why Marsha and Bill Lee insist on romanticizing the Kurds considering the other baggage they’ve brought to Tennessee.

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Should Marsha Have the SIV Program Investigated Before Trying to Expand It?

S.2641, the bill Marsha Blackburn has signed onto, mandates a fast track for Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds who claim they were in some way connected, however loosely or remotely, to America’s fight against ISIS. The bill’s language in this regard is very broadly written.

The bill was finally amended to limit the number of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) to 400 for these groups, but it is important to note as the bill does, that the 400 SIV limit does not apply to the annual refugee admission cap which President Trump set at 18,000 for FY2020.

The bill also has an interesting “carry forward” provision meaning that if the full 400 SIV set aside for Marsha’s pet groups isn’t met in any fiscal year, the unused number will carried forward to the next fiscal year.

Marsha appears to stand at odds with the President since it seems like with this bill, she believes the U.S. owes the Kurds something. For sure she’s not well versed in the Nashville Kurds’ political work against her Republican colleagues.

A recent piece by investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, should give Marsha pause about moving forward with the bill she is co-sponsoring. In fact, she should be taking a lesson from her former House colleague Rep. Chuck Flesichmann and asking to have an in-depth investigation of the SIV program launched immediately before trying to expand the program to cover new groups.

Greenfield covers a lot of ground in his recent piece, How the ‘Interpreter’ Scam Brought 75,000 Iraqis and Afghans to America. In fact, just substitute, Syrian or Kurd anywhere in the piece you see Iraqi or Afghani – program guidelines for admittance work the same in Marsha’s bill and may actually be even more lenient in ways a Syrian or Kurd could qualify for SIV status. Per Greenfield:

….The Special Immigrant Visa scam has been sold for over a decade using the same claim that it’s needed to save the lives of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters who are risking death by helping American soldiers.

In one decade, the United States has handed out 75,250 of these visas to Iraqi and Afghan employees, and their dependents. Between 2007 and 2017, they represented 1 percent of all immigrant visas.

The truth is that the military brass has wrongly used the incentive of Special Immigrant Visas to recruit local personnel and cut costs by promising them resettlement in the United States. Considering the costs of resettling even the nicest Iraqi or Afghan families, it would have been cheaper to pay each of them a six-figure salary. But that would have come out of the defense budget. The SIV scam passes the buck to local cities and states, to ordinary taxpayers and communities who have to hire interpreters who speak Pashto to interact with the children of the interpreters who are swamping local school systems.

One Iraqi or Afghan employee brings a lot more dependents and expenses with him. In 2017, the 4,677 Iraqi and Afghan employees brought 13,713 dependents with them for a total of 18,390 refugees.

…85% of SIV recipients have received refugee resettlement benefits. Over 17,000 have been dumped in California, over 10,000 in Texas, and over 7,000 in Virginia. In Virginia, that meant that over 800 Iraqi children and almost 2,000 Afghan children became part of the system. In Northern Virginia, SIV holders increased tenfold and doubled in just one year, putting a potential terrorist population close to the center of government, to top terror targets, including the headquarters of the CIA in Fairfax County.

 Meanwhile a GAO report found that 60% of SIV refugees were unemployed after three months and 94% were on food stamps.

70% of Iraqi SIVs were unemployed.

In one single year, SIV refugees racked up $80 million in federal aid from two agencies alone. That doesn’t account for some federal refugee assistance programs that go on for as long as 5 years.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “estimated budgetary effects [of Marsha’s bill S.2641], would primarily stem from:

  • Increased spending for health, nutrition, and disability benefits for newly arrived special immigrants, who could receive those federal benefits if they meet the eligibility criteria for those programs
  • Resettlement assistance for newly arrived special immigrants

In case Marsha hasn’t been paying attention, those are some of the costs involved in Tennessee’s Tenth Amendment lawsuit. Of course, since she’s been a Washington-based legislator for over 16 years, she’s been part of the federal machine pushing those costs onto her own state.

 

 

 

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Sen. Marsha Blackburn Sponsors Bill to Import Unlimited Number of Syrian & Iraqi Refugees to Tennessee

Blackburn’s bill mandates a fast track for Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds who claim they were in some way connected, however loosely or remotely, to America’s fight against ISIS. The bill’s language in this regard is very broadly written.

No cap is put on the numbers to be admitted as refugees, nor does this priority group of refugees count towards President Trump’s FY2020 cap of 18,000 refugees. Vetting for this particular pool of potential U.S. entrants, is vague at best.

After the 2105 jihad in Paris when a Syrian passport carried by one of the jihadis was discovered, some politicians, including Blackburn expressed concern about importing Syrians. At the time, it was discovered that there was a robust black market for fake Syrian passports. And who can forget that two months before the Paris jihad Obama promised to import at least 10,000 Syrian refugees.

It seems Marsha has a very short memory. She, five other Republicans and twelve of the most radical Senate Democrats are co-sponsoring S.2641 which is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday, December 11, 2019, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The reality on the ground in Tennessee as opposed to the D.C. bubble, is that Iraqi Kurds established a foothold in Nashville, compliments of federal contractor Catholic Charities. With the influx provided by secondary migration, Nashville now has the largest Sunni Muslim Kurdish community in the U.S. By their own count, they put their numbers at approximately 15,000.

The Kurds in Nashville say “they’re angry” about the President’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Northern Syria and that Trump “betrayed” them.

Well you know what gets us angry Marsha and why we feel betrayed? The fact that Kurdish refugees led the fight against an important material support anti-terrorism bill in our state legislature. And that it was a Kurdish refugee who that same year, was the first to get the HAMAS front group CAIR involved in Tennessee state politics.

And it was Kurdish refugees who led organizing the Tennessee American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC) and then decided to collaborate with some of the country’s most vocal Jew-hating anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour while at the same time, tolerating the overt Jew-hatred of its Kurdish refugee board member Drost Kokoye.

She and her family were first delivered to Arizona and then re-migranted to Tennessee. Growing up in Tennessee seems to have made Drost hate our country and align herself with the most radical anti-American leftists. She protests against police, pushes her Jew-hatred, and helped start AMAC, only recently leaving her spot on its governing board. And by the way, she hates our country.

How convenient also that Sen. Blackburn chooses to overlook the other “gift” the Kurds imported to Tennessee – their Kurdish Pride Gang.

We’d like to see Marsha’s plan for how members of the Kurd’s own Antifa group will be prevented from entering the U.S..

Still more troubling is the part of Marsha’s bill which specifically permits someone to come to the U.S, even if they were in any way connected to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The problem with this is that two years ago, the U.S. led coalition spokesman Col. John Dorrian let slip that the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) terrorist group is part of the SDF.

It just so happens that the PKK is also a U.S. designated terrorist group.

After the Paris jihad, Marsha was quick to say no to importing Syrians to the U.S. and mentioned the problem with vetting and falsified documents:

The security of American citizens must be our top priority. We now have reports that one, and possibly more, of the Paris attackers posed as Syrian refugees before entering Europe. As a result, we must immediately suspend similar resettlement efforts in the U.S. I have repeatedly warned that it is impossible to vet Syrian refugees to determine if they have ties to ISIS. Any efforts to continue moving forward with the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the U.S. would be dangerously irresponsible.

She even co-sponsored a bill to temporarily halt the entire refugee resettlement program and from the House floor commended Tennessee legislators for suing to challenge the federal resettlement program:

Leaving all of this behind in the House, the now Senator Blackburn, is co-sponsoring a bill which pushes refugee resettlement. Does this mean that Marsha wants Governor Lee to consent to refugee resettlement for the state? Does Marsha realize that if the Governor says yes, our lawsuit challenging the federal program goes away? The same lawsuit that she claimed to support in her statement on the House floor?

And what about those measly little security type issues? Did Marsha leave those concerns behind when she graduated from the House? Is she aware of the vetting and other problems we’ve had with Iraqis already admitted to the U.S.?

And by the way Marsha, we’re simply sick and tired of paying to open our doors and pay to bring people into our country who denigrate us and work to undermine our freedoms.

Contact Sen. Marsha Blackburn and tell her this bill stinks. https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/contact_marsha or (202) 224-3344.