The United States is welcoming Muslims with open arms and refusing Christian refugees entrance, says Republican primary candidate Donald Trump.
As recently as May, the United States Department of State was rejecting visas from Assyrian Christians, including a Catholic nun. The National Review reports she was rejected because “Once here, (the nun) could also be at risk for claiming political asylum, and the U.S. seems determined to deny ISIS’ Christian victims that status.”
Assyrian Christians are one of the largest targets of the Islamic State. The terrorist organization killed more than 24,000 people in the first few months of 2014. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Campaign made a global appeal on behalf of Iraqi residents being persecuted by ISIS.
“The array of violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL and associated armed groups is staggering, and many of their acts may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity,” says U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein.
Meanwhile, politicians such as Trump are sounding the alarm about the seemingly free pass Islamic immigrants are gaining to the United States.
A Census Bureau report from 2009 says 96,000 Iraqis have been able to immigrate to the U.S.
“I met with a lot of national security experts and everything else, that if you’re a Christian living in Syria, you can’t come into this country. Yet, if you are a Muslim living in Syria, who (is) not under attack, (you) can come in,” Trump told CBN’s David Brody.
“But we have Christians being beheaded all over the world by ISIS. In Syria and in Iraq, in particular, those Christians can’t come into this country,” Trump continued.
According to the Pew Research Center in 2013, Christians were the largest group of immigrants to the U.S. However, the percentage of Christian immigrants dropped from 68 percent to 61 percent over a 10-year period. Meanwhile, the percentage of immigrating Muslims grew from 5 to 10 percent over that same time.
The Iraqi Christians are going through one of the worst periods in Christian history, according to the Philos Project, and it’s something the State Department appears to be ignoring.
USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers points to President Barack Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the Christian plight.
“When three North Carolina Muslims were gunned down by a virulent atheist, Obama rightly spoke out against the horrifying killings,” Powers writes. “But he just can’t seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians or the eradication of Christianity from its birthplace.”
Research and interviews by the Philos Project back up Powers’ statements.
“Evidence suggests that within the administration, not only is there no passion for persecuted Christians under threat of genocide from the Islamic State, (but) there is no room for them, period,” Philos Project’s Faith J.H. McDonnell writes. “In fact, despite ISIS’ targeting of Iraqi Christians specifically because they are Christians, and, as such, stand in the way of a pure, Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East (and beyond), the U.S. State Department has made it clear that ‘there is no way that Christians will be supported because of their religious affiliation.'”
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