Australia Proposes to Prioritise Syrian Christian Refugees

As reported yesterday in the ABC by Anna Henderson and Chris Uhlmann.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-08/christians-to-get-priority-in-syrian-refugee-intake/6757110

‘Syrian Migrant Crisis: Christians To Get Priority as Abbott Faces Pressure To Take In More Refugees”.

‘The Abbott Government wants to restrict any intake of Syrian refugees to minorities which are largely Christian, as passions run high in the Coalition over the way Australia should handle the crisis in Syria.

Restricting Syrian migrant/ refugee intake to Christians only is both moral – for they are the group most in danger, indeed they are suffering near-genocide – and rational – for they will assimilate into Australian non-Muslim society and will not, further down the track, hatch plots to mass-murder their hosts. – CM

‘Prime Minister Tony Abbott is under increasing pressure to increase this year’s humanitarian intake of 13, 750 people, but has put off a decision while Australia consults with the United Nations about the best approach.

And if the UN won’t let us prioritise the threatend-with-genocide Christians, I think we shall have to tell the UN, very politely, to take a flying leap...- CM

‘Labor is pushing for an additional intake of 10,000 people, while the Greens want double that number.

I am quite, quite sure that Barnabas Fund’s “Operation Safe Haven” could readily find bona fide Christian Syrian refugees to fill every one of 20 000 places, were they offered.  I myself would be happy with 20,000 – no matter how much of a stretch it was to handle – if every single one of them was an Assyrian Christian, because every Christian in Iraq and Syria, right now, is facing extermination.  Every place that is not given to a Christian, but to a potentially-murderous Muslim, means one more Christian is kicked back down into the Predator Pit to die.   – CM

‘Beyond the debate over numbers there is an argument over what kind of refugees should be accepted.

It’s a sign of the times that there is even an argument. If we knew what we were about, there would be no argument; we would be stating, without apology, that we are prepared to accept non-Muslims, only. – CM

‘Government ministers, like Malcolm Turnbull, have argued for accepting more Syrian Christians (Thank you for that, Mr Turnbull; God bless you! – CM), and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has nominated minorities like the Yazidis.

Please, Ms Bishop, not any Muslim minorities. Yazidis and Mandaeans, yes.  There really are not very many of them, and they are not Muslim; and since they are not Christians, they are ‘cool’ and ‘exotic’, you might get some points with some among our population who might otherwise be upset about rejecting Muslims.   But no Muslim minorities (Shiites, and Sunni Muslim Kurds).  Not one. Too much of a risk that, down the track, they or their children will Go Jihad. – CM

‘One backbencher told the ABC the message being sent to the Prime Minister by some in the Coalition was clear – “No more Muslim men”.

Hear, hear! Amen to that! A very hopeful sign; it suggests that at least some MPs are starting to grasp the nature of the beast. –  CM

‘Mr Turnbull said yesterday he was very concerned about the plight of Christian communities in Syria. “They are a minority, they survived in Syria, they’ve been there for thousands of years, literally since the time of Christ”, he said.

Correct.  They have been Christians for centuries, long before the invention of Islam and the invasion of Mesopotamia and the Levant by Arab Muslim imperialists. – CM

“But in an increasingly sectarian Middle East (sic: “a Middle East in which a massive Islamic revival is going on” – CM) you have to ask whether the, the gaps, the spaces, that they were able to live and survive in, will any longer be available.”

The answer, I would say, is no.  Time to get them out to safety, if no-one is prepared to create for them an all-Christian Islam-free enclave guaranteed and protected by western military might. – CM

‘Senate Leader Eric Abetz has also highlighted the case for Christians to be prioritised.

“It should be on the basis of need, and given that the Christians are the most persecuted group in the world, and especially in the Middle East, I think it stands to reason that they would be pretty high up on the priority list for resettlement.”

Yes! He’s got it! by God I think he’s got it!  Hear, hear!  Stick to that line, Mr Abetz. Don’t let anyone shout you down. – CM

‘Ms Bishop told AM the Government was looking at the best way to offer both temporary and permanent protection options for those fleeing the crisis.

“I think that the Christian minorities are being persecuted in Syria (indeed they are, and most terribly; and also in Iraq, by the way – CM), and even if the conflict were over, they would still be persecuted”, she said.

True dat. – CM

“So I believe there will be a focus on ensuring we can get access to those persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, who will have no home to return to, even when the conflict is over.

“That includes Maronites, it includes Yazidis, there are Druze, there are a whole range of ethnic and relgiious minorities that make up the populations in both Syria and Iraq.“

Focus on just one thing, Ms Bishop; anyone we take in must be non-Muslim. Because it is those who are not Muslim who have suffered the most in the past and are suffering the most now and will suffer in the future. Because the lot of a non-Muslim in a Muslim-majority, Islam-suffused society is precarious at best and a living death, at worst.  Read “The Third Choice”, Ms Bishop.  And draw the logical conclusion: we must take the non-Muslims, first, foremost, and only. – CM

‘Fears Focus on Relgion Will Increase Persecution.

‘Labor has joined refugee groups in warning the Government’s emphasis on helping Christian refugees is “dangerous”.

What is he trying to say? That if we try to rescue people that Muslims are trying to exterminate, it will make the Muslims angry with us…so we mustn’t rescue them??? Good god, this man would give a fleeing victim back to a murderer to be killed, because helping the victim will make the murderer and the murderer’s mates mad at him. – CM

“Being a victim of war doesn’t know a particular religion”, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said.

Bill, you are an idiot. What is happening now is what happened during the genocide of the Armenians.  Muslims, acting in accord with the example set by Mohammed and the doctrines of the core texts of Islam, are specifically and preferentially targeting non-Muslims, qua non-Muslims, for abuse, robbery, dispossession and murder, and seizing and raping and enslaving their girl-children and women.  Muslims are breaking crosses and destroying and defiling churches.  They are targeting defenceless minority groups, simply and solely because they are Christians, or because they are Yazidi. And you are deliberately ignoring that fact, which is moderately obvious to anyone who has taken any time at all to examine what is going on, and any person who has bothered to listen to what the Assyrian Christians and the Yazidis are saying.  Listen to them, you fool.  And tell them, if you dare, that this is not a persecution, that they are not being targeted becasue of their religion. They will laugh in your face…though you would deserve it, if they slapped you. – CM

“If you’re a woman facing terrible crimes to be committed against you, if you’re a child, a little child, potentially drowning at sea, I’m not interested in their religion, I’m interested in their safety”.

You’re refusing to see the big picture, Mr Shorten. You need to talk to Sr Hatune, who specialises in rescuing Syrian Christian and Yazidi girls.  They form the majority of those women who have been subjected to horrific rape and torture.  They are the majority of those who have been sold into slavery. 

And now cue another earnestly-Islamophile Useful Idiot and Dhimmi, bleating about how it will upset the Muslims if we dare to prioritise and rescue the Christians. – CM

‘Refugee Council chief executive Paul Power said it is “natural” to expect a large number of the refugees will be Christian, but he said the focus on the group is likely to do damage.

Really?  Why shouldn’t a non-Muslim country prioritise non-Muslim refugees?  Do the Muslim countries prioritise non-Muslim refugees??  No they don’t.  Muslim ‘charity’, such as it is, is meant to be extended to Muslims only, unless offered with sticky dawa strings attached. – CM

“I’m sure one of the consequences is that extremists within Syria and other parts of the Middle East will use this as a weapon against Syrian Christians” Mr Power said.  “They would use it as an argument to push the view that the west cares about Christians and does not care about Muslims and other religious minorities”…

Bloody hell, Mr Powers, I don’t give a damn, right now, what the Muslims think.  And if it is the case that our prioritising of Syrian Christians for rescue from Muslim mass-murderers will cause the Muslims to attack the Christians we haven’t yet rescued, then the obvious thing to do is for the entire Western world to act to get every last Christian outta there as fast as we can…and then the Muslims won’t have any Christians in their clutches to use as hostages and bargaining chips.  – CM

“Speaking from Europe, Mr Dutton said he would hold talks iwth the United Nations refugee agency, and other organisations (I hope those ‘other organisations’ include groups like the Barnabas Fund, which is currently organising ‘Operation Safe Haven’; and Sr Hatune and Hans Erling Jensen of the Hatune Foundation; and Emanuel Youkhana of Christian Aid Program Northern Iraq;  because right now a Muslim is running the UNHCR and is very, very unlikely to be sympathetic to the idea of prioritising Christian refugees, his job is to make sure the Muslims on his books get all the best spots and, indeed, if possible, all the spots avaiilable, the Christians be damned – CM), on how Australia could help.

“There’s more to be done, and the Australian Government’s very keen to have discussions with the UNHCR, with our partners otherwise, to look at what more we can do”, he said.

“We’ll be focusing our attention particularly on the families who are in the refugee camps along the border of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey”.

You must look beyond those camps, Mr Dutton, if you want to find the Christian refugees; for the Muslims dominate those camps and have driven the Christians right out of them.  As Lord Carey pointed out, in his article published in the Telegraph earlier this week – “According to the Barnabas Fund…Christians are not to be found in the UN camps, because they have been attacked and targeted by Islamists and driven from them.  They are seeking refuge in private homes, church buildings, and with neighbours and family”. – CM

‘Persecuted Minorities Must be the Focus” Bernardi.

‘Yesterday in the Senate, Liberal backbencher Cory Bernardi said persecuted minorities must be the focus of Australia’s efforts.

Agree. Persecuted non-Muslim minorities; those are the people who should get those precious tickets to Australia. Not the Muslims who belong to the very same group that – in accord with the instructions laid down in the core texts of Islam – has tormented, abused, degraded and discriminated against these people for over a thousand years. – CM

“The Christians in the Middle East are among the most persecuted people on Earth”, he told the Senate.

Yes. – CM

“If we can provide safe haven to them, then I say we should do it. And that is what the Prime Minister has said.“

Dig in your toes, Mr Abbott. I damn well hope that this is what you said and that this is what you will do. There are not a few subjects on which I disagree with you; but there are two on which I am wholly in agreement.  I heartily agree with you on the subject of Australia’s friendship with and support of Israel, and I heartily agree with you on this…the necessity of rescuing Syrian Christians, first and foremost. – CM

‘Senator Bernardi also questioned the motivation of thousands of those who are trying to enter Europe.

“This seems to me to be becoming an opportunistic cycle which is masking the true humanitarian need that is the responsibility of all Western nations”, he said. “That is the challenge for us – to distinguish between those who are being opportunistic and those who are truly in need.”

The problem is, that a Muslim may be genuinely in need, in the sense of being displaced by war, etc, but still represent a mortal threat to a non-Muslim society, because of the deadly ideology – Islam – that he or she brings with them in their mental baggage.  And therefore, alas, it is necessary, at this point – especially given the observable behaviour of all those many Muslims already entrenched within Europe, their predatory conduct, the rapes, the riots, the sex gangs, the attacks on elderly and infirm infidels such as we recently saw in the Netherlands where two Moroccan Muslim males not only robbed two elderly Jewish Shoah survivors but also brutally bashed them, and attacks on Jews, such as when Mohammed Merah after murdering French soldiers attacked a Jewish school and murdered a rabbi and three little Jewish children –  for Infidel countries to refuse to accept any more manifestly-Muslim ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’.  Weeding out those who will then pretend to be something else to get in, could be facilitated by providing for a rather longer – say, ten years – probation period before the granting of permanent residency or citizenship, and stipulating that pretending to be non-Muslim to gain entry will, upon detection of the imposture, be punished by instant deportation. – CM

‘Richard Marles has described Senator Bernardi as an “embarrassment” to the Government (why? is it an ’embarrassment” that someone proposes to rescue members of a community – Middle Eastern Christians, specifically Assyrian Christians, who are being subjected to genocide? are you mad, Mr Marles? – CM) and said the comments were “reprehensible” and out of kilter with community sentiment.

Really? Have you done a rigorously-conducted opinion poll? I understand that there was an informal online poll run by the ABC that discovered that 71 percent of respondents favoured taking in only the Syrian Christians, not Muslims… I f you commissioned a proper poll, Mr Marles, you might get a shock.  You might find out that people like me – who would be very happy to take in thousands of mortally-imperilled persecuted Syrian Christians, but do not want even one more Muslim to enter Australia, period – are more numerous than you think. =  CM

‘Government backbencher Ewen Jones said Australia had the capacity to take up to 50,000 refugees…

So long as they were all non-Muslims, that’s fine by me. We’ll manage, somehow.  I am sure the Catholics and Orthodox and we Anglicans and a bunch of other churches in Australia could help integrate 50 000 fellow Christians. And Yazidis and Mandaeans would be okay, too.  And we’ll end up with a few more convents and monasteries, and maybe we’ll have a School of Syriac Studies at Macquarie University’s Centre for the Study of Early Christianity, right alongside the School of Coptic Studies we’ve already got. 

Let us do it.  Let us open the gates of hope and bring these traumatised, suffering Christians to a place of relative safety, under the light of the Southern Cross.  Let’s do it.  And Sir Stanley George Savige, the Australian army captain who during World War I in the eastern theatre risked his life to rescue thousands of Syrian Christians from their Muslim tormentors and would-be murderers, will look down from the parapets of heaven and know that his legacy lives on. – CM

Post scriptum. If you click on the link, you will discover that the ABC opened the story for Comments.

Some seemed wholly unable to comprehend why anybody should try to rescue Christians from Muslim persecution.  Many seemed convinced that any affirmative action to rescue a Christian people-group who are threatened by genocide is somehow discriminatory and wrong.

Though others were more clear-headed.

Here is a typical exchange.

Bruce of Berowra whined: “Is it legal for the government to discriminate on the basis of religion?…Given that they obviously plan to exclude Muslims, I’ll bet that’ll be another reason for Muslims to hate Australia.  Whenever religion raises its head, problems like this arise.”

To which Realist (who manfully upholds decency and commonsense throughout the comments thread) retorted, cuttingly – “So we just leave all those Chriistians to be murdered off, just in case Muslims living in Aus get their nose out of joint; are you for real? – we are now so terrified of upsetting Muslims we would leave Christians to be persecuted and murdered?  Nice work.“

And there was another comment, also by a decent and well-informed person, one jardaca, that deserves to be given a wider airing:

“There has been religious cleansing of Christians in the middle east for centuries.  It has intensified in recent years. There is deep hatred among fellow Muslims of differing Islamic faiths in the entire region. Enormous racism and religious vilification. Christians are certainly not welcome. They are far and away the group that requires the most assistance, and it is appropriate that we offer assistance to this minority group first...”.

And another sensible person, ‘metronome’, pointed out the obvious. “Why not help the Chrisitians? They need our help as much as anyone else, and have been severely persecuted in the ME.  Life in any predominantly Muslim country is very hard for them.  And at least they won’t be inclined to become radicalised for Islam and kill us.”