Muslim immigration to Europe and America is a huge issue right now. Yet while Muslims are being brought in by the literal boatload, government and religious leaders are talking about not helping bring over Christians from the Middle East, but instead keeping them in the Middle East. They openly admit this, as the article below points out:
Any U.S. policy that would prioritize the resettlement of Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria might help the Islamic State accomplish its goal of pushing historic Christian communities out of their ancient homelands in the Middle East, an Arab Christian leader has warned.
As hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi Christians have fled from their homes amid rising religious tensions, the ongoing civil war in Syria and the rise of IS (also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh), some human rights advocacy groups in the U.S. and President Donald Trump have suggested that persecuted Christians and religious minorities should receive priority from the U.S. government for resettlement and aid.
Trump signed a controversial executive order on Jan. 27 which suspended all U.S. refugee resettlement for 120 days and suspended Syrian refugee resettlement indefinitely. However, the order includes language that calls for persecuted religious minorities to receive priority status on an individual basis when the refugee resettlement continues. Trump also told CBN News after he signed the order that he believes persecuted Christians should be a “priority.”
While some Christian groups, such as World Relief, have come out against any plan to give priority to Christian refugees, other religious freedom advocates have defended a plan to give priority to persecuted religious minorities, including Christians, and have said that it’s somewhat of an American tradition to prioritize persecuted religious minorities facing genocide.
Although resettlement groups and churches in the U.S. and Europe are eager to help Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria start new lives in the West, a number of Iraqi and Syrian Christian leaders have called on native Christians to stay in the region and return to their homes once IS is pushed out of their homelands.
Habib Ephrem, the secretary general of an organization called Gathering of Christians in the Middle East, told Time magazine in a recent interview that “priority visas” are “the wrong message and the wrong policy.”
Ephrem argued that countries that are giving priority to Christian refugees are, in effect, facilitating IS’ eradication of different minority faiths, including Christianity, from the region.
“ISIS expels people from their homeland and then you take them to the West,” Ephrem, who has lobbied foreign government to stop facilitating the resettling of Christians, said. “So what? You are doing the policy of ISIS?”
As Time reports, “The U.S. does not give Christian refugees priority … but in the past countries including Poland and Slovakia have indicated they would give preference to Christian refugees, and France has also previously offered to host Christians that fled ISIS. Other countries, like Canada, offer private sponsorship programs at are often used by churches to bring their brethren to the country.”
Although towns in Iraq and Syria are listed throughout the Bible, Christian communities that have existed in those nations for over 2,000 years have, in a sense, disappeared.
In Iraq, for example, there were over 1.4 million Christians before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Over a decade later and after Christians in Northern Iraq were forced to convert, die or leave, the Christian population in Iraq was estimated to be at about 275,000 in March 2016, according to an extensive genocide report submitted to the State Department by the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus.
In Syria, Christians accounted for about 10 percent of the pre-war population. But considering that an estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since 2011, it’s hard to tell how many Christians remain. The Chaldean bishop of Aleppo estimated last March that about two-thirds of the 1.5 million Syrian Christians have been killed or fled their homes.
…Although some Christian leaders are calling on Iraqi and Syrian Christians to return to their homes, there are many displaced Christians who no longer have trust in the region.
Even if IS is cleared from their homelands, many Christians fear they will still be persecuted in a post-IS era, considering that it was their own neighbors who betrayed them to IS.
Additionally, homes and churches have been destroyed and many religious minority families don’t have the money to fix the damages.
Many displaced Christians from Iraq and Syria have migrated to Kurdistan, where they are protected by the Kurdish government. Others are living as refugees in neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey. (source)
It is sad and disturbing that it seems Hungary, which has made itself a veritable “champion” against the European Union’s destructive immigration policies as well as against Islam, just revealed that it is doing so for show. It is not good to see what is gross evil and refuse to do anything about it. This is wrong. However, it is even more wrong to see the same evil and then pretend to do something about it because you want to look like you care when the reality is you are doing nothing because you don’t care.
Christianity has already been exterminated through not just the population displacements, but the total destruction of their communities. The Christian communities of the Middle East were already in decline, but the American-backed ISIS terrorist drastically hastened what was already taking place. It is one thing to build a church or two and put people back into their communities, but this is just the first part. These communities have to be rebuilt from the ground up. This means homes, businesses, and economic and social networks which come about naturally and once they are gone they have to regrow naturally- no amount of money can instantly, or even in a short amount of time replace that which was destroyed. Just as Christianity is supposed to be an entire way of life the guides the entire conduct of a person, communities cannot just have one institution rebuilt and expect the others to follow suit right along with it, for what you will end up with is essentially a colony that only can survive on external support and once that support is gone it will collapse.
Prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, many of Iraq’s Christians had already left and were leaving for the West and other parts of the world because they knew there was no future where they were. That was almost 15 years ago, and everybody knows that things in Iraq have only become drastically worse for everybody, Christian or not. If there was no future then, there is certainly no future there now.
Turkish President and Sultan Aspirant Erdogan
Then there is the issue of Turkey, which is a growing and dangerous power that has a long history of murdering Christians. Right now there are nearly half a million Christians sitting in refugee camps throughout the Middle East. Basically, they are sitting ducks right now. If ISIS and other terrorists are dangerous enough, then the fact the Turkey is rising again and rapidly should be of real concern simply because of what happened in 1917. If that is what the Turks did to Christians living in and around its borders, and if history is any guide, then these Christians are living on borrowed time until Turkey becomes powerful enough that it flexes its military muscles and “finishes the job” it started in 1917.
A Turkish official teasing starving Armenian children during the 1917 genocide with a piece of bread. This is the kind of evil that will befall the Christians of the Middle East once again if it is not stopped now, and the way to stop it is to help these people get to a safe place.
The idea that Christianity in the Middle East pre-2003 is going to come back stronger than it was before is a pipe dream. Again, one must have hope and miracles do happen, but the fact is that Christians are real refugees, having suffered and continuing to suffer at the hands of Muslims and who will die unless something is done to help them. Leaving them in their “native lands” is basically asking them to commit suicide because they have no way of supporting themselves and no way to rebuild what was destroyed, and if that was not bad enough and even if they did make improvements, their neighbor to the north in Turkey is patiently biding its time until it has enough power to wipe out these same Christians.
Those who are saying that these Christians should stay in the Middle East are veritably asking for their deaths. It does not matter what sect you are, it does not matter what one would like to have happen with the future of Christianity in Middle East because the future is NOW. The situation, sad as it is, is what it is. Right now, as far as any kind of humanitarian outreach goes, the goal must be on preserving what remains of that society through the people. Buildings can be replaced, businesses restored, and lives put back together, but people not so- indeed, the greatest treasure that we have as Christians as each other and our first goal is to protect that treasure at all costs.
Just to put everything in perspective, I did a story about this entire charity scam that is going on back in December 2016. I wrote how major companies, NGOs, and charities were being paid huge sums of money to bring Muslims in, and that it is possibly the biggest scandal in modern times. One refugee rescue organization, GEFIRA, tracked and actually made a video showing the trafficking that is taking place in real time:
People in the West have known for years that their governments have betrayed their trust. But in a new scandal just uncovered in what is looking like one of the biggest betrayals of trust in Western history. Gefira, a company that specializes in European politicay analysis has outed a huge scandal- there is an active collusion between dozens of major companies, NGOs, and humanitarian organizations doing the European Union’s dirty work by providing direct transportation for the millions of Muslim invaders into Europe and they are all being funded by your tax dollars and charitable organizations.
The list of organizations is formidable. These are not just obscure entities, but major organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Save The Children. A cadre of nations are involved including not just European nations such as Germany, Italy, and Holland, but also nations such as Belize, the Marshall Islands, and Panama, and there are even some boats who act as veritable pirates, providing no identifying information in direct violation of international laws of the sea.
This is possibly the biggest human trafficking operation in modern history taking place right before our eyes. The very governments meant to protect the people the claim to represent along with like companies also who say their goals are to look out for the good of their societies have sold their souls for money and are destroying their own nations for the almighty pursuit of an easy profit.
This whole situation is rotten. This whole refugee crisis is about making a profit off of the deaths of people like you and I, and as long as somebody is getting paid, the entire accursed scam is going to continue and when actual blood does start flowing, like a bunch of cockroaches scattering underneath a bright light these same folk who refused to deal with the reality of the situation will start looking for excuses instead of making penance for their actions. Almost nobody cares about the suffering Christians for the same reason they care so much about the Muslims that are being brought in- it is all about earning praise in the eyes of men and making money through power games while real people, the actual treasure in the eyes of God, are pushed away, left to suffer in a wasteland of no future and ultimately to die alone at the hands of Muslims with no grave to mark their bodies and no man to hear their screams for help.
Country singer Kenny Rogers once said in his famous song “The Gambler”- “you gotta know when to hold ’em, known when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Based on our experience at Rescue Christians, now is the time to fold up this chapter of Christian history in Iraq and neighboring lands and help these Christians in the Middle East walk away before they have to run, if they can even escape at that point.