RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama is willing to gamble with the lives of American citizens. He is intent on emptying Guantanamo of as many of the detainees as possible, even as some of the released jihadists have returned to the battlefield to fight against our soldiers. Now the Obama administration is reportedly planning to accelerate the screening process for Syrians claiming refugee status, so that they can be rapidly resettled in communities across the United States.

The Washington Free Beacon has reported that, according to its sources, “The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months.”

The current resettlement vetting process for self-proclaimed refugees begins with an initial screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).  The applications of some who make it through this preliminary UN screen are referred to United States authorities for further consideration and possible resettlement. UNCHR’s role in the front end of the vetting process should be reason enough for alarm.

The United Nations has called for more open borders to accommodate the millions of “refugees” and other migrants whom have left the Middle East and North Africa. To this end, UNCHR is said to be looking for alternative avenues to admit Syrian refugees that are faster than the current refugee “resettlement” vetting process. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi suggested a number of such alternatives last March, at a high-level meeting held in Geneva to discuss “global responsibility sharing through pathways for admission of Syrian refugees.”

Among the alternative “pathways” listed by the UNCHR High Commissioner for Refugees were “labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons.” He added, “Resettlement needs vastly outstrip the places that have been made available so far… But humanitarian and student visa, job permits and family reunification would represent safe avenues of admission for many other refugees as well.”

The net effect of expanding the grounds for admitting Syrian refugees to include job and student related visas could be to bump American citizens from jobs and scholarships that are given to the refugees instead.

Apparently, the Obama administration is onboard with looking for alternatives to the current refugee resettlement system that depends on cooperation with the states. Perhaps it is reacting to the fact that numerous states have recently elected to opt out of refugee resettlement programs, including New Jersey.

“The United States joins UNHCR in calling for new ways nations, civil society, the private sector, and individuals can together address the global refugee challenge,” the State Department wrote in a Media Note following the Geneva conference. The State Department added that it has “created a program to allow U.S. citizens and permanent residents to file refugee applications for their Syrian family members.”

Who are such “family members?” Would they include siblings and cousins of fighting age? Do we really want to add more loopholes to the existing visa system, which was already breached by the female jihadist who took part in the San Bernardino massacre after being admitted to the United States on a “fiancé” visa? Apparently so, if the Obama administration gets its way. Speeding up the “refugee” admission process and avoiding state roadblocks in the current refugee resettlement pathway appear to have become its top priority.

Meanwhile, Obama administration officials tell us not to worry. They assure us they have a “robust” screening process in place to vet Syrians claiming to be refugees. Don’t believe them. They are deliberately turning a blind eye to the warnings of experts such as FBI Director James Comey, who said last year, during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, that the federal government lacked the data to adequately vet “refugees” seeking entry to the U.S.

“We can only query against that which we have collected,” Comey told the committee. “So if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned earlier this year that he considered ISIS and its branches to be the number 1 terrorist threat. Clapper pointed to ISIS’s success in “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow.”

Even those “refugees” who enter the United States without pre-existing ties to ISIS are vulnerable to indoctrination by jihadists already in this country. Somali “refugees” are a prime example. As Andrew Liepman, who was serving as deputy director for intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center until he retired from government service in 2012, said during the first year of Obama’s presidency: “Despite significant efforts to facilitate their settlement into American communities, many Somali immigrants face isolation.”

Jihadists have been busy “recruiting and radicalizing young people,” Liepman added.

Nevertheless, seven years later, the Obama administration continues to send as many as 700 Somali “refugees” per month to cities across the United States, with the largest number settling in Minnesota where large concentrations of Somalis already live.

Barack Obama has said that it is wrong to “start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.” He refuses to associate Islam or jihad with acts of terrorism or with what he calls violent extremism. He rails against “negative stereotypes of Islam” and “those who slander the prophet of Islam.” But telling the truth about the violent and supremacist strains in Islamic ideology, rooted in the Koran and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, is neither stereotyping nor slander. It is identifying the enemy we are fighting. And wanting to make sure that we have a foolproof vetting system in place before admitting more Muslims from the sectarian conflict-ravaged areas in the Middle East or North Africa is neither fear-mongering nor discrimination. It is common sense defense of the American people from undue risk of attacks in our homeland, which is the primary duty of every U.S. president as commander-in-chief including Barack Obama.