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Lawmakers to Obama: ‘Stop Importing the Threat -Arrests of 2 Iraqis Prove It’s Impossible to ‘Vet’ Muslim Refugees
By Leo Hohmann
Now that two ISIS operatives who entered the U.S. as Iraqi refugees have been arrested on terror-related charges, the heat is sure to get turned up in the debate over the “vetting” of Muslim refugees and whether it is even possible to screen them for terrorist ties.
The two alleged terrorists were arrested Thursday, one in Sacramento and the other in Houston. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the arrests “may have prevented a catastrophic terror-related event in the making and saved countless lives,” CBS News reported.
Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said the arrests “are precisely why I called for a halt to refugees entering the U.S. from countries substantially controlled by terrorists.” He said the refugee inflow from these countries should end “until there is an effective vetting process that will ensure refugees do not compromise the safety of Americans and Texans.”
But the fact is that no amount of “vetting” would have stopped one of the two terrorists from entering the country. The refugee arrested in Houston, Omar Faraj Al Harden, was “radicalied” after he arrived in the U.S. as a teenager in 2009, authorities said.
Rep. Brian Babin — one of most outspoken critics of the refugee resettlement program and author of a bill that would shut the program down pending a full audit — represents parts of the Houston area where Al Harden lived.
Babin introduced his bill, the Refugee Resettlement Accountability National Security Act, more than five months ago, at a time when few in Congress were interested in the refugee issue.
Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas
“That (Houston area) is my district,” Babin told WND in a phone interview Saturday. “I dropped that bill July 30 and quite frankly I was a voice in the wilderness because nobody was talking about it. Then all of a sudden we have the Paris attacks and then San Bernardine. That was just proof in the pudding that what we were suspicious of has been absolutely true and if there were any doubts then these arrests prove the point that we have a problem with this refugee program.”
Ryan offers full funding of Obama refugee program
The debate over vetting Syrian refugees raged in Congress following the Paris attacks but, in the end, Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership decided to fully fund President Obama’s expanded refugee resettlement program. That program will allow the United Nations to select 85,000 refugees that the Obama administration will then distribute into more than 180 U.S. cities and towns during the current fiscal year.
And Obama plans to ramp up the program further in 2017 with 100,000 refugees bound for U.S. cities. The president has said there should never be a ‘religious test’ for those seeking refuge in America and tried to marginalize the pushback against his plans as xenophobia from people “afraid of widows and orphans.”
But roughly half of the nearly 200,000 refugees entering the U.S. over the next two years will come from countries with active jihadist movements – Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Bosnia, Uzbekistan and Burma, among others.
Al Harden, 23, was a Palestinian born in Iraq who had come to Houston as a refugee in November 2009, when he would have been a teenager. He passed through the vaunted “vetting” process that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have described as the “most rigorous” screening faced by any category of immigrant.
Authorities said Al Harden got “radicalized” after he arrived in the U.S. so no amount of “vetting” would have mattered in his case.
“I don’t know the details of his radicalization but the majority of the time we’re getting a lot of these folks radicalized on the Internet after they arrive,” Babin told WND. “But many are radicalized in our local mosques and these radical imams will go into our prisons and recruit there.”
Babin said he was disappointed the GOP leadership could not even get the language of the American SAFE Act requiring enhanced vetting of refugees — a weaker version of his bill — included in the omnibus spending bill.
“The Democrats said it was a non-starter,” he said, and Ryan buckled.
So Babin says he will return to the drawing board and promote his bill, which goes further than the SAFE Act, actually halting all refugee resettlements pending a full audit of the program’s costs to taxpayers and its risks to national security.
“We’re going to be pushing my colleagues. We hadn’t been pushing it but with these arrests we are going to because this problem is not going away, it’s as severe and acute as ever and I don’t know what it’s going to take for this president and for Hillary Clinton to wake up and realize we’re in a war,” he said. “We’re in a war with these radical Islamic terrorists and they won’t even name the enemy.”
Babin said he was astonished Obama would push for expanded background checks for gun purchases while refusing enhanced background checks for Syrian and Iraqi refugees as required by the SAFE Act.
“He’s promised to veto the SAFE Act if it passes the Senate while at the same time he wants to implement these needless background checks on law-abiding Americans so he can disarm us,” Babin said. “Yet he doesn’t want to do enhanced background checks on potential jihadists.”
Read more at WND:
http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/lawmakers-to-obama-stop-importing-the-threat/
If these thugs are getting radicalized on the internet it is time to shut down ALL suspicious Muslim web sites. With all this mumbo jumbo NSA hot air about spying on good American citizens….. Its time to infiltrate the Muslim jihad cells in this country…. the actual terrorists. Then take them out or ship them to Gitmo.
Tooooooooo many forefathers and noted men have commented about Muslims for centuries. Stating they do NOT belong here…. do not conform to our customs. So why on earth would anyone in their right mind allow these menaces to society to ever migrate from their own garbage heap countries. I have been to Israel and Jordan. Although Israel has been beautified in many ways thee are still many Muslims living in the deserts as 7th century fools. Jordan is dirtier. With all the oil money in those countries you would think they would have grand cities like Gaddafi created in Libya. But these people are savage minded…. we cannot change their ways. Ishmael and Esau descendants. What has happened in Europe is beyond sickening. The Rothschild or Zionist protocol or whomever created this nightmare invasion should be hung.