A spokesman for the most well-known Muslim-American advocacy group said at a pro-refugee rally Sunday in St. Louis that Americans should fear their own "right-wing extremists" more than the 10,000 Syrians President Obama wants to resettle in U.S. cities and towns.
The involvement of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, in the rally, billed as the "Bring Them Here March," confirms what WND has been reporting for months – that 95 percent of the Syrian "refugees" will be Muslims.
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"Either we let them in, or we take the statue of liberty down," Faizan Syed, executive director of CAIR for St. Louis, told KMOV-TV in St. Louis.
Christians, who are being hunted down and butchered by Sunni Muslim terrorists affiliated with ISIS, al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida and other jihadist factions, have no hope of getting into America as refugees.
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But Americans should not fear the Syrians arriving in their communities, Sayed said.
Syed told independent video journalist Adam Sharp that right-wing extremism is far more dangerous than the "one-in-a-million" chance that a jihadist could slip in among the 10,000 people who are coming from the jihadist hotbed of Syria, where ISIS controls large swaths of territory and which House Homeland Security Committee Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, referred to as a "jihadist pipeline" into the West.
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To the contrary, Syed said he has "faith in the FBI" to weed out any potential terrorists. He parroted the U.S. State Department talking points about refugees being the "the most scrutinized people on the planet."
"It takes over two years of background checks" by the FBI, he said in the video interview. He failed to mention that the FBI itself has said it's impossible to screen people from the "failed state" of Syria, where the U.S. government has no access to law-enforcement records or intelligence data. (See FBI Counter-Terrorism Deputy Director Michael Steinbach's testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 11, 2015.)
Watch CAIR spokesman's comments about "right-wing extremists" being the true enemy of America, not jihadists being imported from a Middle East war zone:
Obama's 10,000 Syrians 'just the start of flood'
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Obama's decision to allow 10,000 Syrians into the country over the next fiscal year is an ominous sign for the future, says Ann Corcoran, author of the blog Refugee Resettlement Watch. She notes that once a refugee program from a specific country gains a foothold in the U.S., it tends to drag on for years.
So 10,000 in 2016 will likely mean at least another 10,000 the next year, and the next, and for many years after that. This is what has occurred with the Somalia refugee program as well as those involving Iraq, Burma and Bhutan.
"The flow never stops. The Somali program has been going on for about 20 years. And the Iraqis we started bringing in near the end of the George W. Bush administration, and that's been 20,000 or so a year ever since," Corcoran said. "Why are we still taking Somalis? It never ends, and one of the things that caused it to never end is the family reunifications. Once they're here, then we have to bring in all their families.
"So once that flow starts, even if that civil war were to end next year, we'll be taking them for many, many years because the State Department doesn't just say, 'Oh the civil war is over, so we stop the flow.' It doesn't work that way."
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Somali refugees began coming to the U.S. in large numbers around 1992, and they have continued to stream into more than 100 U.S. cities and towns at an average rate of 5,000 per year over the past 20 years. More than 110,000 Somalis have now entered the U.S. since the early 1990s as refugees. Once a refugee arrives, he or she automatically becomes a lawful permanent resident, is signed up for government welfare benefits, their children placed in public schools and the family placed on a fast-track to full citizenship.
According to a recent study by the Congressional Research Office, 72.4 percent of refugees receive food stamps and nearly a quarter live in public housing.
FBI Director James Comey has said his agency is currently overburdened with active ISIS-related investigations in all 50 states and can hardly keep up with the recruitment threat posed by ISIS.
But Syed is unconcerned with that and points to a U.S. Justice Department document, previously detailed by WND, that attempts to shift the focus of the threat away from the Islamists and onto conservative American citizens.
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"And also in America, the greatest threat to any American in this country is right-wing extremism, so I'm more fearful of right-wing extremism and not as fearful of the one-in-a-million chance of this (Islamic extremist attack) happening," Syed said.
Syed is apparently unaware of the more than 70 attacks and attempted attacks carried out just in the last year by Islamic jihadist immigrants inside America, the latest being in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
"Every year, the FBI does a report of basically the greatest threat to the United States, and in the most recent 2014 report they reported that the greatest threat to the United States is actually right-wing extremists within this country and that is really, as Americans, what we should be looking more into, rather than preventing hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering overseas to not come because of this really remote possibility that might exist," Syed said.
"So I'm more fearful of right wing extremism."
He said the issue of jihadists coming into the U.S. through the refugee ranks is an "illegitimate concern," despite the facts that dozens have already done so, including the six Somali men who were arrested in April after making repeated attempts to board planes for Turkey, where they planned to slip across the border into Syria and join ISIS.
Dr. Mark Christian, a native of Egypt and former Sunni Muslim whose father is still a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood front group and known defender of terrorists that for some reason never gets "called out" by the mainstream media for its shadowy past.
The fact that CAIR and the White House are on the same side should raise eyebrows for any thinking American, Christian told WND.
Why is Obama creating new Muslim citizens?
"The vague answers from the White House on screening of refugees, saying they will be able to filter anybody coming in, is baloney," he said. "Some of them are prospective jihadists. The problem is bigger than anyone wants to think about. You are giving them a chance to become permanent citizens when the problem is a temporary problem. If you want to give them shelter temporarily, that is one thing, but let them go back and fix their country at the appropriate time. Why are you giving them permanent citizenship?"
Christian said there are plenty of ways to help the legitimate refugees without inviting people of questionable backgrounds to resettle permanently in the U.S.
"I would help as much as I can on the outside, help them in the Middle East," he said. "There's no chance we can monitor everybody coming in.
"How can you shape them and rehab those who are coming from a war zone into a society that does not appreciate beheading and death, does not appreciate Islamic ideology, does not appreciate bans on alcohol and non-halal food and all of the other things that come with Islamic law?"
The whole issue of screening the refugees ignores the potential for refugees with clean records to get radicalized after they come to America, which has been the case with many of the terrorists who have attacked the U.S., including the Chattanooga shooter who killed four Marines and a sailor in July. Youseff Mohammad Abdulazeez came with his parents from Kuwait at the age of 6, and didn't get radicalized until he graduated from college. Many of the radicalized Somalis also have come as small children or were born to refugees after those refugees arrived in America.
"How can you guarantee there is a way to stop someone from deciding he, all of a sudden, wants to be more devout to his own country and his own holy book, how can you stop them from becoming devout?" Christian asks.
"They have to understand their obligation before they ask for their rights. Otherwise, they will move in and have rights with no obligations," he added. "Groups like CAIR need to be shut down. They are not advocates for Muslims; they are advocates for terrorists."