Thread: MUSLIM COUNTRIES REFUSE TO TAKE A SINGLE SYRIAN REFUGEE, CITE RISK OF EXPOSURE TO TER

MUSLIM COUNTRIES REFUSE TO TAKE A SINGLE SYRIAN REFUGEE, CITE RISK OF EXPOSURE TO TERRORISM


CBC

by DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS5 Sep 20155,143

Five of the wealthiest Muslim countries have taken no Syrian refugees in at all, arguing that doing so would open them up to the risk of terrorism. Although the oil rich countries have handed over aid money, Britain has donated more than Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar combined.

Between 10 and 12 million Syrians have been displaced by the bloody civil war raging in their country. Most still remain within Syria’s borders, but around four million have fled over the borders into neighbouring countries, mostly Turkey Jordan and Lebanon, and beyond.

Lebanon, which has 1.1 million Syrian refugees, shut her borders to the Syrians in June of last year. Jordan, host to another 630,000, followed suit in August last year, preventing more Syrians from abandoning their country.

By early August 2015, European states had received nearly 350,000 asylum applications from Syrians, nearly a third of whom applied to Germany for asylum. Another 65,000 have applied Sweden and 50,000 in Serbia. Hungary and Austria have received close to 19,000 applications each although that figure is likely to rise, while the UK is processing 7,030 applications, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Yet amidst cries for Europe to do more, it has transpired that of the five wealthiest countries on the Arabian Peninsula, that is, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, not one has taken in a single refugee from Syria. Instead, they have argued that accepting large numbers of Syrians is a threat to their safety, as terrorists could be hiding within an influx of people. Sherif Elsayid-Ali, Amnesty International’s Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights, has slammed their inaction as “shameful”.
He said: “The records of Gulf countries is absolutely appalling, in terms of actually showing compassion and sharing the responsibility of this crisis… It is a disgrace.” None of the Gulf States signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, which legally defines a refugee as “A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality”. However, they have taken refugees in the past.

Twenty-five years ago, hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s invasion were given refuge. According to Arabian expert Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi: “in Abu Dhabi, the government rented out entire apartment blocks and gave them to families for free.”

Instead the countries, all of which are within the Top 50 list of wealthiest nations by GDP, have opted to donate aid to those affected by the crisis. According to the Daily Mail, the UAE has funded a refugee camp in Jordan giving shelter to tens of thousands of Syrians, while Saudi Arabia and Qatar have donated funds, food, shelter and clothing to Syrians in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

Total donations from the Gulf States are believe to total £589 million, less than a quarter of America’s £2.8 billion, and a fraction of the £65 billion they spent on defence in 2012 alone. The UK has handed over £920 million so far, but the Prime Minister yesterday pledged to increase that figure to £1 billion. He also promised to take in thousands more refugees.

Al-Qassemi has argued in the that the standing that the Muslim countries now have in the world confer on them a moral obligation to step in. “The Gulf States have emerged as the nerve centres of Arab diplomacy, culture, media production, commerce and tourism, amassing an unprecedented degree of soft power unrivalled in the region and beyond,” he said.

They also form “the most influential bloc within the 70-year-old Arab League.”

“But with great power comes great responsibility. The Gulf must realise that now is the time to change their policy regarding accepting refugees from the Syria crisis. It is the moral, ethical and responsible step to take.”

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015...-of-terrorism/

This of course confirms how totally stupid all the other countries are for accepting these "refugees".

So oil-rich Muslim countries won't take in their own brethren when they have no place else to go, due to Muslim extremists driving them out of their countries, but Europe and America should take them in!?!?

Ummm. . . NO!!!!!

Arab world's wealthiest nations do nothing for refugees
(Washington Post) By Ishaan Tharoor September 4, 2015.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rias-refugees/

The world has been transfixed in recent weeks by the unfolding refugee crisis in Europe, an influx of migrants unprecedented since World War II. More than 332,000 people have reached the continent so far this year. A fair amount of attention has fallen on the failure of many Western governments to adequately address the burden on Syria's neighboring countries, which are struggling to host the brunt of the roughly 4 million Syrians forced out of the country by its civil war.

[the Vatican offered to take @ 2 families!!??]

Some European countries have been criticized for offering sanctuary only to a small number of refugees, or for discriminating between Muslims and Christians. [We don't have enought mosques].

Less ire, though, has been directed at another set of stakeholders who almost certainly should be doing more: Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Arab states along the Persian Gulf.

As Amnesty International recently pointed out, the "six Gulf countries -- Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain -- have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees." This claim was echoed by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, on Twitter:

That's a shocking figure, given these countries' relative proximity to Syria, as well as the incredible resources at their disposal. As Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, a Dubai-based political commentator, observes, these countries include some of the Arab world's largest military budgets, its highest standards of living, as well as a lengthy history -- especially in the case of the United Arab Emirates -- of welcoming immigrants from other Arab nations and turning them into citizens.

Moreover, these countries aren't totally innocent bystanders. To varying degrees, elements within Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have invested in the Syrian conflict, playing a conspicuous role in funding and arming a constellation of rebel and Islamist factions fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

None of these countries are signatories of the United Nations' 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and lays out their rights, as well as the obligations of states to safeguard them. For a Syrian to enter these countries, they would have to apply for a visa, which, in the current circumstances, is rarely granted. According to the BBC, the only Arab countries where a Syrian can travel without a visa are Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen -- hardly choice or practical destinations.

Like European countries, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors also have fears over new arrivals taking jobs from citizens, and may also invoke concerns about security and terrorism. But the current gulf aid outlay for Syrian refugees, which amounts to collective donations under $1 billion (the United States has given four times that sum), seems short -- and is made all the more galling when you consider the vast sums Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. poured into this year's war effort in Yemen, an intervention some consider a strategic blunder.

As Bobby Ghosh, managing editor of the news site Quartz, points out, the gulf states in theory have a far greater ability to deal with large numbers of arrivals than Syria's more immediate and poorer neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan:

The region has the capacity to quickly build housing for the refugees. The giant construction companies that have built the gleaming towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh should be contracted to create shelters for the influx. Saudi Arabia has plenty of expertise at managing large numbers of arrivals: It receives an annual surge of millions of Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. There’s no reason all this knowhow can’t be put to humanitarian use.

"The Gulf must realize that now is the time to change their policy regarding accepting refugees from the Syria crisis," writes the columnist Qassemi. "It is the moral, ethical and responsible step to take."

Hungary’s Orban PM invokes Ottoman invasion to justify keeping refugees out

3 online COMMENTS:

How many extremists are part of these refugees? Callous I admit it, that is the real world.Those extremists were trained and funded by the wealthy Muslim nations. Wahabi Islam, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, is one of the most violent Sunni sects, the sect of the 9/11 bombers (most of whom were Saudi) and the one that is funding most of the mosques in the US.

This is invasion. The West shouldn't take the refugees. That's the job of the Muslim world.

Everyone pay attention to the biggest – master piece – islamic grand design to conquer the world. What do you think with ISIS, Syria muslim refuges, African muslims, middle east muslims, from pakistan to afghanistan, from syria to iraq to libya to sudan. All pretend as refugees and flooding western (now Europe, tomorrow will be America) while leaving islamic countries nearby untouched. All these massive immigration is actually an invasion, planned and done perfectly by islamic world since many years ago, and its way well paved by the UN by the effort of OIC. Get the big picture. It is not about war. ISIS is just a tool for the islamic world to conquer the world

and a headline from an'08 story -(Stop building mosques in UK’ NO more mosques should be built in Britain, a member of the Church of England’s governing body said Mosques increasingly not welcome in Europe)