The New York Times has put out a dishonest piece attacking President Trump's plan to overturn Obama's covert ban on Christian refugees from Syria.
Ever since President Trump raised the question of aiding Christian refugees, who unlike the Muslim perpetrators of the violence, are actually persecuted, the media has been trying to whitewash it. The approach that some media outlets have taken was to simply call President Trump a liar based on the overall worldwide refugee numbers, even though Trump was specifically discussing the 99% Muslim dominance of Syrian refugee numbers.
The New York Times tries to be a bit slicker even as it plays the same game.
The contention was consistent with the conspiracy theories held by some conservative Christians that Mr. Obama was secretly a Muslim, and that he was turning a blind eye to the suffering of Christians while using the reins of government to increase the Muslim population of the United States.
But the claim is simply untrue. In 2016, the United States admitted almost as many Christian refugees (37,521) as Muslim refugees (38,901), according to the Pew Research Center.
While only about one percent of the refugees from Syria resettled in the United States last year were Christian, the population of that country is 93 percent Muslim and only 5 percent Christian, according to Pew.
And leaders of several refugee resettlement organizations said during interviews that it took 18 months to three years for most refugees to go through the vetting process to get into the United States.
This is a wildly dishonest part of an already dishonest article.
Muslims, unlike Christians, hardly face religious persecution. So even the overall numbers have been heavily bulked up. Muslims dominate every country in the Middle East except one. Meanwhile the Christian populations in the region have been vanishing. Christian refugee numbers should vastly outstrip those of Muslims.
But let's look closer at the dishonest game that the Times is playing in Syria.
Why is the New York Times obsessively quoting Pew? Because when you lie with numbers, then you build confidence in that lie by quoting a named source.
The Times claims that Syria's population is 5 percent, that's a very misleading statistic. And the Times knows it. Here's the actual information from the State Department.
The continued population displacement adds a degree of uncertainty to demographic analyses, but the U.S. government estimates approximately 74 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim, which includes ethnic Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, and some Turkomans. Other Muslim groups, including Alawites, Ismailis, and Shia, together constitute 13 percent according to U.S. estimates, while Druze account for 3 percent of the population. Previous estimates put the Christian population at 10 percent of the overall population, although media and other reports of Christians fleeing the country as a result of the civil war suggest the Christian population is now considerably lower.
The Christian population was at 10 percent. It's been severely displaced. So severely that the majority of the Christian population are now refugees.
Yet the Times uses this displacement to argue that Christians aren't really refugees and to defend Obama's covert ban on Christians.
And you can see why the Times has to struggle to explain what's going on. Because if 2/3rds of a population have been displaced, if that population made up 10 percent of the country, and barely 1 percent show up as refugees, then something is clearly wrong.
Forget percentages. This is what the actual numbers look like.
Of the 15,479 Syrian refugees admitted by the end of Thursday:
--15,302 (98.8 percent) are Muslims – 15,134 Sunnis, 29 Shi’a, and 139 other Muslims
--125 (0.8 percent) are Christians – 32 Catholics, 32 Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 52 refugees described only as “Christian” in State Department Refugee Processing Center data
That's 125 versus 15,302.
This is what President Trump wants to overturn. This is what the left, from the New York Times, are fighting. They want to import Muslim terrorists while closing the doors on Syrian Christians.
The hard numbers tell the story.
