Whether Fleeing or Staying Put, Middle Eastern Christians Largely Ignrored
The ongoing refugee crisis revolves mainly around whether Western nations should provide sanctuary to the millions of displaced persons who have fled the turmoil of the Syrian civil war and, if so, how many each nation should admit. In the United States, however — as we shall discuss momentarily — other issues have been raised: Has the Obama administration deliberately engaged in a practice of discriminating against Christian refugees, and what should be done about the fact that Western policies created the warring, strife, and refugees in the first place?
Initially, most of those fleeing the conflict, which began in 2011, fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. As these countries’ capacity to absorb the ceaseless flow of refugees reached their limits, around early 2015, a third of a million of them moved on to European Union nations.
By September, the United States had resettled 1,500 Syrians, but that number would soon increase. By September 10, the refugee quota had been increased to 10,000, and 10 days later Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the “Obama administration will increase the number of refugees the United States is willing to accept in 2017 to 100,000, a significant increase over the current annual worldwide cap of 70,000.”
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