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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Unbelievable: ISIS executes Christians, Israel gets blamed

The link goes to this Haaretz article (who else in Israel would publish such a thing?). But when you read the story, blaming Israel doesn't exactly add up.
At least one of the three asylum seekers, T., was held in the Holot detention center in the Negev before leaving Israel. T.'s relative, Mesi, told Haaretz that the family identified him in the ISIS video. "He appears in the video and in the photographs, definitely," she said. "He had been in Israel since the end of 2007. He decided to go back after the [Israeli] Ministry of Interior told him he would be better off."
According to Mesi, T. "went back to Uganda or Rwanda – I think Rwanda – where they are not accepted. From there he went on to Sudan, and from Sudan to Libya." She said that he was not able to remain in Libya, and tried to reach Europe by boat. "I understood that the boat was returned to Libya," she said, "where they were arrested. Rumors have it that the extreme Islamic group snatched them from the jail itself." 
Mesi said she tried to dissuade T. from going to a third county. "They told him he would be better off if he flies. I asked him not to. He didn't tell us he had signed [papers] to leave." She added that she and other friends of T. tried to tell him things could change for the better, "that [asylum seekers] would be released from Holot."

Mesi added that she did not keep in touch with T. after he left Israel, but received updates from his brother, who resides in Norway. "He told me that T. arrived in Sudan and Libya and that he hadn't spoken to him in a long time because he was in Libyan prison." She said T.'s brother saw the images of ISIS' execution, but did not think his brother was among the group of Ethiopian Christians. 
So why is Israel being blamed? Who sent the boat back to Libya? Why isn't Uganda or Rwanda or Sudan blamed? Why isn't the United States blamed because President Hussein Obama led from behind to depose the Gadhaffi's? Why isn't ISIS blamed?

But wait, it gets worse. There's this hit job from the Daily Beast (the title is enough to tell you where this article is headed).
At least three of the victims were Eritrean refugees who had been deported from Israel. An Eritrean named Mesi Fashiya who works as a translator for The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO that advocates for Israel’s estimated 46,000 refugees, identified the victims.
Sadly, one was her relative.
Fashiya told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that her cousin, identified as “T.,” was deported from Israel “back to Uganda or Rwanda—I think Rwanda—where they are not accepted. From there he went on to Sudan, and from Sudan to Libya.”
“I recognized my relative, T., from the photos published by ISIS that appeared on Facebook before the video was released,” Fashiya told +972 magazine.
T. was sent abroad in a program that Israel initiated to deal with its burgeoning refugee problem. In a brochure obtained by The Daily Beast, the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority “offers foreign nationals from [Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Guinea Conakry], who entered Israel illegally, the option to leave the country voluntarily, in a fair and dignified manner.”
In the brochure, Israel offers to assist in the “arrangement of travel documents, purchase of airline tickets, and a financial grant in the amount of $3,500 per person, including children,” to asylum seekers who agree to leave.
While this may seem a fair deal, Israel’s record with asylum seekers and migrant workers is, for lack of a better word, awful.
Excuse me, but since when is little Israel responsible for solving the world's problems? Until ISIS came in, these people were economic refugees - what country in the world grants asylum to economic refugees? (Answer: The United States under Obama, but there are a lot of people who are unhappy about that, and it will likely change in 2017). The financial grant is quite generous for that part of the world. And note that Libya is not one of the countries on the list. These people could have gone to Eritrea or Ethiopia where they came from.

Funny how Israel is the only country blamed for this. Coincidence? I think not.

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