[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 20 (Wednesday, February 3, 2016)]
[House]
[Pages H554-H557]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SAVE CHRISTIANS FROM GENOCIDE ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to call my colleagues'
attention and the attention of the public to the legislation I have
proposed.
The bill number is H.R. 4017. This act is the Save Christians from
Genocide Act. I would ask my colleagues to consider cosponsoring this
legislation. A number have already done so.
I would ask the public to make sure that they know that their
Congressperson knows exactly what is going on with H.R. 4017 and that
they would hope that their Member of Congress would also be a cosponsor
of the bill.
By calling your Congressman's office, I am sure the Members of
Congress will be very happy to hear your opinion. Many Members of this
body need to know that their constituents support the Save Christians
from Genocide Act, H.R. 4017.
What this legislation does is set a priority for immigration and
refugee status for those Christians who are now under attack, targeted
for genocide in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan.
Genocide is taking place. Mass murder is happening. Christians have
been targeted for slaughter and elimination by radical Islamic
terrorists in the Middle East. We have to acknowledge that or
millions--not just hundreds of thousands--of Christian brethren will
die.
Another group, the Yazidis, have also been similarly targeted, and my
bill covers those people as well, although they are not Christians.
The greatest threat to our country today is radical Islamic
terrorism. So it should not be a difficult decision on the part of our
President or the people or the public or this body to decide that we
are going to do what we can to save Christians who have been targeted
for slaughter by those very same forces who are now the greatest threat
to our own security. However, what we have is not just a foot dragging,
but a negative response from this administration.
Our President has been unable to defeat or even to turn back the
onslaught of radical Islamic terrorism. Yes. I have to admit this
President was dealt a pretty bad hand. Things were not good when he
took over in the Middle East.
I think the mistake the United States made--it is clear that, when we
sent our troops into Iraq, we did indeed break a stability that has
caused us problems. It was a bad situation at that time when our
President became President.
Well, this President has turned a bad situation into a catastrophe.
We have almost lost--and with our President's policies, we would have
lost--Egypt to radical Islamic terrorism.
Our President supported the Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, a man
named Mohamed Morsi, who was at that time President of Egypt during the
early years of this administration.
President Obama went all the way to Egypt in order to give a speech,
standing beside President Morsi to the Muslim people of that region.
What it was was basically an acceptance of the Muslim Brotherhood,
which people now know is the philosophical godfather to all of the
radical Islamic terrorist movements that now slaughter Christians and
threaten the peace and stability of the world.
Our President encouraged them in the beginning, feeling, if we did,
again, treat someone nicely, they will respect you.
What happened? Moderate regimes and, yes, regimes in the Middle East
that were not democratic, were less than free, have been replaced with
radical Islamists who mean to destroy the Middle East and turn it into
a caliphate, radical Islamic terrorists who conduct terrorist raids
into Western countries, radical Islamic terrorists who murder people in
Turkey, in Russia, in San Bernardino.
This is what has happened since this President took over and reached
out with the hand of friendship and understanding to those who would
become the radical Islamic terrorists of that region and, I might say,
a threat to the entire world, including the people of every city in the
United States.
{time} 1915
Had Egypt been left the way that the President wanted it to be, had
we instead not supported the effort by the Egyptian people to rid
themselves of Morsi and his government at the time when Morsi was
trying to destroy their supreme court and their court system, at a time
when Morsi was trying to establish a caliphate that is totally rejected
by the Egyptian people, had our President been able to support General
el-Sisi, perhaps the revolution could have happened peacefully. But,
instead, Morsi was removed by General el-Sisi when he tried to betray
the Egyptian people.
Today General el-Sisi now has been elected by a landslide in Egypt.
And General el-Sisi--now President el-Sisi--has done everything he can
to try to find a way to reconcile between Islam and the other faiths,
of not only the region but the world.
President el-Sisi is the only leader, the only President of Egypt
ever to go to a Coptic Christian church and help them celebrate
Christmas. This was an incredible act on his part. He also went to the
Muslim clerics and personally pleaded with the leadership of the Muslim
faith in Egypt and in that part of the world, pleaded for a rejection
of the radicalism and pleaded for a rejection of those people who would
commit acts of violence on others and try to repress the freedom of
religion of other people.
President el-Sisi begged and pleaded for the Egyptian clerics, the
Muslim clerics to come out strongly for respect of other people's
faiths, respect of freedom of religion and tolerance toward others.
When have we ever had a leader like that? Our President resented him
because he overthrew a man who was in the Muslim Brotherhood who was
trying to lay the foundation for a caliphate of terrorists who would
have
[[Page H555]]
tried to attack the entire Western world.
So what did General el-Sisi get for being this courageous person?
What did General el-Sisi get from us, from our President because he now
basically saved Egypt, but not only Egypt--because had Egypt become a
radical terrorist state--the entire Middle East would have fallen. It
would have been totally out of control. And General el-Sisi stepped up.
What did he get from our President because of that? He got a feeling
that our President really didn't like him. He got the feeling, not only
the feeling, but he got rejection on those requests that he made for
support from the United States, legitimate requests of how he could
have weapons systems that would help him defeat the same radical
Islamic terrorists that are murdering our own people and conducting
murderous terrorist acts throughout the world.
At that time, I might add, they were also conducting mass murders of
Christians and of other people of other faiths in the Middle East,
burning people to death, taking people out and sawing their heads off
and doing this in a very public way, capturing young women, raping them
en masse because they are Christians or some other faith than Islam.
Yes, we needed to confront that at that time. But, instead, when
General el-Sisi needed help, what did he get? I went to Egypt several
years ago, and General el-Sisi pleaded: We have F-16s that we need to
combat this threat. We need spare parts for our tanks. He pleaded with
us: We need these things or we can't police the desert areas on both
sides of Egypt where these radicals are beginning to try to establish
some kind of an uprising and some kind of a conflict that is hard to
get at. So they need helicopters, they need the spare parts for their
tanks, and they need their F-16, airplanes as well.
So I came back and I put together, along with several of my other
colleagues, the Egyptian Caucus. The Egyptian Caucus is nothing more
than a group of probably 20 of us who are trying to do our best to see
that the radical Islamists do not take over Egypt and that General el-
Sisi is successful in reaching out to the moderate Muslims and trying
to create goodwill between people of faith who are people of goodwill
and should be working together and rejecting the radical terrorists
that now threaten the whole world and threaten the region.
So we are trying to help el-Sisi. He is the point man. I came back a
year later, and I talked to General el-Sisi. Well, did you get your
spare parts? Well, did you get the F-16s yet? No. Did you get spare
parts for the tanks you mentioned? No. Well, did you get those Apache
helicopters? He said: Yeah, we got the Apache helicopters, but the
defensive systems needed to send Apache helicopters into a combat zone
were not included, so we can't use them.
Now, what I just described to you is not something that just happened
by bureaucratic happenstance or somebody forgot to send the paperwork
out. This was the policy of the Obama administration. I have worked in
the White House and seen how these games are played. They are looking
at el-Sisi as an enemy, and they are trying to play games with him,
making sure his helicopters didn't have the equipment needed to do
their job, and that the F-16s didn't come and the spare parts didn't
come.
Finally--after 2 years, I might add--I went back a year later, and
finally they had arrived, after we had raised hell in this body and the
American people had their say that people like el-Sisi and other
moderate people, like Abdullah in Jordan and people like that who are
moderate in their religious beliefs. They are moderate people, and they
believe in giving people of other faiths respect and tolerance. These
are the type of leaders we should be siding with.
I might add that General el-Sisi has worked with Israel. He has gone
out of his way to make sure there isn't war between Israel and Egypt.
What could be better than a man who is reaching out, asking for
tolerance among all faiths, a man who reaches out to a country where
they have been at war before and is trying to say: We will never be at
war again, we will work together to build a better world. That is what
he is doing. But that is what our President is trying to undermine.
Our President basically has been unable to use the words ``radical
Islamic terrorism.'' We keep saying that. That is why right after the
Benghazi fiasco, that is why immediately when they started talking
about: Oh, these weren't really terrorists who murdered our Ambassador,
it was all caused by a movie that had been shown, and it just enraged
these Muslim people and a demonstration got out of hand, and that is
when they went in and murdered our Ambassador. Do you remember that?
I remember hearing it four or five times. The very first time that I
heard it, I said: That is a lie. Everybody who knew what was going on,
that is what struck them, our government was lying to us in order to
protect what? And, I might add, our Secretary of State then, Hillary
Clinton, when she was confronted with that lie--and finally by the time
we confronted her with it, it was clearly a lie--she said: Well, what
difference does it make whether it was a radical terrorist group or
whether it was some people who were demonstrating against a movie? What
difference does it make?
I will tell you what difference it makes. The difference it makes is
that you are sending a message to radicals who murdered our Ambassador
that they have gotten away with it, and we are going to wink and nod
and let them get away with it. We are not going to challenge them. We
are not going after the terrorist murderers. We are not even giving
them credit or making them accountable for it. We are going to blame it
on somebody else so the American people won't get mad and insist that
we do something against it.
So, yeah, that was what the administration was trying to tell us.
This is the same administration, as I say, that can't get itself to
help General el-Sisi, who has saved us from the horror story of having
Egypt turned into a radical Islamic terrorist camp. And now we can't
even tell the American people that their Ambassador has been murdered
by radical Islamic terrorists.
In fact, those words, ``radical Islamic terrorists'' have not been
uttered. I would challenge the President tonight, not including this in
a list of long things, but just get up and say one sentence
specifically about ``I reject radical Islamic terrorism, and the
radical Islamic terrorists of the world have to know that.'' We haven't
heard that from him. We haven't heard that from him at all. Give me the
quote.
By the way, I think he did use the phrase in passing saying Christian
terrorists and radical Islamic terrorists and blah-blah. No, that is
not it. Let's have a condemnation of radical Islamic terrorism. But,
no, we haven't been able to do that.
That same President, then, at a time when the situation is spiraling
out of control because these terrorists are flooding the Middle East
and various countries--whether it is Syria, Iraq, and those parts--this
area is becoming so unstable that if we do not do something to save the
people there who are under attack in two ways, number one, those people
who are there, like the Kurds, like the Sunnis in the Anbar Province
who are anti-ISIL, like General el-Sisi and Abdullah of Jordan, we have
to make sure we help them. That is the first thing we have to do.
But the second thing we have to do is make sure we do what is morally
right when it comes to those people who have been targeted to be
slaughtered. We are talking about a genocide that is existing. We know
that the Christian communities have been targeted for extinction by a
mass slaughter being conducted by radical Islamic terrorists. Those
people who have been targeted deserve to come to the United States.
Number one, our government needs to help those who are fighting ISIL.
Number two, our government needs to make sure that those people who are
targeted for genocide can find safe haven here instead of bringing
healthy, young Muslim men from that area and letting them come into the
United States, letting them flood into Europe rather than those people,
those Christians who are being targeted.
I went up to Munich and took a look at one of these refugee camps. We
all have seen this, video after video of young, healthy Muslim men by
the hundreds of thousands pouring in to Western Europe. We don't know
how many of them are terrorists. But here
[[Page H556]]
is the point. If those young men don't like radical Islam and this
terrorism, they should be back in their home country fighting it.
If they do like radical Islam, they certainly shouldn't be permitted
into the Western democracies. The same is true in the United States. We
should not be permitting--and our President has been, I would say, not
doing the job that we have been expecting him to do to protect our
interests when it comes to the people who are flooding into our
country, whether they are radical Islamic terrorists or whether they
are just people coming in from the Middle East who we haven't checked
out yet enough. And, of course, we have hundreds of thousands, and,
yes, millions of people who have come here illegally--we don't even
know who they are--who have swarmed across the border.
This President talks about amnesty, talks about giving children who
have come here illegally free education and health care, the DREAM Act,
et cetera. What do you think this does? This encourages hundreds of
thousands or millions of people to come here.
The trouble is, when there is a flood, we don't know if in that group
of hundreds of thousands and millions of people in the last few years,
how many of them have been terrorists. Do you really believe that our
enemies, that these people who slaughter innocent people, these people
who are rampaging through the Middle East, raping thousands of young
girls because they are Christians, you think that they would care about
lying to come here and they would refrain from coming here because they
would have to cross the border and break the law? We don't know how
many of them are here, but they are here. It is the President of the
United States who is at fault.
We should have had a system of coming into our country a long time
ago that handled refugees and handled people with legitimate
immigration status, and everyone that would come here from the Middle
East should have been vetted that way.
I was briefed, along with my colleagues, on the vetting process. Top
level people in this government admit that they have not been able to
really verify the things that the people claim is their background.
I would suggest and I would insist, there is legislation here as well
that is pending that I am a cosponsor of that insists on a lie detector
test for everybody that comes here, at least from that region.
{time} 1930
We could ask them five questions, like: Have you ever advocated
violence for your religion? Do you believe in sharia law or the
Constitution? That is all we have to do, just take an extra 5 minutes.
We haven't even done that.
We have millions of people here. Maybe 10,000 of them have animosity
toward us or are here to try to shoot people like they did in San
Bernardino, right in our own area. Innocent people were just
slaughtered.
I went to Paris. These kids were in a dance club and these guys came
in and just massacred them. They kept shooting at them for minutes at a
time. They loaded their guns again.
This is what we are up against. It is evil. And this administration,
this President can't use the words ``radical Islamic terrorists.''
Well, I ask my colleagues today to please join me in cosponsoring my
legislation, H.R. 4017. It does this. At the very least, we can try to
save those Christians in Yazidi cities that have been targeted for
genocide.
And how we do it is this. You have a certain number of those on
refugee status, a certain number on immigration status coming from
these five countries that I mentioned in the Middle East. These are the
areas where the Christians are the most under attack. What my bill
simply says is that Christians and these Yazidis who have also been
targeted for genocide are going to get priority. They deserve to be on
the top of the list. They deserve priority long before these healthy,
young Muslim men who want to come here. And then we will let them in.
We will, of course, vet them, make sure we know who they are, and they
will get the priority.
Now, the President made a statement--he didn't use the number of my
bill, but he talked about it--and said: Well, we don't believe in that.
That is discriminating because of religion. It is a religious test. We
don't do religious tests in America.
Are you kidding? We cannot prioritize what we do to make sure that
what we are doing is helping the person who is most in danger? Is a
lifeguard in some way showing disrespect in not helping those other
people in the water by going out and saving someone who is drowning?
This isn't discrimination. This is a prioritization of the people who
are under attack and will be slaughtered. This intellectualism will
result in what, if we accept the President and this administration
saying, ``Oh, you can't prioritize for Christians''?
By the way, he doesn't seem to have any trouble prioritizing for
anybody else, but it is very clear that he won't let us prioritize for
Christians who are targeted for genocide. No, I reject that totally. It
is not racism.
We had another incident like this in our history. In 1939, there was
at least one boatload of Jews that made it to the United States. They
prayed and pleaded with us to let them in. At that moment, Nazi Germany
was in the process of picking up the Jews and putting them in
concentration camps.
These people got away with their families and they came here. And
what did we do? We turned them back. We turned them back for the same
reason. Oh, if we let you in, it is a special favor to you. These
people were targeted for genocide, and we let them go back. Many of
them died in these Nazi concentration camps. Let's not do that again.
I would ask my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring my bill, H.R.
4017, the Save Christians from Genocide Act. Join me and we will send a
message to the world that, yes, we are still the same good-hearted
people that we have always claimed to be but have not always met that
standard.
Today we deserve to stand up and be the champion of the type of
values that I am talking about. That is what our Founding Fathers had
in mind. America was the refuge of the world. America was the shining
city on the hill that inspired the whole world. But we weren't cowards.
We weren't someone who undermined some person in his country who is
fighting an evil force like General el-Sisi. No, our Founding Fathers
made sure that those people who are struggling for a better world had
our support.
By the way, let me just note that I worked on speeches for Ronald
Reagan. I was Reagan's speechwriter for 7 years in the White House. I
was actually researching one of his speeches, and I came across the
fact that a man named Kossuth, from Hungary, came to the United States
and was pleading for help for the Hungarian people who were then in an
uprising against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and were fighting for
their freedom. He was there in the Midwest giving speeches and trying
to get the American people to support him. I read a couple of his
speeches.
Then I noted that in Springfield, Illinois, right after his speech,
the town liked him. He was a freedom fighter. But they passed a
resolution at their meeting that said the United States is a
noninterventionist power and we should not get involved overseas,
something like that.
Kossuth was still in town. He read the newspaper account of it. And
when the word got out that he was so in despair that the people of the
United States would say such a thing and side with the oppressor
through their inaction, when the people heard about this, they called a
second meeting.
In the second meeting, they passed a resolution saying that while we
don't want to send our military forces all over the world--which is
still a good idea--we will support those people who are struggling for
freedom throughout the world. We will open up our arsenals. We will
give them what they need to defeat the forces of tyranny that oppress
them. That second resolution, then, was passed and was signed by the
people of Springfield, Illinois; and in the last phases, I might add,
one of the people who signed that document was one A. Lincoln.
I will tell you this about that speech of Mr. Kossuth. That speech
ended with:
And we do this and we make this commitment so that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people
shall not perish from this Earth.
[[Page H557]]
Lincoln was there in that room when that speech was given, and he
later united the people of the United States with that thought from
that man, that freedom fighter overseas.
There are people who are struggling for their freedom. There are
people who are struggling for their existence. We do not have to send
American military boys to fight the fight that they should be fighting
for themselves. But at the very least, we must give them the support
they need to defeat the evil forces in the world that would slaughter
them, slaughter their families, and come after us next.
That is what the war with radical Islam terrorism is all about. They
are at war with us, and they mean to kill our families and they mean to
push Western civilization out of the history books of the world in the
future. They want it to be a radical Islamic world, and they will kill
all of us to get it.
Now, that is not all of the Muslims. I agree with our President that
we should not say all Muslims are this way. After all, General el-Sisi
is a Muslim; Abdullah of Jordan is a Muslim.
The people that we need on our side to defeat radical Islam are the
moderate Muslims of the world. I think at least 80 percent of the
Muslims of the world are moderate and would want to be our friends. We
need now to recognize that that segment of Islam is now a threat to our
safety, our well-being.
This is an historic moment. We can either meet this challenge or we
will lose. But the most important thing, no matter what we do, if our
President doesn't want to send troops there, fine, but at least let us
ensure that history will record that we saved those Christians who were
targeted for the genocide of this evil force that was expanding in that
part of the world. Shame on us if we do not.
I ask my colleagues to join me in support of H.R. 4017. I ask the
people of the United States to let their Congressmen know that they
expect them to support honorable and noble and moral stands like this.
It is not discrimination. It is prioritizing towards those people who
have been targeted for genocide. Nothing could be better for our soul
than to help those who have been so targeted.
I ask that my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________