[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1307-1310]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 1308]]

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 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

[[Page 1309]]

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 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

[[Page 1310]]

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.

  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.

                          ____________________