ICC Note: Faith McDonnell, the director of Religious Liberty Programs and the Church Alliance for a New Sudan, spoke against  statement that rejected the plea for resettlement of more Christian refugees from Middle East countries. While the resettlement of Muslim refugees is by no means condemnable, it is the Christians that suffer the most at the hand of radical Islam. The numbers remain that out of over 9,000 resettled, only 47 of those refugees were Christian.

08/26/2016 Middle East (Christian Post):Christian religious freedom activist Faith McDonnell is pushing back against the notion that it is unchristian to voice concerns with how the State Department is resettling refugees from Syria and other terrorist hot spots in the Middle East.

McDonnell, the the director of Religious Liberty Programs and the Church Alliance for a New Sudan at the Washington-based think tank Institute on Religion and Democracy, told The Christian Post on Monday that it’s reasonable for Christians to voice concern about how the State Department is resettling only a minuscule percentage of Christian refugees from Syria and voice concern that the havoc being wrecked by Muslim refugees in Europe could also occur in America.

McDonnell took issue with recent remarks issued by Matthew Soerens, the U.S. director of church mobilization for the evangelical refugee resettlement organization World Relief.

Soerens, who works for one of nine agencies authorized by the State Department to resettle refugees inside the U.S., told CP this month that the notion that the State Department has an “anti-Christian bias” is baseless when looking at refugee resettlement numbers.

He pointed to State Department Refugee Processing Center data which shows that more Christian refugees have been resettled in the U.S. in the time-span between Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2015, than refugees with other religious affiliations.

Although more Christian refugees might have been resettled in the U.S. than any other religious group in the last decade, McDonnell points out her concern with the fact that the government has begun resettling more and more Muslim refugees from terrorist hot spots in the Middle East over the last few years and are now accepting more Muslim refugees than Christian.

In the last year since Oct. 1, 2015, more Muslim refugees (over 30,500) have been resettled in the U.S. than Christian refugees (nearly 29,000), according to the State Department Refugee Processing Center data. CNS News reports that this is the first time in over a decade the U.S. has resettled more Muslim refugees than Christians refugees.

But as the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State has caused hundreds of thousands of Christians to flee their homes in Syria over the last couple of years, McDonnell says that there is a real issue with the fact that the U.S. has resettled only 47 Syrian Christian refugees, compared to 9,077 Syrian Muslim refugees this fiscal year.

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