We’ve previously noted how CNSNews.com, particularly reporter Patrick Goodenough, fretted over large numbers of Muslim refugees being admitted to the U.S. under President Obama, compared with Christian refugees, only to be much happier when those numbers flipped under President Trump. That happiness continues in a March 4 article by Goodenough:
Five months into the fiscal year, the Trump administration has admitted a total of 9,305 refugees into the United States, an admission rate well below the average needed to meet the 30,000 ceiling for FY 2019 which it set last fall.
According to State Department Refugee Processing Center data, monthly admissions since the start of the current fiscal year were 1,834 in October, 2,150 in November, 1,722 in December, 1,455 in January and 2,144 in February – in each case below the 2,500 monthly average that would add up to the 30,000 ceiling.
[…]Of the 9,305 refugees resettled in the first five months of FY 2019, 7,684 (82.5 percent) self-identified as Christians, and 1,306 (14 percent) as Muslims. One year earlier, 62.9 percent of the new arrivals over that five-month period were Christians, and 15.7 percent were Muslims.
By contrast, during the equivalent periods in FY 2016 and FY 2017, the proportions were more balanced: Muslims comprised 42.9 and 47.3 percent respectively, and Christians comprised 46.3 and 43.4 percent respectively.
Even though the religious breakdown of the refugees wasn’t address until the fifth paragraph, CNS made it the headline claim.
Goodenough can be a good reporter when he wants to be, and he does admit that the number of refugees admitted so far aren’t on track to be even close to the Trump’s administration’s lowered ceiling of 30,000. But he’s still huffing about larger numbers of Muslims than Christians from Syria getting refugee status under Obama, even though “Christians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslims were deliberately targeted by ISIS jihadists in what the Obama administration determined in 2016 amounted to a policy of genocide.” But as we’ve also noted, Goodenough still can’t quite admit that Muslims were being persecuted during the Syrian civil war as well; while “74 percent of the Syrian population was Sunni Muslim” at the start of the civil war, as Goodenough states, the Assad regime that rules Syria is Alawite and has targeted Sunni civilians.
Instead, Goodenough is content to suggest sinister motives in Obama’s admitting more Muslim refugees. That’s not honest reporting.