Andrew Walther, vice president of communications for the Knights of Columbus – the world’s largest Catholic fraternal order – joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow for a special edition of Breitbart News Daily live from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), to discuss his op-ed calling for Christian refugees from the Islamic State (ISIS) to be given priority consideration.
“I’ve been over to Iraq twice in the last year, the last time with Congressman Chris Smith, taking a look at how Christians were being overlooked by the aid program of the U.S. government, getting basically no money from the U.S. or the UN,” Walther said.
“What we’ve discovered and been advocating against at this point is that these people are really being left out,” he said. “ISIS came in, killed a lot of them, drove them all from their homes in Nineveh and elsewhere. The upshot of that was the U.S. just sort of stood by, did not have a plan for helping communities.”
“Now I think we have the opportunity to change things,” said Walther. “These people faced genocide once, then they faced the sort of overlooking by the U.S., and now I’m told that there are signs that things are starting to change – that there’s a new openness among government officials there in Iraq, U.S. government officials, to helping these communities that have been overlooked for so long.”
“How this happened was simply a matter of an argument that we have to take care of everybody, so all the money goes to the big camps,” he explained. “Christians don’t go to the big camps because, of course, they get persecuted and targeted for violence at the big camps, and so, as a result, they get nothing because there’s no thought about prioritizing, or even helping, or making sure that you don’t leave out these little communities that could disappear. In the case of Christians, their numbers have declined in Iraq by almost 90 percent in the last decade.”
Walther said he found some of the reactions to President Trump’s executive order on immigration “very confusing.” READ MORE
