Politics

CNN’s Jim Sciutto fact-checked on Twitter after slamming Trump’s refugee policy

Sciutto CNN refugee
Sciutto — Screengrab: Twitter

On Friday, CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto came under fire on Twitter after issuing a tweet in which he claimed there is no basis to the idea that Muslim refugees were given priority over Christians.  The tweet was in response to President Donald Trump’s new refugee policy.

Sciutto’s tweet, however, seemed to fly in the face of reality, as the Washington Examiner reported last year that Muslim refugees topped Christians overall by 46 percent to 44:

The Obama administration has not only welcomed more Muslim refugees than ever to the United States this year, but an analysis of State Department figures show that they also outnumbered Christian refugees for the first time.

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According to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, 38,901 Muslim refugees entered the U.S. in fiscal 2016 compared to 37,521 Christians. Both made up the bulk of 85,000 fiscal 2016 refugees.

The numbers are much worse when one considers only the refugees from Syria.

In December, CNS News reported:

In its last full month in office, the Obama administration has admitted 1,307 more Syrian refugees – pushing the 2016 calendar year total to 15,479, a 606.1 percent increase from the numbers resettled in the U.S. in 2015.

Of the 15,479 Syrian refugees admitted by the end of Thursday:

–15,302 (98.8 percent) are Muslims – 15,134 Sunnis, 29 Shi’a, and 139 other Muslims

–125 (0.8 percent) are Christians – 32 Catholics, 32 Orthodox, five Protestants, four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 52 refugees described only as “Christian” in State Department Refugee Processing Center data

–43(0.27 percent) are Yazidis

–eight are “other” religion and one is described as having “no religion”

–3,904 (25.2 percent) are males between the ages of 14 and 50

–3,521 (22.7 percent) are females aged 14-50

–7,428 (47.9 percent) are children under 14, of whom 3,824 are boys and 3,604 are girls.

Got that? 98.8 percent of Syrian refugees admitted last year were Muslim, while only .8 percent were Christian.

The report goes on to note that “Christians comprised some 10 percent of the Syrian population in early 2011, but only account for 0.8 percent of the refugees resettled in 2016; and for just 1.03 percent of the total number of Syrian refugees taken in since the beginning of the civil war (187 out of 18,026).”

One person asked Sciutto:

https://twitter.com/mhickey187/status/825151276837126144

Another asked:

https://twitter.com/Itsjoeco/status/825160279130566657

Twitchy said that attorney Gabriel Malor responded by fact-checking Sciutto’s claims:

No wonder CNN is now considered the least-trusted cable news outlet…

President Trump has said he would prioritize Christian refugees seeking safety from those wishing to kill them.

“They’ve been horribly treated,” he said. “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.”

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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