It was an honest mistake, but the establishment propaganda media doesn’t allow those it hates to make honest mistakes. That generosity is reserved for Barack (“57 states”) Obama and Joe (“When the Depression started, FDR went on TV”) Biden, and the like.
Does Zack Beauchamp think that he has now discredited the idea that Muslim refugees have committed jihad terror attacks? Well, let’s see. In 2016 alone, there were these: Somali Muslim migrant Mohammad Barry, who in February 2016 stabbed multiple patrons at a restaurant owned by an Israeli Arab Christian; Ahmad Khan Rahami, an Afghan Muslim migrant who in September 2016 set off bombs in New York City and New Jersey; Arcan Cetin, a Turkish Muslim migrant who in September 2016 murdered five people in a mall in Burlington, Washington; Dahir Adan, another Somali Muslim migrant who in October 2016 stabbed mall shoppers in St. Cloud while screaming “Allahu akbar”; and Abdul Razak Artan, yet another Somali Muslim migrant who in November 2016 injured nine people with car and knife attacks at Ohio State University.
What’s more, all of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees. But, but, Kellyanne Conway made a mistake!
“Kellyanne Conway made up a fake terrorist attack to justify Trump’s ‘Muslim ban,” by Zack Beauchamp, Vox, February 3, 2017:
In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that aired on Thursday night, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway managed to get two huge things wrong in a short, 19-second answer. First, she said that the Obama administration banned Iraqi refugees from entering in the United States for six months in 2011 — which is flatly untrue.
Second, and more significantly, she made up a terrorist attack committed by Iraqi refugees that never happened — the “Bowling Green Massacre”:
.@KellyannePolls says that 2 Iraqi refugees “were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.”
(There was no such massacre.)Joe Sonka is, to be clear, 100 percent correct about this. There has never been a terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky, committed by Iraqi refugees.
Conway claims that “most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.” Most people don’t know about it because it didn’t happen.
Where Conway is coming from (I think)
In 2011, two Iraqi refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were arrested in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on federal terrorism charges. Allegedly, they had been plotting to send money and weapons back home to Iraqi insurgents.
During the investigation, the FBI found something worrying: fingerprints from Alwan on a roadside bomb in Iraq. This suggested there was a very specific flaw in America’s refugee screening process: Databases of fingerprints from Iraqi militants were not well-integrated into the broader State Department–run refugee admissions process. As a result, the Obama administration initiated a new review of all roughly 57,000 Iraqi refugees who had been recently admitted into the United States.
This process was manpower- and time-intensive, and resulted in a significant slowdown in Iraqi refugee admissions to the United States for six months. But it was not a ban, as Conway, Trump, and many in the conservative media claimed: Refugees from Iraq entered the United States in all six months….