Abrams begins by noting that of the more than ten thousand Syrian refugees admitted this past year, only 56 are Christian. Out of that single thread he weaves a whole cloth using unsubstantiated anecdotes, bad math and worse logic, with a touch of fabrication thrown in for good measure—quoting Nina Shea, another former USCIRF Commissioner, who boldly states that there is “de facto discrimination and a gross injustice” being committed [by the US] against Syrian Christians.
Abrams frames his case around the assumption that around 10% of Syria’s prewar population was Christian. That much is true. But then, without justification, he alleges that “somewhere between a half million and a million Syrian Christians have fled Syria”. Since he presents no evidence for that claim, I can only speculate that Abrams may have taken the total number of Syrian refugees (between 4.5 to 5 million, with another 6 million Syrians internally displaced) and assumed that Christians must be 10% of that total. This is clearly unwarranted.
Specialists in the field point to several factors that Abrams either doesn’t know or won’t acknowledge because they would muddy up his case. In the first place, we simply do not know how many Christians have left Syria. Many, we are told by church leaders, have stayed because they have felt relatively secure in government controlled areas. Instead of uprooting their families and risking the loss of their properties and businesses, they have remained. There is also strong evidence that some Christians who are wealthier or who are professionals left Syria to join families abroad. Many others, we know, have settled in Christian areas of Lebanon, where they have family ties, and do not consider themselves refugees. After Jordan and Lebanon began tightening their borders, more recent Syrian refugees have taken advantage of Turkey’s more porous borders and since Turkey keeps and does not share its registration data for refugees, we have no idea how many Christians have entered that country. The bottom line is that it is simply not possible to know the number of Christians who fled Syria.
Abrams’ next argument is based on what he initially terms “a theory”, but then acts as if it were established fact, “that the US takes refugee referrals from the UN refugee camps in Jordan and there are no Christians there [in the refugee camps in Jordan]”. This “theory” supposedly accounts for the low number of Syrian Christians coming the US. To add weight to this argument, Abrams again quotes Shea who alleges that the reason Christians aren’t in the Jordanian camps is because “they are preyed upon by other residents from the Sunni community...they are raped, abducted into slavery...It is extremely dangerous, there is not a single Christian in the Jordanian camps for Syrian refugees”.
