Katie Pavlich: The patience of jihad

As the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reaffirmed its commitment to send jihadist fighters into western Europe and the United States through easily accessible refugee streams, the Obama administration is still refusing to reconsider its policy to bring additional refugees from terror hot spots to American soil.

The president also said Republicans, who have expressed skepticism toward his refugee program, are afraid of “widows and orphans,” but the truth about the history of jihadist refugees coming to the U.S. tells a different story.

{mosads}According to the International Organization of Migration, 66 percent of refugees from Syria and passing through Greece are young men. Many of them are carrying fake passports, and background checks are close to useless in determining who they are, where they came from and what their intentions are moving forward.

According to the Daily Mail, the suspected ringleaders of the recent ISIS attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead in the worst terror attack since World War II, recruited terrorists for their cause at a Hungarian refugee camp. At least three of the terrorists who carried out the attacks posed as refugees and used false documentation to get into Europe. These circumstances have prompted strong reactions from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which are tasked with keeping terrorism out of American cities.

“I am concerned that we do the proper security vetting for refugees we bring into this country. We’ve committed to 10,000, and I’ve committed that each one will receive a careful security vetting,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified on Capitol Hill recently. “It is true that we are not going to know a whole lot about a lot of the Syrians that come forth in this process, just given the nature of the situation. So we are doing better at checking all the right databases in the law enforcement and intelligence communities than we used to, and so it’s a good process and it’s a thorough process. But that definitely is a challenge.”

FBI Director James Comey, whose agency is currently pursuing 1,000 ISIS leads and cases in the U.S., has said there are gaps in the screening process. These gaps serve as major risks when people are coming from terror heavy conflict zones. National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen has echoed the same.

These examples are part of the current challenge we face, but it’s important to look at the history of how the refugee system in the United States has served as a way for jihadists to get into the country. Further, it’s important to look at how the current refugee program fails to properly vet individuals from all over the world, not just Syria.

According to information provided by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), at least a dozen refugees previously admitted into the U.S. have been connected to terrorism investigations just this year.

“On October 22, 2015, FBI Director James Comey confirmed this in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly stating that the government does not have the resources and lacks the necessary information to fully vet Syrian refugees, and could not offer any assurances that there is no risk associated with admitting these individuals to the country,” Sessions wrote in a recent letter to colleagues, detailing specific examples of terrorists admitted to country as refugees. “Our track record on screening is very poor. My Subcommittee has identified at least 26 foreign-born individuals inside the United States charged with or convicted of terrorism over approximately the last year alone.”

In 2011, the Obama administration temporarily stopped granting refugee requests to people fleeing Iraq after two terrorists, Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, were found to have been relocated to Bowling Green, Ky. They had applied for asylum and went through the lengthy process. Later, it was discovered Alwan and Hammadi may have been just two of dozens of terrorists who used the system to gain access to the United States.

“Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan,” ABC News reported in 2013. “The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists’ fingerprints.”

President Obama has argued there isn’t a threat of terrorism from the U.S. refugee program because for individuals who apply it takes two years, “heavy vetting” and is a relatively long process. It doesn’t matter. Jihad is patient, and as ISIS has pledged, it will do whatever it takes to get the job done. We should take ISIS at their word.

For the sake of national security, we cannot ignore the lack of a complete vetting process. 

Pavlich is editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.