HIAS, targeted by anti-Semitic shooter, has helped millions of refugees and vulnerable people
Over its 130 years of existence, Jewish agency HIAS has helped millions of refugees and vulnerable people displaced by war and persecution, including Mazen Hasan. With HIAS’s help, the engineer arrived to the U.S. in 2014, after fleeing his native Iraq when “his work for the American military had drawn threats on his life,” the New York Times reports. “They did everything they can to help us and make it easy to adjust to a new life here,” he said.
HIAS was also a target of Robert Bowers, the white supremacist responsible for the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, which took the lives of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Bowers falsely claimed in a Gab post before the massacre, fueled by the right-wing conspiracy theory about immigrant “invaders that kill our people.”
Back here in reality, HIAS has changed—and saved—lives. “Its clients have often been Jews—its first mission was to aid those fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe—but the agency has also helped resettle many other kinds of refugees, including thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians after Communist victories in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. ‘We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish, [HIAS president Mark] Hetfield said. ‘Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish.’”
But it’s the good work of agencies like HIAS that continues to be under attack. The administration, guided by white supremacist and senior advisor Stephen Miller, has taken a sledgehammer to the refugee resettlement program, slashing admissions to a record low. Sec. of State Mike Pompeo announced last month that officials have slashed admissions for fiscal year 2019 to 30,000, “the lowest ceiling a president has placed on the refugee program since its creation in 1980.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/11/1/1809139/-HIAS-targeted-by-anti-Semitic-shooter-has-helped-millions-of-refugees-and-vulnerable-people
