Courtesy of Obama: Jihad Tourism

Posted on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

Sure, not all immigrants or refugees are terrorists or connected to terrorism, but due to the fact there is no way to check and verify backgrounds from people out of the Middle East, especially Syria, it is irresponsible to even suggest all can be checked.

If one questions the pushback, then one must remember the Tsarnaev family and the Boston bombing or take a long look at Minneapolis and how that city has a history of Somalis that have left America to fight jihad.

Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19, Adnan Farah, 19, Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19, and Guled Ali Omar, 20, were arrested in Minneapolis. Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21, and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21, were arrested in San Diego after driving there in hopes of crossing into Mexico.

Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes stated that the Federal government has robust methods to verify backgrounds. That is indeed in dispute. Per Ben Rhodes, he mentioned using the National Counterterrorism Center was one of the resources, yet upon a in depth review of the website, they don’t do background checks at all.

If there is any truth at all to be told, the United Nations controls the flow and background checks of the refugees. No one wants to admit that due to the fact, an outside bureaucratic organization has control over the flow on people into countries, including the United States. The United Nations coordinates with other organizations as well including the International Rescue Committee. The UN has a wing called the Human Rights that manages who is called a refugee or those called ‘stateless’ people. In turn, the U.S. State Department has its own bureau that has charitable organizations, paid by government to place refugees in locations across the Unite States, without notice or approval of governors or mayors.

For some testimony by the State Department on the Refugee Admission Program, click here.

There is not a single person within the Obama administration that can make guarantees with full confidence that all people admitted are without any questionable background, there in lies the issue.

The White House is so panicked about so many bi-partisan governors pushing back to stop the program into their states, there is a conference call with those governors and the White House on November 17. Perhaps some will ask why no Christians but further why in America when there are other locations across the globe more conducive the migrant needs.

U.S. ‘discriminates’ against Christian refugees, accepts 96% Muslims, 3% Christians
Less than 3 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far are Christian and 96 percent are Muslim, the result of a referral system that Republican Sen. Tom Cotton says “unintentionally discriminates” against Christians.

State Department figures released Monday showed that the current system overwhelmingly favors Muslim refugees. Of the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far, only 53 are Christians while 2,098 are Muslim, the Christian News Service reported.
Mr. Cotton and Sen. John Boozman, both Arkansas Republicans, called Monday for a moratorium on resettlements, a White House report on vetting procedures, and a re-evaluation of the refugee-referral process.

“[T]he United States’ reliance on the United Nations for referrals of Syrian refugees should also be re-evaluated,” said Mr. Cotton in a statement. “That reliance unintentionally discriminates against Syrian Christians and other religious minorities who are reluctant to register as refugees with the United Nations for fear of political and sectarian retribution.”

The current system relies on referrals from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Syria’s population in 2011 was 90 percent Muslim and 10 percent Christian, CNS said.
At a news conference Monday in Turkey, President Obama described as “shameful” the idea of giving religious preferences to refugees, apparently referring to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s suggestion that the United States should accept Christian refugees while Muslim refugees are sent to majority-Muslim countries.
“That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” Mr. Obama said.

Figures from the State Department Refugee Processing Center updated Monday showed that 96 percent of the Syrian refugees accepted so far are Muslim, while less than 3 percent are Christian. The other 33 identified as belonging to smaller religious faiths or said they had no religion.

Ben Rhodes, Obama deputy national security adviser, said Sunday that the White House still plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees despite last week’s deadly terrorist attack on Paris. Republicans have countered that it’s all but impossible to conduct background checks on those seeking refuge.
Mr. Cotton and Mr. Boozman called Monday for a temporary moratorium on resettlements and “a requirement that the President certify the integrity of the security vetting process as a condition of lifting the moratorium.”

“The American people have long demonstrated unmatched compassion for the world’s persecuted and endangered. But when bringing refugees to our shores, the U.S. government must put the security of Arkansans and all Americans first,” Mr. Cotton said. “No terrorist should be able to take advantage of the refugee process to threaten the United States.”

ISIS Has 24 Hour Tech Savvy Jihad Help Desk

Posted on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

Using the Darkweb is not a new weapon for jihad cells, DARPA has been working the ISIS hidden internet world for quite some time, to what success is undetermined.

ISIS Has Help Desk for Terrorists Staffed Around the Clock

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

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Authorities are now homing in on the terror group’s growing cyber capabilities after attacks in Paris, Egypt and elsewhere for which ISIS has claimed credit.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” said Aaron F. Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organization at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Brantly was the lead author of a CTC report on the Islamic State’s use of secure communications, based on hundreds of hours of observation of how the Jihadi Help Desk operates.

“They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror,” Brantly said in an interview Monday. “Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

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The existence of the Jihadi Help Desk has raised alarm bells in Washington and within the global counterterrorism community because it appears to be allowing a far wider web of militants to network with each other and plot attacks. A senior European counterterrorism official said that concerns about the recent development are especially serious in Europe, where ISIS operatives are believed to be plotting major attacks, some of them with direct assistance from ISIS headquarters in Syria.

At a congressional hearing in October, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is extremely concerned about ISIS’ increasing ability to “go dark.” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. is ” confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet.”

“While some of the contacts between groups like ISIL and potential recruits occur in publicly accessible social networking sites,” said Comey, “others take place via encrypted private messaging platforms. As a result, the FBI and all law enforcement organizations must understand the latest communication tools and position ourselves to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.”

Nick Rasmussen, director of the U.S. government’s multiagency National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview with the Combating Terrorism Center’s in-house publication that the “agile use of new means of communicating, including ways which they understand are beyond our ability to collect,” is one of his greatest concerns when it comes to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Brantly described the Jihadi Help Desk as “a fairly large, robust community” that is anchored by at least five or six core members who are technical experts with at least collegiate or masters level training in information technology. There are layers of other associates, living all around the world, who allow the service to operate — and respond to questions — at any time of the day or night. CTC researchers have spent a year or so monitoring the help desk — and its senior operatives — via online forums, social media and other means.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,” which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, Brantly said. “They are very decentralized. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

The help desk workers closely track all of the many new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online, and produce materials to train others in how to use them. The CTC has obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

ISIS also distributes the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, taking pains to link to versions of it that can be downloaded even after their social media sites are shut down.

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And once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Brantly said.

“They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies,” Brantly said. “Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”

Revenue Source for ISIS, a New Target Oil

Posted on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

MarketPlace: France bombed ISIS targets in Syria on Sunday —in retaliation for Friday’s terror attacks in Paris —including a training camp and an ammunition depot, according to the French Defense Ministry. The next day, the United States targeted 116 trucks ISIS had been using to transport oil. The latter strike, reportedly planned before the Paris attacks, is an attempt to stymie a source of funding for the extremist group.

ISIS derives most of its funds from activities inside the territories it now controls, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. That’s different from, say, Al Qaeda, which has historically relied on donations from outside sources.

“When they control a territory that’s approximately the size of Great Britain, that creates a great deal of ability to get internal sources of revenue, ranging from natural resources, to antiquities they control, to taxation on their population,” he said.

It’s hard to say just how much funding ISIS gets from each source. Gartenstein-Ross estimates that the largest piece of the pie comes from taxing the people in its territories.

The group also benefits from the sale of antiquities from sites it loots.

“We’re really talking about small items, so tablets or seals,” said Howard Shatz, a senior economist at the Rand Corporation. “You can put those in your pocket, you can put them in a suitcase.”

Shatz said middlemen can get the goods to private buyers or lower-tier auction houses.

Meanwhile, oil is often transported across long-standing smuggling routes and mixed with oil from other sources so it can’t be traced, said Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The group makes use of hidden compartments in trucks as well as hoses to transport oil across borders, often into southern Turkey.

Still, other funding comes from ransoms demanded for kidnap victims.

“The vast majority of this money is going to run their state, because that’s their biggest expense by far,” said Levitt. “But they have a lot of money. If they want to be able to peel off a little bit for terrorism, they can do a tremendous amount of damage.”

While funding sources for the Paris attack are not yet clear, Levitt said similar attacks typically cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and are often funded by criminal activity near the target.

Targeting revenue sources is but one method to ‘contain’ Islamic State.

MilitaryTimes: In the first wave of U.S. airstrikes since the Paris attacks, A-10 Thunderbolt ground attack aircraft and AC-130 gunships raked a convoy of more than 100 ISIS oil tanker trucks in Syria in a stepped-up effort to cut off a main source of terror funding, the Pentagon said Monday.

The Navy also announced that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its battle group had departed Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on a seven-month deployment to the Mideast to plug a gap in the U.S. air arm that has existed since the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt left the region in September.

Pentagon officials also said that the French carrier Charles de Gaulle was also expected to leave port soon and head to the region to bolster coalition air assets with the 11 Rafale and 9 Super Étendard fighters aboard.

The oil convoy attack and the carrier deployment signaled the U.S. intent to intensify airstrikes while increasing efforts to share intelligence with allies in the aftermath of the Paris carnage last Friday that killed at least 129, but President Obama insisted that there would be no fundamental changes in strategy.

“We have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through,” Obama said at a news conference at an economic summit in Turkey before heading to the Philippines and Malaysia for summit meetings there.

The president announced an agreement between the United States and France to share more intelligence information to prevent future terror attacks and refine airstrike targeting in Iraq and Syria.

The agreement would “allow our personnel to pass threat information, including on ISIL, to our French partners even more quickly and more often,” Obama said.

The U.S. will increase airstrikes and boost support for local forces fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria but would continue to avoid “boots on the ground” combat, he said.

“What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough,” Obama said.

Sending U.S. ground troop into Syria and Iraq “would be a mistake, not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before” in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, referring to another term for ISIS.

Lasting victory over terrorists and insurgents requires local forces and populations to take control with U.S. support, Obama said — “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries,” he said.

Obama was adamant in rejecting the calls by Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders to scrap plans to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. for fear that terrorists would slip in among them.

“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism — they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” he said. “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”

In response, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Obama’s remarks at a news conference were defeatist. “Never before have I seen an American president project such weakness on the global stage,” Preibus said.

With the exceptions of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, the Republican presidential candidates have also stopped short of recommending U.S. “boots on the ground” to counter the Islamic State.

At a Pentagon briefing, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said the force posture of the U.S. had not altered since the Paris attacks but “clearly, we are very interested in doing everything we can” to stop ISIS.

Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had approved plans to “bolster our intelligence sharing” with France to include specifics on “operational planning.”

Carter and Clapper “provided new instructions that will enable the U.S. military to more easily share operational planning information and intelligence with our French counterparts on a range of shared challenges.”

The first fruits of the intelligence sharing were seen Saturday when French warplanes, using airbases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, conducted airstrikes on the self-proclaimed ISIS capital of Raqqa in northwestern Syria.

Davis said that the French “nominated” the targets from intelligence supplied by the U.S. “This was something they were very interested in doing” following what happened in Parks, he said.

The attack on the tanker truck convoy at Abu Kamal was part of a “broader operation specifically to target ISIL oil revenues,” Davis said.

“ISIL is stealing oil from the people of Iraq and Syria” at a rate estimated by the Treasury Department at $1 million daily, Davis said. By hitting ISIS-controlled oil facilities and distribution networks, “We’re disrupting a significant source of funding” for terror activities, he said.

Davis said the warplanes dropped leaflets warning of the convoy attack before the strike commenced to allow truck drivers who may not have been allied with ISIS to escape.

“It is a balancing act,” he said of the strikes on oil facilities. The U.S. wanted to cut off the funding the al-Qaeda-inspired group gets from oil sales while leaving behind the basic infrastructure for a future democratic Syria.

Davis echoed the remarks last week at a Pentagon briefing from Baghdad by Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve.

Warren said that two-thirds of the ISIS oil revenues come from the eastern Syrian region near the city of Deir ez-Zor, which has been a main focus of U.S. airstrikes.

“Our intent is to shut those oil facilities down completely,” he said. “We’ve done a very comprehensive analysis of these facilities to determine which pieces of the facility we can strike that will shut that facility down for a fairly extended period of time.

“Again, we have to be cognizant that there will be a time after the war — the war will end,” he added. “So we don’t want to completely and utterly destroy these facilities to where they’re irreparable.”

The campaign against ISIS oil facilities has been named “Operation Tidal Wave II.” The original Operation Tidal Wave was the disastrous raid in August of 1943 by B-24 Liberator bombers on the Ploiești, Romania, oil facilities that were supplying Nazi Germany.

Fifty-three aircraft and 660 crew members were lost, and the U.S. military later concluded that the raid had little or no effect on oil production.

Lisbon Treaty and Confirmed Bomb on Russian Plane

Posted on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by Denise Simon

BBC: France has mobilised 115,000 security personnel in the wake of Friday’s Paris attacks by Islamist militants, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.

Mr Cazeneuve said 128 more raids on suspected militants were carried out. French air strikes also hit Islamic State in Syria overnight.

IS has said it carried out the attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a stadium in which 129 people died.

A huge manhunt is under way for one of the suspects, Salah Abdeslam.

He is believed to have fled across the border to his native Belgium. Belgian police have released more pictures of the wanted man. More here including recent facts, timeline and target locations.

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John Kerry is in Europe working as a mediator and is guiding discussions on Europe’s offensive measures. Belgium is on high alert as is the UK but Germany appears to be passive. France has deployed a carrier group and has launched a second night of sorties, striking 19 targets and provided by U.S. intel sources. Meanwhile, officials have confirmed there was a bomb on board the Russian commercial aircraft that was brought down over the Sinai by the Islamic State faction in that province. The bomb was 1.5 kilos of TNT, which is more than what brought down PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie. Russia has offered a $50 million dollar reward and the Egyptian security services have detained 2 airport suspects.

Meanwhile, what is on tap with Europe is a new security discussion not under NATO but rather the European Union Lisbon Treaty which John Kerry is participating.

BRUSSELS—Defense ministers gathered in Brussels Tuesday to discuss a French decision to invoke the mutual defense clause of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

The clause of the Lisbon Treaty has never been invoked, pushing the European Union into new territory.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian declined to speak as he entered the European Union Council building Tuesday.

Two French officials said that the EU treaty provision, 42-7, was being invoked to try to prod the union to move forward on border control issues and increased intelligence sharing.

French officials said there needs to be agreement on stronger background and passenger name record checks on the European Union’s external borders — something that EU member states have been pressing for well over a year. The French also want more cooperation on illegal arms sales within Europe.

“Cooperation has not moved forward for years,” said a French official. “We are asking the EU to move forward on a number of issues that have been stuck for years,” said a French official..

Another French official said the use of the EU treaty could also help prompt better, and faster, intelligence sharing within the union.

French officials don’t want to invoke the NATO treaty, arguing the current coalition is a more nimble organization with which to strike at Islamic State targets.

While French requests carry great weight within the European Union, it isn’t clear whether the move will be able to resolve the disagreements over border control or other issues.

Measures to increase passenger name record screening have so far been blocked because of resistance to the measures in the European Parliament, forcing rounds of negotiations between capitals, lawmakers and the EU’s executive, the European Commission.

There have also been frequent calls since the migrant crisis began to tighten external border controls but apart from Hungary’s move to build fences on its border and a greater effort to register people entering the bloc in Italy and Greece there has been limited progress.

In a news conference late afternoon Monday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it was too early to react to the French request, which she said she would discuss Tuesday morning with Mr. Le Drian.

“Obviously we will take a careful look at that politically with the French authorities first of all, with the rest of the European institutions including the legal services and obviously we’ll come up with a follow up to that,” Ms. Mogherini said. “Obviously we have started to work on this.”

On Tuesday, most defense ministers declined to comment on the proposal in advance of the French presentation, but expressed support for France in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

“We will defend our security, our freedom, our way of living and we will not be intimidated,” said Jeanine Hennis- Plasschaert, the minister of defense for the Netherlands.

Governors Just Saying NO to WH and Refugees

Posted on November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 by Denise Simon

Growing Number Of States Say They Will Not Accept Syrian Refugees

Governors in 13 states have all said they will stop or otherwise oppose accepting additional Syrian refugees in their states.

At a glance: Governors in more than a dozen states have spoken out against the Obama administration allowing additional Syrian refugees to be resettled in their states at this time. They are:

Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Illinois
Indiana
Louisiana
Massachusetts
Michigan
Mississippi
North Carolina
Ohio
Texas

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Several state governors announced on Monday that they will not accept Syrian refugees following the attacks in Paris, citing concerns for security.

The governors of North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Texas, and Arkansas announced measures on Monday to stop or oppose any additional Syrian refugees from resettling in their states. Alabama and Michigan made similar announcements on Sunday.

The terrorist attacks in Paris have brought renewed attention on the U.S. refugee program, specifically the threat that ISIS could exploit the process to infiltrate and attack the United States. Several Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates have called on the administration to stop taking Syrian refugees, citing security concerns.

The governors of Connecticut and Vermont, meanwhile, have backed the Obama administration’s policy, voicing their support for accepting refugees in their states.

Refugees are extensively vetted — the process takes on average 18 to 24 months — but senior U.S. officials have said they are concerned there is a lack of on-the-ground intelligence in Syria that could be useful in the screening process.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order on Monday instructing agencies in his state to “utilize all lawful means” to stop Syrian refugees from resettling in the state.

“All departments, budget units, agencies, offices, entities, and officers of the executive branch of the State of Louisiana are authorized and directed to utilize all lawful means to prevent the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the State of Louisiana while this Order is in effect,” the order reads.

“The Louisiana State Police, upon receiving information of a Syrian refugee already relocated within the State of Louisiana, are authorized and directed to utilize all lawful means to monitor and avert threats within the State of Louisiana,” reads another provision of the order.

In a letter sent to President Obama on Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that his state will also refuse to resettle Syrian refugees.

“Given the tragic attacks in Paris and the threats we have already seen, Texas cannot participate in any program that will result in Syrian refugees — any one of whom could be connected to terrorism — being resettled in Texas,” Abbott wrote in the letter. “Effective today, I am directing the Texas Health & Human Services Commission’s Refugee Resettlement Program to not participate in the resettlement of any Syrian refugees in the state of Texas. And I urge you, as president, to halt your plans to allow Syrians to be resettled anywhere in the United States.”

“Neither you nor any federal official can guarantee that Syrian refugees will not be part of any terroristic activity,” Abbott continued. “As such, opening our door to them irresponsibly exposes our fellow Americans to unacceptable peril.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich similarly sent a letter to Obama, requesting that the federal government stop resettling Syrian refugees in Ohio.

“The governor doesn’t believe the U.S. should accept additional Syrian refugees because security and safety issues cannot be adequately addressed,” Kasich communications director Jim Lynch said. “The governor is writing to the President to ask him to stop, and to ask him to stop resettling them in Ohio. We are also looking at what additional steps Ohio can take to stop resettlement of these refugees.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, while ending state support for resettlement efforts, wrote in a letter to congressional leaders that it was his “understanding” that “the state does not have the authority to prevent the federal government from funding the relocation of these Syrian refugees to Florida even without state support.” As such, Scott called on Congress to prevent the Obama administration from using federal funds to support Syrian resettlement efforts.

Governor Mike Pence of Indiana said in a statement on Monday, “Effective immediately, I am directing all state agencies to suspend the resettlement of additional Syrian refugees in the state of Indiana pending assurances from the federal government that proper security measures have been achieved. Unless and until the state of Indiana receives assurances that proper security measures are in place, this policy will remain in full force and effect.”

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said in a statement on Monday that he would do “everything humanly possible” to stop the Obama administration from placing Syrian refugees in the state.

“I’m currently working with the Mississippi Department of Public Safety and Mississippi Office of Homeland Security to determine the current status of any Syrian refugees that may be brought to our state in the near future,” Bryant said in a statement. “I will do everything humanly possible to stop any plans from the Obama administration to put Syrian refugees in Mississippi. The policy of bringing these individuals into the country is not only misguided, it is extremely dangerous. I’ll be notifying President Obama of my decision today to resist this potential action.”

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson wrote in a tweet on Monday that he too would oppose Syrian refugees being relocated to his state.

According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker told reporters on Monday he was “not interested” in accepting Syrian refugees. “I would say no as of right now,” Baker said. “No, I’m not interested in accepting refugees from Syria.”

“My view on this is the safety and security of the people of the Commonwealth of Mass. is my highest priority,” Baker added. “So I would set the bar very high on this.”

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement, “Given the horrifying events in Paris last week, I am calling for an immediate halt in the placement of any new refugees in Arizona.” Specifically, he called for the Obama administration to provide “immediate consultation” under the United States Refugee Act.

In a news conference, North Carolina Gov. Scott McCrory took similar action, saying that he was requesting that the Obama administration “cease” Syrian refugee resettlement in the state immediately “until we are thoroughly satisfied” that concerns about safety that he expressed are resolved.

Of the governors’ actions and statements, McCrory added that some of the governors will be meeting later this week: “I’m sure all of us will be speaking, as a group, in the very near future.”

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announced on Sunday that they would attempt to block Syrian refugees from relocating to their states after the Paris terror attacks.

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