Horrific News out of Idaho

If you missed this article from the Washington Post last week, you might count yourself lucky. It’s a tough read.

A very young girl, age 5, was sexually assaulted in a small farming town in Idaho. The perpetrators were juveniles. One was from the Sudan, the other Iraq.

Rumor spread that the incident was “carried out by a violent gang of young Syrian refugees who had taken over a low-income housing complex on the northern edge of town.” City officials were accused of “manufacturing a cover-up that was designed to downplay a new crime wave that followed an influx of lawless Muslim refugees who had arrived via a federal resettlement program.”

Those rumors spread locally via social media. They spread nationwide with the help of the conservative news aggregation website The Drudge Report, which ran the following headline “Syrian Refugees Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.”

The prosecuting attorney assigned to the case called that headline “all false” – the child was not raped, there was no knife, and no Syrians were involved.

In fact, no Syrians have resettled in the affected town. Only 57 Syrians have resettled anywhere in Idaho since 2011.

But over 350 refugees, from the Sudan and Iraq, have resettled in the small town since 2011. And at least some residents are concerned that “ISIS is here; the Muslim Brotherhood is here.” While others opine that “bringing in these people from other countries — if they don’t abide by our rules, they need to get the hell back to their country.”

-KitJ