NY Times Buries The Real Story On Deporting Iraqi Christians

There’s an old Internet maxim, namely that most people will read the first 3 paragraphs or 30 seconds of any article. After that, they either skim through it, head to the comments, or just move on. I remember an LA Times hitjob on President George W. Bush, castigating him for daring to require active military members to pay a deductible when hurt. Alas, we learned deep in the article that the deductible only applied when they hurt themselves when not in performance of their duties. Now we get

(Daily Caller) A New York Times story on hundreds of Iraqi Christians rounded up for deportation used the kind of insufferable weeping not seen since The Notebook was in theaters to bury the most important supporting information of the piece: “[T]heir green cards were revoked after criminal convictions on charges including theft, drug possession, rape and murder.”

Yes, that’s verbatim from the tenth paragraph of Vivian Yee’s Wednesday immigration report in the Times. You might not have seen it though, because Yee meandered her way through the killing fields in Iraq, the persecution of Christians (something the Times has always been really concerned about), and, of course, President Donald Trump’s bigotry, before she actually told readers the truth: They’re being deported for breaking the law.

Not any whimsical lawbreaking either, no, ma’am, they weren’t scooped up for unpaid parking tickets. Once more, with gusto: “theft, drug possession, rape and murder.”

That’s right, it took 10 paragraphs to get to the actual reality of the story. Here’s the first 3 paragraphs

A few Sundays ago, federal immigration agents walked through the doors of handsome houses here in the Detroit suburbs, brushing past tearful children, stunned wives and statuettes of the Virgin Mary in search of men whose time was up.

If the Trump administration prevails, more than 100 of these men may soon be deported, like the tens of thousands of other people rounded up this year as part of a national clampdown on illegal immigration.

But the arrests may have stunned this community more than most.

What about 30 seconds?

While President Trump was hurling verbal napalm at Mexico and vowing to keep out Muslims during his campaign, he was also promising to look out for people from these men’s besieged corner of the world.

They are Christians from Iraq — a land that they and their families fled decades ago because, they say, to live as a Christian in Iraq is no life at all, and sometimes means death. They settled in Detroit and its suburbs, accumulating into what may now be the largest population of Chaldean Christians in the world. They opened businesses, founded a dozen Chaldean Catholic churches and rose in numbers and wealth.

Even so, they, too, are subject to American immigration law — despite what the Chaldean community took to be an ironclad promise from a president whose election many of them saw as a miracle from God, helped along by their donations, their prayers and blessings from religious leaders.

“Christians in the Middle East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter in January, returning to a campaign-trail refrain that had captured Chaldean hearts and ballots across this stretch of Macomb and Oakland Counties. As the Chaldeans like to say, once with pride, now with fury, the area helped tip Michigan to Mr. Trump in November.

You might have gotten that far. Would the average Internet reader make it to the part about their actual serious crimes? Or would most think “boy howdy, that Trump guy is super mean”?

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