Better late than never? Or, as Rahm Emanuel famously or notoriously said when he was in the Obama administration: "Never let a crisis go to waste." (Winston Churchill is alleged to have said it first, however, when discussing how modern governments create their own crises to expand power, and also about how one can personally face a crisis and be strengthened by the experience -- quite the opposite of what Emanuel meant.) Now, I wouldn't know an Assyrian if I stood next to him in a supermarket checkout line. If he were speaking a foreign tongue with his companion, I wouldn't necessarily know that it was in Farsi or Iraqi or ancient Assyrian or Catalon. Frankly, I know little or nothing about Ancient Assyria or Assyrian culture. I know that Obama's grand plan for populating the U.S. with "refugees" basically hostile to individual rights and the U.S. Constitution does not include admitting swarms of individuals who are true refugees from tyranny and poverty who seek the security of a civilized country governed by the rule of law and not of men. He prefers to bring in Muslims who come here as part of a "Grand Jihad" to conquer the country by settling in it. It's a strategy discussed in at least two of my recent Rule of Reason columns, "Just Do It, Parts One and Two." See Europe for the dire and wholly predictable consequences of the Muslim invasion of a Western country. The INS has been given its marching orders: block Middle Eastern Christians from entering the U.S., but put out the welcome mat for anyone who wants to reclaim Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico as Mexican provinces, or for anyone who adheres to Islam and expects the rest of the U.S. to abide by its rules, and who wouldn't mind the Constitution being replaced with Sharia law. Or, simply make life miserable and expensive for anyone who does not toe the Obama line on immigration. Punish them. Smear them. Bankrupt them. Silence them. Before I write anything else, the reader should know my personal context. I am an atheist. I champion no religion. I regard any religion as a kind of moral anchorage to a primitive philosophy for living. To paraphrase the American revolutionary, Ethan Allen, and also declaring that I am not a Deist, either, reason is my oracle, not mysticism. However, because most religions do not threaten my life or my country, as Islam does, I do not fear them or go out of my way to criticize, derogate or mock them. Islam is the only exception to that rule. Over its fourteen-century history, the "religion of peace" has a greater record of murder than have either Communism or Nazism. So I have no preference for bias toward any especially Christian religion, whether its followers come from Syria, Iraq, or Egypt. The Assyrians are not out to convert me to their brand of Christianity. Nor are Jews hounding me to memorize the Torah. They just want to be left alone, just as the Amish and Quakers want to be left alone. Most of them don't flaunt their religion in public in some traditional garb, or block streets to say their prayers, as Muslims demand the right to do -- or else they go whining to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), their Hamas-linked mommy, to kiss their boo-boos and make the mental anguish and humiliation go away. If an immigration attorney thumbs his nose at the Obama diktat, he gets targeted by the Department of Justice, also known for the last nine years as the Department of Injustice, first under Eric Holder, and now under Loretta Lynch. What an appropriate surname for someone in charge of "hanging high" anyone who defies said diktat; I also keep associating Attorney General Lynch with a Country and Western singer. Cutting to the chase, this column is about Robert DeKelaita, a Chicago area immigration attorney of Syrian-Iraqi descent who apparently specializes in aiding Assyrian Christian refugees in finding asylum in the U.S., which would put them on the road to permanent residence and ultimately to U.S. citizenship. He was charged (in 2014) with committing immigration fraud, but the period in which the alleged fraud took place was 2000-2001. So, the first and principal question to ask is: Why the fourteen-year delay? Why is the DOJ now pursuing a man who purportedly faked documents almost decade and a half ago? There is no statute of limitations on the prosecution of capital crimes, such as murder. I gather there is no perceived statute of limitations on the enforcement of federal laws and regulations, either. The FBI, which participated in Mr. DeKelaita's arrest, posted this notice on September 23, 2014:

CHICAGO -- A suburban immigration attorney and a man who provided translation services for the lawyer and his law firm were arrested today after being indicted on federal charges for allegedly falsifying requests for asylum for a dozen clients over approximately a decade. In some instances, the charges allege that the attorney and interpreter falsely claimed that their clients were seeking asylum because their clients were subjected to religious persecution by Islamic extremists in Iraq. The attorney, ROBERT DEKELAITA, 51, of Glenview, and his contract interpreter, ADAM BENJAMIN, 61, of Skokie, were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit immigration and naturalization fraud. DeKelaita was also charged with three counts each of immigration fraud and suborning perjury, and Benjamin was also charged with two counts each of immigration fraud and suborning perjury in a seven-count indictment that was returned by a federal grand jury on Sept. 4 and unsealed today following their arrests.

The FBI notice included this advisory at the very end of the two-page notice:

The public is reminded that an indictment contains only charges and is not evidence of guilt. The defendants are presumed innocent and are entitled to a fair trial at which the government has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the indictment, regardless of the outcome of Mr. DeKelaita's case, is smear enough. The original notice of U.S. Attorney General's office, the Northern District of Illinois, can be read here, and the 25-page indictment can be read here. In a private email exchange, I solicited Mr. DeKelaita's thoughts on the matter. He wrote back:

"I believe the 'investigation' began in 2008. But you are right that it does smell like an ulterior motive. I began to hear DHS agents harassing clients and spreading rumors that I was in prison and that my office was 'wired' etc. In other words, they did their best to destroy my business, all the while not approaching me. They treated my work on behalf of persecuted people into a 'criminal conspiracy.' These wizards think they can use magic words to influence facts. They harassed people to get them to say what was not true. They constructed -- against all odds -- a case. You would think that the DHS/DOJ would be interested in protecting the homeland from real dangers, not chasing old Assyrian Christian ladies about the exaggerations and 'lies' they told to save themselves from persecution or to reunite with their families. But this is our government and its priorities and I think it is a major disappointment."

A petition to Senators, Congressmen, and others (to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, carbon copied to President Barack Obama, United States Inspector General Michael Horowitz, U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Zachary T. Fardon, Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo), circulated electronically by StandWithRobert, begins:

I am writing to you regarding the recent indictment of attorney Robert William DeKelaita. I would like to express my concerns on behalf of the Middle Eastern Christian community. Mr. DeKelaita has been charged with immigration fraud for allegedly falsifying asylum requests for Iraqi Christians. At a time where Iraq's Christians are facing their greatest plight in nearly a century, the charges are not only wrongful--they are inappropriate and exceedingly insensitive. Iraq's Assyrian Christian community has suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists for decades, particularly after the 2003 United States invasion left them defenseless. The current takeover by the Islamic State has terrorized the Assyrian people, as the violence against them has surged. They have been made victims of unspeakable crimes--including brutal murders, beheadings, torture, and sexual assault. While prosecutors were preparing their case against Mr. DeKelaita, Assyrians were fleeing their homes with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They are now displaced, living without means to survive--refugees in their own homeland. Mr. DeKelaita has been an advocate for the Assyrian people, among other persecuted minorities, for years. He is an exemplary citizen. They have dedicated their lives and careers to others, lending their voices to those who have been silenced.

There is a wealth of information about how ISIS and other Muslim states and terrorist gangs have persecuted Mideast, African, and Far Eastern Christians. Raymond Ibrahim is among the foremost chroniclers of that persecution. In his October 1st, 2015 column, "Muslim History vs Western Fantasy: The 'Refugee Crisis' in Context," he writes:

One of the primary reasons Islamic and Western nations are "worlds apart" is because the way they understand the world is worlds apart. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies. This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will "conquer Rome" and "break its crosses," few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam's founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources--words and goals that prompted over a thousand years of jihad on Europe. Most recently, the Islamic State released a map of the areas it plans on expanding into over the next five years. The map includes European nations such as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, and parts of Russia. The reason these European nations are included in the Islamic State's map is simple. According to Islamic law, once a country has been conquered (or "opened," as it's called in the euphemistic Arabic), it becomes Islamic in perpetuity. Now, however, that the "caliphate" has been reborn and is expanding before a paralytic West, dreams of reconquering portions of Europe--if not through jihad, then through migration--are becoming more plausible, perhaps even more so than conquering Israel. Because of their historical experiences with Islam, some central and east European nations are aware of Muslim aspirations. Hungary's prime minister even cited his nation's unpleasant past under Islamic rule (in the guise of the Ottoman Empire) as reason to disallow Muslim refugees from entering.

There is, of course, the genocidal persecution of the Yazidis and the sexual enslavement of many of that creed's women -- a barbarism so horrific that not even the MSM could ignore it -- the destruction of ancient archeological sites in an attempt to erase pre-Islamic history, and the jihad waged by so-called "lone wolf" killers in the West. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch also carries the most news about the Islamic persecution of Christians. The atrocities and the stories never end and will not end any time soon. The Wall Street Journal in 2006 published an expos