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ISIS’ Other Victims
These monsters — we run out of words, don’t we? — have victimized so many more people this week than the maimed and murdered in France. So many desperate refugees — fleeing monsters like them — will now again drown in the sea, like they have been, or be shot at the borders, or returned to be imprisoned, starved, tortured, sold into sexual slavery, and barrel-bombed.
That so many in the US are now agitating not to accept refugees breaks my heart. You aren’t wrong about the security risk. But as someone whose entire neighborhood was just turned into an abattoir — as someone who could easily have been in any of those places — I still say: Find a way. We’re America. We’re this country, remember?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door. ….
We can’t check their backgrounds? Then find another way to give them safe shelter. We can’t save them all? Then save their children, save the women, as many as we can without drowning along with them. The Saudis won’t let them in? Since when do we point our moral compass to Mecca? What are we protecting, if not a civilization that is better than theirs?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.
Don’t let them keep killing. We must protect their victims.
On another note, after more than two months of relative calm, fighting is starting up again in eastern Ukraine. Of course it is. Putin’s got Europe on his side now. If I were a hardcore conspiracy theorist, I would wonder if this was the plan, but I’m not. Sometimes awful things happen by luck and accident. But these monsters have also condemned Ukraine, working splendidly with Putin’s opportunism.
So much damage done by a handful of monsters.
Published in General
if they were families with women and children, it would be a bit easier, don’t you think? There is little reason to take able-bodied young men as “refugees.” Based simply on the historical definition of the term, they’ve never really qualified… yet, this is what we have.
40 Below keeps the riff raff away.
Hey I saw Fargo. The Cohen brothers disproved that theory. :)
How many non-Jewish German refugees did the the US take in, both before and after 1945?
The traditional American foreign policy principal, which kept us out of many a third world squabble until recently.
This kind of paternalistic nonsense burns me to no end. “These people” should be fighting for their own country, whatever that vision is. Not trying to get into ours. This notion that everyone else in the world is helpless without our guiding hand is the same kind of attitudes the Democrats demonstrate in domestic policy, and just as destructive in the foreign side. Not to mention that most of these people aren’t really refugees, but opportunists.
Minnesota is full of Somalis. Ice or no, they’ll go where the government benefits and free housing are.
“How many non-Jewish German refugees did the the US take in, both before and after 1945?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/17/what-americans-thought-of-jewish-refugees-on-the-eve-of-world-war-ii/?tid=sm_fb
Two!
That is a most elegant explanation of the Trump phenomenon! It’s also a nice synopsis of the divide on this thread between those who advocate compassionate action and those who emphasize security concerns. The US was a very different country in so many ways when Emma Lazarus wrote her poem. Since we are no longer ‘this country’ we can not be ‘that country.’
Before we try to act like the US of yore we need to change some of values and policies. When assimilation is praised instead of derided, when self-reliance and freedom are elevated above dependence, and when American exceptionalism is embraced (especially by the new arrivals) — then we can open the golden door. Now? Not so much.
Syrian “Refugee” already missing in Baton Rouge, LA.
Nice. This is a few miles from where I currently sit. A few miles from where my kids attend school.
Sympathy is one thing but now it’s in my back yard.
Thanks, Obama.
Don’t just thank Obama. Thank all the bleeding hearts in the GOP that helped him on this. Thank Catholic/Lutheran Social Services for perpetuating the refugee scam. Thank all of the self-identified conservatives and Libertarians that insist you’re some kind of moral eunuch unless you agree to throw the doors open to anyone that claims persecution.
Their recruiters are in the civilized world, thanks to the Internet. Better to not risk them sneaking in with these people.
My Antiochian Orthodox parish has collected money for Syrian orphans and displaced Christian families. Now we are looking into sponsoring some individual Syrian Christian refugees (women and children) here. We can do this because these are our brothers and sisters: these are people known to other Orthodox Americans. Someone I know and can trust knows them. Furthermore, this would be a privately funded charitable project, and these resettled refugees would have a “family” here, ready to help them acculturate.
But trusting the US government to implement an enormous resettlement program of strangers who have no roots here, no history or understanding of American culture or the American project? I am empathetic. I am also VERY skeptical.
I love the Middle East. I have had many foreign-born Muslim friends in my life (particularly from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, the West Bank, and Syria), nearly all of whom have been absolutely peaceful, personally devout, and adhere to what I’ll call a “metaphorical” interpretation of the Quran: jihad represents an internal struggle, the Muslim life is one of submission of the will to Allah and the spiritual disciplines, obviously violent verses in the Quran were contextual and are now no longer relevant, etc. It would be dangerously naive of me, however, to believe that the interpretive school to which these Muslim friends of mine adhere is the school of interpretation to which most Muslims worldwide adhere. It simply is. not. true.
Also, I don’t buy that they are very desperate people. As someone else said, I’d gladly support women and children under 12 or so. That’s not the bulk of these “refugees.” It is the premise that I don’t buy; if we could agree on that, I think most of us would be open to good solutions, even at the expense of Americans. Believe it or not, Americans are very generous.
That’s key, and it illustrates a major failure to understand on the part of the Left.
Our Judeo-Christian obligations to those in straits are individual obligations, not collective ones. Government cannot satisfy these obligations for us, government can only help us–as a last resort, not the default–satisfy our individual obligations.
Another aspect of this Left failure is the concept that what works for you–personally helping a Syrian, for instance–must, therefore, work for everyone, for the nation as a whole. Romneycare worked for Massachusetts; therefore it’s good for the nation. And Government must impose it on everyone.
That’s…foolishness. And it’s counterproductively inflexible. Each of us doing charity according to our individual imperatives will produce more and broader help to more of those who need it than government can possibly do by dictating to us what our charity will be and the means by which we’ll support it.
Eric Hines
I’ll admit to being conflicted on this. The refugees are victims of our bad foreign policy and need a safe haven. On the other hand, there are bad guys mixed in with them and we don’t yet have the means to screen them out. And we have an obligation to protect our own innocents.
Maybe tent cities would be the best approach. We can keep an eye on them, and it would be an improvement over the situation they are fleeing. In the meantime, we should work on our screening processes, so we don’t have to keep the tent cities forever.
There are also Jewish arbitrating bodies and other ecclesiastical courts still active in the United States. Not to mention numerous secular arbitrating bodies.
As far as I can tell, James is right. Contracts do give parties quite a bit of choice in dispute resolution, and there is nothing about Constitutional law that prohibits this.
Our Founders inherited their notion of contract from English common law, with roots going back as far as medieval jurisprudence. There isn’t a whole lot to suggest that their idea of a proper contract between people changed radically during the Revolution.
Exclusionary covenants in real estate contracts?
I said boys under 10 or not showing signs of puberty.
Very true. Plenty of gobsmackingly bizarre behavior and petty crime? Yes. Many first-generation Hmong refugees quite literally did not know how to behave in the modern world, and died before ever figuring it out. It was up to their children and their children’s children to assimilate.
Still, the Hmong had fought for the US before being granted refugee status.
The Hmong did not, either. Most first-generation Hmong refugees expected to return to Laos eventually, to be buried with their ancestors. Yet despite their frustrating hostility toward assimilation, the Hmong eventually assimilated.
Still, hostility toward assimilation itself in otherwise peaceful people is different from being at risk of harboring terrorist sympathies.
I’ve spent a few days thinking about this and have to say that there are abundant refugees among the Yazidi, and the Christians. There are unlikely to be any Jews, and you can ask our erstwhile Syrian guests why that is. Fact is, that I could make 30 % of our asylum applicant Muslims very happy just by shooting myself in front of them, and half of those would be glad to lend a hand. Is that what you’d have me do? I do value your good opinion, Claire, but can only follow so far.
The asylum/ quarantine ideas don’t seem preposterous. I don’t advocate for harsh climates or conditions, but only an ocean. I don’t want these people to suffer and have no interest in tormenting them, but each must be regarded as an escape risk and a potential psychopath until they’ve been observed at some length.
The West had its medieval period, it’s holy wars and massacres and slavery and we were cured only by time, like an alcoholic. We can’t convert the Arab world to civilization: they foreswore decency and view that as an achievement. They will come around, but not as long as they see the endgame as expansion, either while holding a gun or shopping for one on the black market.
The innocent need not suffer, but they are carriers of the disease and quarantine is appropriate.
I have no desire to run into this back-and-forth beyond this point… but I have to say that anti-Americanism internationally goes far beyond anything I’ve seen on this thread or on Ricochet ever.
I read an article a number of years ago in Britain’s Daily Telegraph by someone named something like Margaret Dribble. The title, as I recall, was “I loath America.”
This was in the still-early days when our countries were at war, together. That wasn’t even in the Guardian or the Independent, where you’d go for the truly rabid ant-Americanism.
What makes you think he’d wait three years?
I gotta go with Walter Russell Mead on this, to wit – this (‘why can’t we show compassion to these poor people?’) is not the conversation we should be having. The actual conversation should be, ‘what should America do to ameliorate the Obama disaster in Syria?’
The moneyline is also the why.
edit. I turned this into a post on the member feed.