Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Compassion is a good and necessary thing, but it should be a personal choice, not something that should be forced on you by the State. You can do your part by adopting a Syrian family if you want, and sending them food, clothes etc., but not by imposing their presence on people who don’t want them.
Problem is that’ll never be how it works out. Once they’re here, they’re here permanently.
Let the Muslims take care of the Muslims. If their culture will not protect their own, in the marketplace of ideas, we are winners.
Bryan, both Walton and I were explicit in our initial comments that we oppose mass immigration of refugees.
That’s the beauty of Gitmo!
Bad poetry on an old French statue is not an immigration policy.
But you are for spending tax dollars to ease their pain and suffering. How is that different? Where is that part of the social contract between citizen and government? Shouldn’t this be something individuals choose to do or not to do?
The point is that some of them will likely pass on the fine opportunity to brave the ND winter. An internment camp far from the rest of civilization will discourage escapes and make the return process easy. We could even build an airstrip there to bypass other transportational difficulties.
I recommend reading Claire’s piece again, especially the parts where she talks about the Saudis being asked to take them in and the plea for other alternatives than abandoning them to their deaths.
I think Claire’s preferred position is immigration or resettlement/internment of some kind. If so, I disagree with her.
However, I took the bolded below to mean that she is open to other means of pursuing this humanitarian goal.
Claire, you disappoint us. Your call is the same one we hear every day from the left. “You must show compassion. You must bear the burden of this person’s misfortune, of that culture’s primitive dark heart. You and your success must give way to these failures.”
Who do these leftists think they are, to define our common values by their foot-stamping fiat? Who do you think you are, Ms. Berlinski, to tell anyone what they must do to uphold the values of America? I trust you’ve thought this thru’ – beyond quoting Lazarus’ tired emo prattle out of context, I mean.
You really ought not to wish for minarets and the atonal chant of the muzzein in my neighborhood. I do not submit. There’s my American value for you.
Yes, and by the religion that breeds and indoctrinates them.
Interesting philosophy, then why spend tax dollars to fight ISIS at all. They haven’t attacked American soil have they?
Indeed. Would that the open borders crowd showed such compassion to their fellow countrymen, particularly those living on our southern border.
Look at this and weep. A good friend has a kid attending U-M Dearborn.
American Muslims Stone Christians in Dearborn, Michigan
As this is a very heated topic, please be sure to play the ball, not the man. No need to impugn intentions; instead let’s discuss ideas. Thank you very much.
Savagery, nothing more.
How quickly we forget Garland Texas. No worries. The Republic will take care of our own.
Perhaps Malaysia would like them? Why not Pakistan?
The point is there are other countries, Jamie. Muslim Countries. Not advanced, western countries where just getting to our doorstep is like hitting the lottery.
“Abandoning them to their deaths?” Nobody is advocating shooting their boats out of the Med, but turning them around, unloading them and then scuttling their ships is an option. Hell, Obama and Clinton did a great job with Libya – send them there.
I thought separating families was beyond the pale.
It doesn’t exist. I believe I have been quite clear on that.
To elaborate again, though, I think it’s in our naked self-interest to reduce the refugee crisis and the best way of doing that is destroying ISIS while providing safe haven there to genuine refugees.
Again, I do not want refugees immigrating here. Sounds like a bad policy to me. Protecting people there and destroying ISIS strikes me as a good and inexpensive way to stop the flow.
I wonder how many of those here so adamant in their refusal to help these people through resettlement are currently donating to charities designed to help them closer to home.
You know what’s great about sarcasm? It never gets old.
I’m so sick of having that thrown in my face I’d gladly subscribe to chiseling those words off the tablet and replacing them with “Enough already, fix the problems in the country you’re in.”
Sorry to be so blunt, but people moved to compassion for refugees can donate to helping them in the country they’re already in. I’d even go along with them taking a family into their spare bedroom. Don’t import 10,000 of them into my state and insist I pay for it.
Sharyl Atkisson did a great report on the problems caused by refugee resettlement in the inaugural edition of her show Full Measure. The town of Lewiston Maine is being bankrupted by the Somali refugees it’s been required to take in.
I am not the libertarian. I am a conservative, and a nationalist. You cannot hold me to your rules.
Bring fire from the sky to wipe the off the face of the Earth. I’ll pay for that. If I had the money and resources (a la Tony Stark) I’d do it myself.
I donated at the office.
Why is South America always exempt from helping?
Airdrop the refusees anywhere over South America. Plenty of utopias there and They should feel Right at Home. It’s time that continent starts pulling Its weight.
I guess I don’t see a good way to protect people there that does not involve putting our boys in harm’s way on the ground. I don’t want that. We can wipe out the enemy from the sky and they cannot touch us. Do that.
I’d gladly play for the removal of Emma Lazarus’ doggerel.
The IRS donated for me.
Large-scale immigration into the US, especially by people of very different cultures, has been made much more problematic by our loss of civilizational self-confidence, which will turn assimilation from the Normal Case to an Exception Case. Consider the Student Government at U-Minnesota, which decided *not* have 9/11 commemoration events because they thought it might offend Muslims. Who would want to assimilate into a society whose representatives show so little self-respect? And communities of resolutely non-assimilated and non-assimilatable immigrants, even if they are not themselves violent, inherently provide cover for those who *are* violent.