Sunday, November 29, 2015

No Christians and persecuted minorities allowed By Abraham H. Miller, Washington Times


I just had to repost this article which is no longer available on the Net.

Standing before the cameras in Turkey, President Obama found his safe place to indict half his countrymen for raising the issue of religion in their concern over his plan to open America’s gates to tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” from Syria. Subjecting refugees to a religious test runs counter to American values, said Mr. Obama.

The Harvard Law School graduate got it wrong, again. As Andrew McCarthy notes, the immigration law explicitly requires religious considerations. How could it do otherwise? Religion is a prime reason why people are persecuted and expelled from their homelands.

The Obama administration’s Department of State also considers religion. Syrian Muslims showing up at the border with Mexico are being welcomed, but Chaldean Christians fleeing the horror and brutality of the Islamic State are being incarcerated in a federal detention center outside of San Diego, and Yazidis are not even on the administration’s radar.

Chaldean Christians and Yazidis cannot get into the United Nations refugee camps and, consequently, are not certified as refugees. You cannot be a refugee unless you are certified, and the Muslims, who dominate the camps, do not want the Christians and Yazidis in the camps. Still, the Muslims prefer refuge in predominantly Christian countries. Moreover, Muslims perpetuate their persecution of Christians in resettlement centers in Europe.

When you belong to a triumphal religion, hypocrisy is not a concern.

Mr. Obama’s statements in Turkey display profound ignorance mixed with contemptible hubris. Neither the Chaldeans nor the Yazidis present a security threat. In fact, the local Chaldean community in Southern California is more than willing to sponsor their brethren and affirm that they are not a security threat. Their pleas have fallen on the administration’s deaf ears.

The Muslims, in contrast, present a proven security threat. While not all Muslims are terrorists, it is true that Muslims are responsible for most of the terror and war in the world. The Islamic State has openly boasted that it has thousands of fighters among the refugees, and at least one of the terrorists responsible for the recent carnage in Paris was a refugee who entered Europe through Greece on a false Syrian passport. To date, the Islamic State has not made idle threats.

The fatuous retort from progressives is that terrorists are more likely to come from Muslim communities already here than from refugees. As if that were truly comforting.

To this is added the typical liberal attempt to blame the victim. It is our marginalization of Muslims, we are told, that causes them to run to Syria and become terrorists. One wonders if the liberal explanation for rape is that by rejecting men, women marginalize them and damage their self-esteem, causing them to rape, just as Muslims are similarly pushed to become fighters for the Islamic State.
The former example is just as nonsensical as the latter. But in the liberal mind, it is the victims who are responsible for what befalls them when the perpetrators are members of protected classes.

The best way to understand the potential consequences of bringing tens of thousands of Muslim refugees into America is to look at the consequences of Muslim immigration in other societies. In Europe, Muslims have created parallel societies. The European dream of a pluralistic, integrative, multicultural society has become a nightmare. Multiculturalism is a failure, and some European politicians have directly said so.

Sweden has become the rape capital of Europe, and the government has pressured the Swedish media to hide the ethnicity of the Muslim rapists, a policy that exacerbates the situation. Reality is always assumed to be worse when it is hidden. A similar Muslim-based rape culture, some of it directed at infidels, took root in England, and authorities disgracefully covered it up for years for fear of being labeled Islamophobes.

Despite denials by politicians, both London and Paris have no-go and Shariah-compliant areas enforced by Muslim thugs who have decided that their beliefs supersede the law.
While not all Muslims support these affronts to humanity, community policies are set not by the majority but by organized and militant minorities. And in Muslim communities, while ordinary people are trying to rear families and survive economically, the active minorities are busy forcing their fundamentalist view on society.

The greatest threat to America will not be some terrorist event with mass casualties. It will come from what happens next. That will be a call for a state of siege and a security protocol that will fundamentally tilt the society’s perpetual balance between freedom and order toward order. 
Ironically, liberals who want both the resettlement of refugees, whom the FBI tells us cannot be vetted, and a more open society will find that the two aspirations are contradictory. Every democratic society that finds itself in a state of siege eventually tilts the balance of freedom and order toward order, and those changes, once made, are difficult to undo.

If terrorists and fundamentalist Muslims comprise, let us say, 5 percent of all Muslim refugees, does not our sense of compassion impel us to take that risk? Every person will answer that question in terms of his own value system, but I wonder what ordinary Parisians, especially those who lost loved ones, would say about that risk.

If Americans want to show compassion and concern for refugees who are truly being brutalized, whose religions are being extinguished, and are not designated as refugees,they might begin by expending energy to convince this administration to accept the Chaldean Christians and Yazidis. We can guarantee that they present not even a remote risk to the security of the nation.
  • Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and a senior fellow with the Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought.

No comments: