It’s not just Alabama's governor fear-mongering about Syrian refugees. His party’s presidential candidates are enthusiastically on the “we’re too scared, weak, and ungenerous to do what Europe is doing” train. According to Republican establishment boy(ish) wonder Marco Rubio, “It's not that we don't want to [take in Syrian refugees]; it's that we can't because there's no way to background check someone that's coming from Syria.” No, Marco, I think it’s that you don’t want to. And for some reason, the U.S. should reject refugees even though Rubio immediately followed up by saying:
The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home, homegrown violent extremists, individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who have been radicalized online. This has become a multi-faceted threat.
So we should reject refugees out of fear even though we’ve already got plenty of terrorists of our own. (To say nothing of white American-born guys with guns shooting up schools and movie theaters.) But the other Republican candidates are in line with Rubio on the BE AFRAID message. Mike Huckabee called for President Obama to “close our borders.” Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz said they’d be okay with some Syrian refugees in the United States … but they have to be Christian. Ben Carson advocated global NIMBYism by saying the U.S. should “help get them resettled—over there—and to support them over there” because:
”… to bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.”
“You know that the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals, because we can engage in rational thought processing.”
Oh, well, if the brain surgeon is telling us that the workings of the human brain demand we leave vulnerable refugees of a horrific war “over there,” I guess we better! This, by the way, came in the same interview in which Carson expressed support for shooting down a Russian plane and repeated his insistence that the Chinese are active in Syria.
In short, the Republican presidential candidates can’t trample fast enough or hard enough on President Obama’s warning against “Equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”
Sign and send the petition to the White House: I support admitting Syrian refugees into the United States.