I am ashamed of these people calling themselves “Americans” clamoring that hungry children, their parents and siblings who have had to flee their homes to escape ethnic cleansing by Daesh are being treated like vermin. The refugees, not Daesh, the refugees have been called “Mad Dogs”. That they, and frankly all Muslims should be marked and tagged with ID badges like animals, or kept track of in a Muslim database as if they were factory inventory. Or placed in camps. That only Christian Syrians should be allowed entry.
It’s unbelievable. I never thought that America could return to the mindset of the internment camps. That we would consider repeating the mistake of rejecting German refugees who were forced to return and were ultimately murdered in the holocaust. These people are giving Daesh exactly what they want.
President Obama: I can no think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate. ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there is war between Islam and the west… When people suggest that Christians are more worthy than Muslims for protection, it feeds the ISIL narrative. It’s counter-productive.
These people argue that our refugee vetting process isn't stringent enough when in facts it’s already pretty fracking stringent.
— The U.S. annually accepts 70,000 refugees from around the world. This group includes people fleeing violence, religious persecution and war. The Obama administration announced earlier this year that the number of people invited to move to the U.S. as refugees would be increased to 85,000 in the coming year, including about 10,000 Syrians.
— The U.S. has helped resettle about 2,500 Syrian refugees since the war started in that country in 2011. The Obama administration said about half that group is children, while about 2.5 percent are people over the age of 60 and roughly 2 percent are single men of combat age. The overall group is almost evenly split among men and women.
— Amid questions about background checks and security vetting, the administration for the first time this week disclosed new details about how refugees are investigated. The process is directed by the Homeland Security Department and involves the State Department and U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Refugees submit to in-person interviews overseas, where they provide biographical details about themselves, including their families, friendships, social or political activities, employment, phone numbers, email accounts and more. They also provide biometric information about themselves, including fingerprints. Syrians are subject to additional, classified controls, according to administration officials, who briefed reporters this week on condition that they not be identified by name to publicly discuss confidential details about the process. The Associated Press had been seeking details about the vetting process since September.
Of course the leader in this hateful bandwagon of fear has been Don Trump.
On MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough asked, if President, would Trump consider closing mosques?
"I would hate to do it but it would be something that you're going to have strongly consider," Trump said. "Some of the ideas, some of the hatred, absolute hatred, is coming from these areas."
Followed by Dr. Ben Carson.
"If there's a rabid dog running around in your neighborhood, you're probably not going to assume something good about that dog," Carson said during a press conference in Mobile, Ala. "And you're probably going to put your children out of the way. That doesn't mean that you hate all dogs."
In the end they risk us repeating this tragic mistake.
Desperate people, fleeing a terrifying, bloodthirsty regime, try to find refuge in the US. But the American government and the public don't want to accept them. They worry that accepting refugees would put citizens at risk, and they don't see the refugee crisis as their problem to fix. So they are turned away.
This is what could happen in the US in 2015, if the governors and members of Congress pushing to stop the admission of Syrian refugees have their way. But it's definitely what happened in 1939 to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The US (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis. They didn't. At one point, the US literally turned away a ship of 900 German Jews. Shortly afterward, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety.
A fairly heated discussion of this broke out this week between Jessie Jane Duff of DC’s Fox 5 affiliate and Muslim Journalist Noor Tagori.
“There have been 1,500 Syrian refugees let into this country so far, we’re talking about another 10,000,” Duff said. “The cost alone to the American taxpayer is going to be $6.5 billion. We have a right to defend ourselves.”
Tagouri argued that refusing to help Syrian refugees was exactly what ISIS wanted the United States to do.
“It’s just funny to me because this entire conversation is sparked from the Paris attacks when none of the attackers were refugees,” she noted.
“Not true,” Duff interrupted. “There was one that had a Syrian passport.”
WTTG anchor Shawn Yancy reminded Duff that the Syrian passport found in Paris had likely been faked.
“Of course it’s fake!” Duff insisted, turning to Tagouri. “Because ISIS has invaded all of these government offices now. You do not know that for a fact, they know that they found a passport from a Syrian refugee.”
“There are 85,000 refugees now, why haven’t they stood up and defended their nation?” Duff asked. “Because I guarantee, if there were 85,000 Americans under attack, we would have took up arms. Why are we now going to spend this type of money when they’re not even defending themselves?”
Tagouri said that the United States would be “repeating history” if it made the same mistake as it had with Jews fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II.
Duff shot back that the comparison was “insulting.”
“This is a different kind of refugee,” she quipped. “I find it insulting that you would compare it to the Jews. Because we’re looking at Syria that has, again, at minimum 50,000 ISIS members. Minimum!”
“Now it has festered out of control and we’re going to say we’ve turned away innocent people when you cannot guarantee to me that you will not have ISIS in this country,” Duff said. “And the day that the women in this country are raped and beheaded the way that the Yazidi women have been, we will have blood on our hands!”
“This is exactly what you would tell the Syrian mother and her kids to their faces?” Tagouri wondered. “This is exactly what ISIS wants.”
And she is exactly correct. Daesh is not the advocate for these refugees, seeing them shunned, wandering and homeless, seeing nations turn against them, watching so many Americans curl up into a quivering ball of apoplectic paranoia is exactly what these mass murdering assfracks want.
If we don’t have the back-bone to stand up to 5-year-old orphans exactly how are we going to stand up to the determined killers of Daesh? You don’t fight cowards with greater cowardice.
You do it by showing you have courage of your convictions to freedom, justice, and human rights despite your fear of those who seek to harm you. You can not let them dictate the narrative, else the ideals of America — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equal protection— become just empty words, empty rhetoric.
You’re either a real American or you aren’t.