…it was a U.S. invasion of their homeland (the Middle East) that victimized the Syrian people in the first place by strengthening the terrorist cell they now flee.
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“ …ISIS is a product of American brutality … closely following tactics that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan employed on innocent Muslims unfortunate enough to be targets of America’s barbaric war of aggression. It is that barbarism borne of invading two sovereign Muslim nations that set the stage for ISIS’s rise to power and destabilized the entire region to such an extent that now the dreaded Islamic State of Iran and America are working in concert to defeat an enemy created by Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Iran’s aid to Iraqi Shia’s to drive Iraqi Sunnis into neighboring Syria to spawn the Islamic State.” – Politicus USA, Sept. 4, 2014
The political voices exploiting and fueling Americans’ fear of terrorism amid an anti-refugee sentiment either don’t get or ignore the complicity of the United States in the widening tide of terrorism worldwide and in strengthening the organization behind it, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – ISIS.
It is with hypocrisy, then, that the Republican controlled U.S. House and an additional 47 Democrats voted 289-137 Thursday to impose strangling conditions on Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the United States from the violence of ISIS in their homeland. Further, 31 state governors have proclaimed they will not allow Syrian refugees in their states – although their legal authority to override federal law is doubtful. The House bill would require the director of the FBI, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence to confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no security or terrorist threat to the United States.
…an argument can be made that the United States has an ethical and a moral obligation to accept and shelter Syrian refugees who were the collateral victims of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The Senate is not expected to act on the measure until after Thanksgiving, but Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sounded confident in a New York Times story that the measure won’t survive the Senate. Even if it does, however, President Obama has threatened a veto.
Discarding political rhetoric – most of it coming from Republicans and conservatives – an argument can be made that the United States has an ethical and a moral obligation to accept and shelter Syrian refugees who were the collateral victims of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor can it be ignored that Bush’s justification for invading Iraq was based on faulty intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t, and Hussein’s ouster destabilized the region sufficiently to empower ISIS’ rise and enable Iran’s aid to Iraqi Shia’s to drive Iraqi Sunnis into neighboring Syria, thus spawning the Islamic State.
Nonetheless, official calls in the United States to stem the flow of Syrian refugees have solid backing of American public opinion. A Bloom berg poll published Nov. 18 – five days after an ISIS-orchestrated shooting attack in Paris killed 130 people – found that 53 percent of U.S. adults in the survey believed a program to resettle up to 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States should be discontinued. Another 28 percent would keep the program with a screening process already in place, and 11 percent said they would favor a limited program to accept only Syrian Christians but exclude Muslims altogether.
…a Republican state senator in Rhode Island, Elaine Morgan, has proposed placing displaced Syrians in refugee camps similar to disposition of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
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Additionally, almost every Republican presidential candidate has said the United States should stop admitting any Syrian refugees. Short of denying admission altogether, Ted Cruz has called for a religious test that identifies refugees as Christians, and a Republican state senator in Rhode Island, Elaine Morgan, has proposed placing displaced Syrians in refugee camps similar to disposition of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Yet opposition to turning refugees away comes from perhaps the unlikeliest of sources – organized religion. Two of the largest and most influential religious groups, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals, have issued official statements urging the United States not to halt refugee resettlement in the United States. Further, other churches have taken official positions against turning away refugees.
Much of the opposition is based on ethical and moral grounds while backers of refusing Syrian refugees cite fears for national security. And this is perhaps the defining distinction between conservative ideology and the more liberal thought that the United States has an historic and a moral obligation to the world’s most vulnerable of citizens in the global brotherhood of man.
There may less room to argue a conservative argument that turning away Syrian refugees is validated by history, namely America’s …interring Japanese Americans in concentration camps when a liberal U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, led the country.
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In threatening to veto the House refugee bill if it reaches his desk, President Obama called the measure “untenable” and “un-American.” There may be room to argue Obama’s point considering the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to the world to send its endangered citizens to U.S. shores. There may less room to argue a conservative argument that turning away Syrian refugees is validated by history, namely America’s opposition to taking in Jews and other eastern Europeans fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 40s, and interring Japanese Americans in concentration camps when a liberal U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, led the country.
But history appears to have assessed both as significant failures of FDR’s administration along with its refusal to intervene in the Nazi mass-extermination of Jews in what is identified by a single muting metaphor – the Holocaust.
If debates about the morality and ethics of America’s handling of the Syrian refugee crisis do not lend a solution, the colder reality of fact may be inarguable. After all, it was a U.S. invasion of their homeland that victimized the Syrian people in the first place by strengthening the terrorist cell they now flee. For the country which aided in their original victimization to deny them refuge is tantamount to re-victimization.
And is this the way of America?
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Photo Credit: Christiaan Triebert/flickr