Tempers have been flaring, fear mongering has been absurd, compassion has been absent and the dog whistles have been not so subtle and not so ultrasonic recently in the “debate” over whether our nation should continue to accept Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
Without naming names and without mentioning the (obvious) political Party affiliation of those making them, here is a random selection of the most “memorable” comments on what our country should do about and with those destitute and desperate men, women and children trying to find refuge on our shores or, for that matter, those Muslims already in our country.
One of the leading presidential candidates compared Syrian refugees to rabid dogs:
“For instance, you know, if there is a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog, and you’re probably gonna put your children out of the way,” [the candidate] said. “Doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination.
Continuing his analogy, the Republican presidential candidate said that screening refugees is like questioning how you protect your children, even though you love dogs and will call the Humane Society to take the dog away to reestablish a safe environment.
“By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly,” he added.
“Who are the people who wanna come in here and hurt us and wanna destroy us? Until we know how to do that, just like it would be foolish to put your child out in the neighborhood knowing that that was going on, it’s foolish for us to accept people if we cannot have the appropriate type of screening.”
Another leading presidential candidate has called for increased surveillance of Islamic mosques, has not ruled out warrantless searches and remains “open toward registering U.S. Muslims in a database or giving them special identification identifying their faith.
“We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” the candidate says, “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”
A former governor and now a low-scoring presidential wannabe told CNN it was the “craziest thing” to “take people who live in a desert who don’t speak our language, who don’t understand our culture, who don’t share a same worldview, and bring them to Minnesota during the winter.”
Another presidential candidate, and a governor, is proposing a new government agency to promote a Jewish- and Christian-based belief system around the world as part of a broad national security plan to defeat ISIS.
“We need to beam messages around the world” about the freedoms Americans enjoy, [the governor] said in an interview with NBC News Tuesday.
“It means freedom, it means opportunity, it means respect for women, it means freedom to gather, it means so many things.”
In the meantime, the governor — ostensibly in support of “freedom, opportunity, respect for women,” etc. — has sent a letter to the president urging him not to accept any more Syrian refugees.
Award-winning journalist and co-blogger Dr. Walter Brasch nicely summarizes the actions and comments of three additional personalities in his excellent “The Republicans’ Rhetoric of Hate and Fear”
In order not to affect the thrust of his comments, names and Party affiliations are included:
Rep. Glen Casada, Republican caucus leader in Tennessee, wants the Tennessee National Guard to round up all Syrian refugees who are lawful residents of his state and to deport them—if not back to Syria, at least to some other state.
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State Sen. Elaine Morgan (R-R.I.) wants to create internment camps for any Syrian refugee admitted into her state. Most Pennsylvania republican legislators, spewing their caucus’s talking points, said they had “grave concerns” about Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to allow Syrian refugees to live in the state where the Declaration of Independence was written.
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Texas State Rep. Tony Dale, one of the nation’s most ardent defenders of the right to own guns, and who consistently receives grades of “A” from the NRA, added yet another reason to deny Syrian refugees admission to the United States. Without recognizing the irony and the hypocrisy, he said it would be too easy for refugees to buy guns.
Then there is that other formidable governor and presidential wannabe who would not even make an exception for “orphans under the age of five.”
Even as the House passes legislation to toughen the vetting process of refugee resettlement, a number of legislators are introducing a flurry of even tougher bills. Among them “The Refugee Resettlement Accountability National Security Act of 2015” introduced by a Texas representative, who, anticipating criticism to his bill, had this to say to Breitbart News’s Steve Bannon in an interview Wednesday:
What they’re going to bring up over the holiday season is, ‘Mary and Joseph were refugees. Mary and Joseph when they went into Egypt were refugees…Well, Steve, I would just say this…Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do. You can see it in technicolor in Paris.
The Washington Post clarifies: “As of right now, none of the eight identified suspects in the Paris attacks were refugees from Iraq or Syria. A passport found on one suspect, which matched one that was used by a refugee, was quickly determined to be fraudulent.”
For those who will claim, “The other side does it, too,” here is some token ammo for you from a token Demo mayor who had this to say about the Syrian refugee crisis: “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis [sic] now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”
Of course, we cannot let the liberal media off the hook. A CNN global affairs correspondent tweeted on the House bill that would make it more difficult for Syrian refugees to come to the U.S., “House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees. Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish,” linking to a CNN article on the vote.
Lead photo: Ververidis Vasilis / Shutterstock.com
Edited to “clean up” links
