Since the tragedy in San Bernardino, Republican presidential candidates, other politicians and their cheering supporters have had a field day attempting to link the mass murders — probably an act of terrorism — to Muslims in general and to the Syrian refugees issue in particular.
This, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of evidence that points to Syrian refugees in the United States as having committed the massacre. “After all, 785,000 refugees have been admitted to the United States since 9/11 and not one has been convicted of killing a person in a terrorist act in America,” says Nicholas Kristof.
This, while ignoring factors of more relevance to the tragedy such as the easy availability of weapons of mass slaughter and of their equally murderous ammunition, a broken visa system and the Republican controlled Senate’s refusal to block people on the terror watch list from buying assault rifles.
As a matter of fact — and just as they have done after each similar tragedy — the NRA and its supporters have used such mass killings as excuses to double down on “the need” for more weapons, for more and easier access to them, for more armed people, for more vigilantes.
Witness the president of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., urging students to get their permits to carry concealed weapons and, referring to the San Bernardino massacre, saying, “If more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”
In an unprecedented (since 1920) front page editorial, the New York Times lets it all out — after expressing “sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents” and after pointing out, “The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms”:
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.
But back to the Syrian refugees.
In the New York Times Sunday Review, Nicholas Kristof who has spent time among the refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, perhaps puts the refugee hysteria best into perspective:
For three weeks American politicians have been fulminating about the peril posed by Syrian refugees, even though in the last dozen years no refugee in America has killed a single person in a terror attack.
.
In the same three weeks as this hysteria about refugees, guns have claimed 2,000 lives in America. The terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs were the most dramatic, but there’s an unrelenting average of 92 gun deaths every day in America, including suicides, murders and accidents.
Kristof suggests to politicians who want to tackle a real threat to develop “a serious policy to reduce gun deaths — yes, including counterterrorism measures, but not simply making scapegoats of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Kristof gives an example of one of those “most vulnerable people,” a 16-year-old Syrian boy whom he calls Ahmed; who lived in a part of Syria controlled by ISIL; who was flogged by ISIL bullies for skipping prayers; who almost had his head chopped off “for speaking to a woman”; who “has seen more beheadings than he can count” and who had to leave his family behind.
Kristof:
So what should I tell this 16-year-old boy who risked his life to flee extremism? That many Americans are now afraid of him? That the San Bernardino murders may only add to the suspicion of Syrian refugees? That in an election year, politicians pander and magnify voter fears?
Kristof adds:
Historically, we Americans have repeatedly misperceived outsiders as threats. In 1938 and again in 1941, one desperate Jewish family in Europe tried to gain refugee status in the United States but failed, along with countless thousands of others. That was Anne Frank’s family.
.So while it was the Nazis who murdered Anne, we Americans were in some sense complicit.
Some indeed compare the urging of many governors and politicians not to accept Syrian refugees to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration’s 1939 decision not to let the more than 900 desperate Jewish passengers of the SS St. Louis, fleeing Nazi Germany, into our country: “And the SS St. Louis sailed back to Europe, where World War II was just weeks away. Many of the passengers would fall back into the hands of the Nazis they were trying to escape. About 250 of them did not survive the war,” according to the Miami Herald.
The Herald:
The decision to turn away the St. Louis was a grotesquely ugly moment in American history, one for which Congress and the U.S. State Department would eventually apologize. Now the governors of 26 states are urging President Barack Obama to turn away another group of refugees, 10,000 people fleeing the civil war in Syria.
Are we about to repeat history?
Lead photo: Ververidis Vasilis / Shutterstock.com
