This
holiday season, politicians are taking aim at some of the most helpless people
on earth.
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| Once again, Canada shows us how it's done |
As holiday shoppers empty their wallets to buy presents for
family and friends, there’s been an outbreak of miserliness among our
politicians — directed at some of the world’s most helpless people.
At least 30 Republican governors, and one Democrat, are vowing to bar Syrian refugees from their states. One
family was actually turned away at the Indiana state line when the local
resettlement agency got a nasty phone call from the authorities.
In Washington, 47 House Democrats joined their Republican
colleagues to pass a bill requiring each and every Syrian applying to enter the
United States to be personally approved by the heads of three intelligence agencies.
That would include “widows and orphans,” says President Barack Obama, who
rightly opposes the measure.
What’s with the mean spirits? It’s supposed to be the season of
generosity.
The immediate trigger is fear, prompted in part by false reports
that one of the terrorists who attacked Paris on November 13 was a recent
Syrian migrant. In fact, almost all of
the assailants identified so far were Belgian or French
citizens.
But it’s only too easy for demagogues like the Republican
presidential candidates to dream up nightmare scenarios about a jihadi militant
or two sneaking into America disguised as an asylum seeker.
Sure enough, after the terrible mass shooting in San Bernardino,
California, Rand Paul put forward a measure in Congress that would have imposed
an “immediate moratorium” on visas for refugees from “high-risk” countries.
Neither of the killers was a refugee — one was born in America and the other
grew up in U.S.-allied Saudi Arabia. And they obtained every piece of their
enormous arsenal right here in the US of A, legally.
Paul’s opportunism taps into deep currents of anti-Muslim prejudice that politicians have
been stirring up for years.
When Donald Trump says that mosques should be under permanent
surveillance and that Muslims should be barred from entering the country, or
when Jeb Bush says that Syrian Christians can move here but not Muslims, they
send a clear message:
They believe all Muslims are potential terrorists.
This dark hint isn’t just the opposite of charity. It’s racist —
and downright perverse.
Syrian refugees are fleeing from terrorism, whether by the
regime of Bashar al-Assad or his radical Islamist opponents, among them the
Islamic State. Over half of Syria’s 22 million people have been displaced from
their homes over the course of the dreadful civil war — now a proxy war — that
has raged there since 2011.
The pace of flight has increased with the Russian airstrikes on
the side of the regime. In October alone, the UN reported, 120,000 people were forced to leave areas that had
previously been spared the worst of the fighting.
Syrians run first to relatives in other provinces, then to
neighboring countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. But those front-line
nations lack the resources to absorb the refugees indefinitely. So, more and
more, Syrians are spending their savings to head westward via dangerous
smuggling routes. Far too many are dying along the way.
Ben Carson, another GOP White House hopeful, visited a refugee
camp in Jordan and claimed that most of the residents want to return home
rather than come to America. He’s not wrong, exactly — anyone would rather live
in familiar surroundings than in a strange country across the ocean.
But Carson left out the important part: Syrians only want to go
home when it’s safe. That day, sadly, is a long way off.
In the meantime, the United States and Europe can save lives by
easing the restrictions on formal, legal refugee resettlement. We should
welcome as many escapees from the Syrian catastrophe as possible.
‘Tis the season of giving, not barring the door.
Chris
Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle
East Research and Information Project in Washington, DC. MERIP.org. Distributed by OtherWords.org.