President Obama wants more Syrian Muslim refugees in the West. Speaking in Turkey on Monday, Obama explained that the West needed to open its heart to Muslim refugees, who after all were fleeing from terrorism in the Middle East to the safe and warm arms of the West. Meanwhile, Obama continued to maintain that Islamic radicalism presents no threat to the world.
To President Obama, the issue of Syrian Muslim refugee immigration into the United States is a simple risk-reward analysis. The risk: terrorist attack. The reward: not being “Islamophobic.”
First, the risk. We know that President Obama believes that Americans can take a terrorist attack. Back in 2010, according to Bob Woodward, Obama stated, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever…we absorbed it and we are stronger.” And Obama acknowledged today that American intelligence officials have considered ISIS capable of attacks beyond its borders for months. So Obama knows that accepting Syrian Muslim refugees carries a risk above zero. He’s willing to accept that risk.
And the risk is substantial. We now know that at least one of the terrorists in Paris entered Europe as a refugee and carried an ID for Syrian refugees. According to CNN:
[The] bomber falsely declared himself to be a Syrian named Ahmad al Muhammad, born on September 10, 1990, and was allowed to enter Greece on October 3. From there he moved to Macedonia, then Serbia and Croatia, where he registered in the Opatovac refugee camp, the lawmaker said. Eventually, he made his way to Paris, where he was one of three men who blew themselves up at the Stade de France.
He’s not the only one. As Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) explained, “If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation.” That’s true. According to The Express (UK), “An operative working for Islamic State has revealed the terror group has successfully smuggled thousands of covert jihadists into Europe.” Two Turkish refugee-smugglers agreed.
It didn’t take Syrian refugees to launch the risk of Islamic terrorism in France. In 2014, a poll showed that 16 percent of French people had positive attitudes toward ISIS, including 27 percent of French people between ages 18 and 24. According to Ann-Elizabeth Moutet of Newsweek, “This is the ideology of young French Muslims from immigrant backgrounds…these are the same people who torch synagogues.”
Beyond the risk of terrorism, heightened Islamic immigration to Europe has led to increased crime and massive cultural fragmentation as well. Yesterday, The New York Times admitted that Europe has its own no-go zones in Muslim areas; Belgium’s home affairs minister said that the government has no “control of the situation in Molenbeek,” a working-class area of Brussels. That’s been true in France for years, where “semi-autonomous” sectors have become more and more common. Increased Muslim immigration has spelled a significant rise in anti-Semitic crime as well as more crime generally. In Germany, crime rates have skyrocketed as the number of those seeking asylum has risen. In Sweden, Jews have fled certain cities like Malmo altogether over the rising threat of radical Islam; the rate of rape in Sweden has jumped tremendously as well.
So yes, increased Islamic immigration to the West is a major risk.
Which brings us to the reward. What’s the reward for allowing a certain number of Westerners to die, allowing Western welfare systems to be overloaded by poor immigrants, allowing Western culture to be fragmented by Islamic fundamentalism? Avoiding charges of Islamophobia. Today, President Obama explained that proposals by Republicans to house Christian refugees but not Muslim refugees were un-American:
When I hear folks say that maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims, when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who is feeling from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are.
So, to be clear, it’s un-American to accept only Christian refugees from a region of the world where they are routinely persecuted for their religious persuasion, despite the heightened risk of terrorism from Muslim refugees. But it’s perfectly American for the State Department to consider ruling that Christians living under ISIS rule are not victims of an impending genocide, and to insist that the West house, feed, and clothe Muslim refugees. It’s un-American to protect American lives; it’s perfectly American to take in un-vetted refugees of the same general religious persuasion as the terrorists of 9/11 and 7/7 and Paris, without regard to the safety of the citizenry.
While the West churns its guts over Muslim refugees, Muslim countries aren’t doing so. There are fifty Muslim-majority countries all over the globe. Just five Muslim countries have taken in significant numbers of refugees: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. Only Egypt does not share a border with Syria. A huge percentage of refugees entering Europe are doing so not directly from Syria, but through Turkey, which has taken in approximately two million refugees but is housing hundreds of thousands in internment camps. This isn’t rare. For decades, Muslim countries have refused to integrate fellow Muslim refugees, which is why Palestinian Arabs still live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan seventy years after the foundation of the State of Israel. The umma won’t deign to take in fellow Muslims the same way, say, that the Jewish state has taken in and integrated every Jewish refugee population from Russia to Ethiopia.
Nonetheless, President Obama says that morality requires the West to risk its own citizenry to save Muslim refugees without proper background checks and without any distinction between the capacity of Christians and Muslims to integrate into Christian-based societies.
No shock there. After all, President Obama obviously dislikes the West more than he dislikes radical Islam, seeing as he won’t even recognize radical Islam’s existence.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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