How Many Westerners Will Die to Make #RefugeesWelcome?

How many Westerners will leftists allow to die in order to achieve their utopian vision of a multicultural world without borders?

That’s the question of the day as leftists from country to country declare that a few days after 129, people were slaughtered wholesale in France, and the day after two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Paris, the West should refrain from “overreacting” to the threat of radical Islam.

President Obama has suggested that only bigotry would motivate conservatives to shut the door to unvetted Syrian Muslim refugees; Hillary Clinton has suggested the same. Today, the White House launched a #RefugeesWelcome hashtag campaign. At the Brookings Institute website, Jeremy Shapiro writes that we must be careful not to “overreact” to the Paris attacks; Secretary of State John Kerry says people “shouldn’t be hysterical” about the Syrian Muslim refugee issue. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio explains that closing our borders to Syrian Muslim refugees would grant “terrorists a victory over our democracy,” as though American democracy depends on importing hundreds of thousands of people who do not share Western democratic values; Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson avers that by accepting Muslims, even radical ones, we might westernize our enemies.

Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande said that the country would accept 30,000 Muslim refugees over the next two years, stating that it was France’s “humanitarian duty…We have to reinforce our borders while remaining true to our values.”

Underlying all of this is a barely-concealed sense of blitheness about what just happened in Paris – or, for that matter, what has happened on American soil on 9/11, or at Fort Hood, or in Boston, or in Chattanooga, or in Garland, Texas. The pseudo-sophisticates enjoy pointing out that you are statistically far more likely to die in a car accident than at the hands of Islamic terrorists – neglecting to mention, of course, that there are actual societal upsides to millions of people driving, while there are no upsides with regard to importing radical Muslims. These same pseudo-sophisticates swoon to President Obama’s smarmy “if can save just one life” language promoting full-scale gun seizures.

But the idea is that we should focus our ire on the issues that actually matter: issues like climate change. As Paul Krugman wrote yesterday in The New York Times, terrorists simply want to “sow panic,” not destroy Western civilization. He sneered, “[Terrorism] isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris…the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire.” We should worry more about such overwrought responses than the actual murder of human beings – and we should worry more about climate change than both: “Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.”

Or perhaps we ought to focus on domestic non-Islamic gun-owners instead, as per Brian Beutler of the nearly-defunct The New Republic: “There are many more armed loons in the US than committed jihadis. Being scared of the latter, but not the former, is revealed bigotry.” Or perhaps we ought to be frightened of the National Rifle Association, according to the same New York Daily News editors who wrote yesterday that we ought not curb Syrian Muslim immigration in any way. Or perhaps we should simply treat terrorism maturely, you see, not like we did Ebola, as NBC News states.

Of course, there is just one hold-up here: Islamic terrorists do kill people. They kill people in the West. It’s not just Islamic terrorists, either – mass immigration of Muslims into Europe has dramatically increased crime rates ranging from hate crimes to rape. And unlike gun ownership – a right benefitting millions of American citizens since the founding – entry to the United States is not a universal right, particularly based on a general philosophical background that rarely meshes with American ideals. President Obama’s protestations that we “vet” those who enter the country reeks of falsehood. He refuses to vet those pouring across our Southern border, calling it xenophobic, then ignoring the corpses of the Kate Steinles; he refuses to label Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism rather than workplace violence when it does take place on American soil. Islamic terrorists have entered the United States via naturalization, lawful permanent residency, illegally crossing America’s borders, student visa, tourist visas, business visas, fake passports, and yes, refugee status.

No, we don’t have control over our immigration system, and no, Obama can’t truthfully promise that we do. But he will nonetheless, because after all, what are a few American lives compared to open borders ideals that prize multiculturalism above assimilation into Americanism?

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.