With the news that at least one of the terrorists who attacked Paris on Friday evening held a (possibly fraudulent) Syrian passport and had claimed refugee status in Greece, USA leaders are beginning to protest the planned admission of as many as 100,000 refugees into the United States by the end of 2017.
Advertisement
Obama says the people fleeing Syria are the ones that are more harmed by terrorism. As The Washington Post’s Abby Phillip documented, more than a dozen governors joined Jindal on Monday in trying to keep Syrian refugees from their states.
“Some of these people are people who have suffered to horrors of war, they’re women, they’re orphans, they’re children who have suffered at the hands of ISIL”, Rhodes said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for the terror group. President Barack Obama’s administration has said they would accept 10,000 of the more than four million refugees from Syria. Cruz has applied a “religious test” to judge which refugees to admit, in the words of the White House, telling reporters across SC this weekend that he would admit all persecuted Christians to the USA but no persecuted Muslims. She wouldn’t disclose the religion of her family members who she says were turned away from the embassy, but she acknowledged that a few of her family members were, in fact, Muslim.
In light of widespread fears that terrorists may be hiding among those seeking admittance to the United States – worries prompted by discovery of a recent migrant among the Paris suicide bombers – US officials need to tighten those review standards, not loosen them to meet an artificial numerical goal.
Ben Carson, meanwhile, said on Fox News that President Obama’s move to allow Syrian refugees in the country amounted to a “suspension of intellect”.
French President Francois Hollande said Monday the Paris attacks were planned in Syria and organized in Belgium. “It takes nearly a year for a refugee to be processed into the United States”. The Texas Republican announced on Monday that he would introduce legislation that would bar Muslims from Syria from entering the United States.
Obama, while at the G-20 meeting in Turkey, also not-so-subtly spoke about the efforts to keep Syrian Muslims out of the country when he said, “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion”. If they had closed the borders decades ago, they might have avoided this attack… “We shall be Warriors who inflict disgusting numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace”.
Asked on Tuesday to name the best and worst foreign policy decisions from then-President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush said “both relate to Iraq”. On this they should follow his example – it was the right one.
Advertisement
“If my father were part of a theocratic and political movement like radical Islam that promotes murdering anyone who doesn’t share your extreme faith or forcibly converting them, it would make ideal sense”, he said. It was the right impulse. We don’t have the databases to vet them past. And we don’t feed that kind of notion that somehow Christians and Muslims are at war. It’s not that ISIS is less apt to kill their fellow Muslims, but that its leaders seem to put a premium on wiping out Christianity in the territory under their control – much as Hitler was a menace to all but was particularly intent on eliminating Jews.
