It’s Time for Honest Talk about Muslim Immigration

[Valin]

National Review:

Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion?

David French

November 30, 2016

 

(Snip)

 

When we survey the American experience since 9/11, two undeniable truths emerge, and it’s past time that we grapple head-on with them. First, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants — no matter their country of origin — are not terrorists. They won’t attack anyone, they won’t participate in terrorist plots, and they abhor terrorism. Some even provide invaluable information in the fight against jihad. That’s the good news.

 

The bad news is the second truth: Some Muslim immigrants (or their children) will either attempt to commit mass murder or will actually succeed in killing and wounding Americans by the dozens. All groups of immigrants contain some number of criminals. But not all groups of immigrants contain meaningful numbers of terrorists. This one does. It’s simply a fact.

 

Moreover, there isn’t an even geographic distribution of terrorists. We don’t have as many terrorist immigrants from Indonesia, India, or Malaysia as we do from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or from the conflict zones in the Middle East. It’s much less risky to bring into the country a cardiologist from Jakarta than a refugee from Kandahar.

 

If the Democrats wish to maintain immigration from jihadist conflict zones, they need to rid their rhetoric of the language of “Islamophobia” and tell the truth. If they want to continue admitting refugees from jihad zones, they need to make the case that meeting the humanitarian needs of an an extremely small fraction of the world’s Muslim refugees is worth the cost of importing a small number of mass murderers. They must make the case that the human toll in America is the price we must pay for national compassion. Of course no Democrat wants a terror attack to occur, but Democrats must understand and acknowledge that under present policies, such attacks will occur — despite our best efforts to stop them.

 

But I’d submit that America can show compassion without opening its borders to an uncertain number of jihadist killers. We can maintain and expand existing safe zones in the Middle East. We can project power to continue to roll back ISIS and provide space for people to return to their homes. We can implement new tests for immigrants and restrict immigration from volatile regions. At the same time, we can avoid paranoia and appreciate the peacefulness and patriotism of the vast majority of our existing Muslim population.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Related

The Wages of Merkel’s Migrant Rethink
Walter Russell Mead
Nov. 30 2016

The German government’s brief, politically disastrous experiment with welcoming mass migration from the Middle East and beyond is coming to an end as the Merkel government looks at the consequences on its public standing. The Financial Times:

(Snip)

 

We’ve said before that the only effective way to deal with mass refugee flows is to have a foreign policy that prevents them; sadly but understandably, the willingness of receiving countries to accommodate refugees declines when the number of refugees and potential refugees spirals up. The refugee lobby, full of good people with good intentions, is fighting this truth of human nature in vain—around the world the doors are closing to refugees as the desperation in places like Syria and Burma grows.

 

The refugee lobby makes things worse when it attacks the “racism”, “Islamophobia” and “xenophobia” of “selfish” publics unwilling to open the doors to refugees on the mass scale that the ineptitude of, for example, U.S. and European policy in Libya and Syria seems to require. But the authors of the human misery and tragedy of the refugees are, in the first place, the evil rulers and cold killers who engage in the brutal warfare that drives people from their homes, and second with the short sighted, inept policy makers who fail to connect the dots and draw the proper conclusions. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Francois Hollande will all face an ugly reckoning as historians come to grips with the unnecessary suffering they failed to address.

 

Meanwhile, the more well intentioned liberals and refugee advocates try to sustain unsustainable levels of migration, the more they feed the fires of the populist revolts they so fear and abhor.........................(Snip)

[Valin]

Getting It Wrong About Islam: Check Your Secular Privilege, Liberal America
Zouhair Mazouz
December 01, 2016

“Don’t say that. It’s racist.”

I froze for a second. Although every cell in my body was urging me to respond, I could not utter a single word.

I had just been accused of racism by a liberal. As an American human rights activist, she had a respectable track record of advocacy. In her free time, she volunteered at Planned Parenthood. Her stances on gender equality, racial justice, individual liberties and religious freedom were unmistakably progressive.

But because I criticized the misogynistic treatment of women in predominantly Muslim societies, I was accused of racism. Against my own people.

(Snip)

It takes a certain amount of hubris to frame the religious issues of the Middle East through the lens of America’s culture wars. Such a tendency is even more disconcerting when displayed by American liberals, people who should know better. They would not want their country to have an official religion, as evidenced by their successive lawsuits against public school prayer. They would never compromise on a woman’s right to choose, now that Roe V. Wade is the law of the land. Their very ideological platform is rooted in standing with society’s underdogs: underrepresented ethnic groups, religious minorities, LGBTQs and free thinkers. Yet when Middle Eastern dissidents advocate for the same fundamental rights, liberals would rather not hear it. Why the inconsistency?

 

Middle Eastern expats eager to advocate for secular societies back home have no choice but to seek freedom of speech. When our liberal allies in America try to silence our plea, they imply that the Middle East does not deserve the same rights they enjoy here. Interpreting our struggles purely from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy is borderline ethnocentric. Surely, that is not the liberal thing to do.