Cherries and Refugees

How about a bowl of cherries, maybe some nice, tasty bing or black cherries? It will be delicious – there is only one cockroach there. What? You don't want to eat those cherries? The vast majority of them will be great, surely you won't hold the whole bowl responsible for one little cockroach.

Now something similar. How about if we allow refugees from Syria into our country. They need help, there is no doubt of that, nor can we doubt that we have the resources to help them. The majority will almost certainly be grateful to us and not harm us. I'm sure you see the problem. Like one cockroach among the cherries, a few bad actors can poison the whole. Unlike the cockroach, however, those bad actors are not easily identifiable. The fanatic wing of Islam is very good at deception, and even claims religious grounds for lying and deceit. Any terrorists among the genuine refugees will pretend to be actually fleeing death or persecution in their home country, and we have no records of their previous lives. We cannot know who they are – until they take action against us.

This problem is not confined to France, it has happened right here. Fort Hood, the World Trade Center, the Boston Marathon, all have seen Islamic terror; and the perpetrators at the Boston Marathon were supposedly refugees, here for their own safety. Michele Malkin, in her column of 16 Nov 2015, lists several other refugees who used their status to commit murder and other crimes here.

The sad fact is that there are terrorists in this world, most of them fanatic Muslims. The fact that most Muslims disagree with those terrorists mitigates their danger not at all. Indeed, the more moderate Muslims provide a population wherein the fanatics can hide – and hide they will. The terrorist leaders have both both the motivation and the skill to put “sleepers” among the real refugees.

Can we protect ourselves while helping avoid a humanitarian crisis? Yes! There is no reason refugees have to come to our country. Instead, we can and should find a place closer to their home and provide temporary help there. The mid-east has lots of areas populated lightly if at all. The refugees are already accustomed to the the climate and could survive in temporary housing, or even tents. We could supply them for a limited time, with the understanding that they must, themselves, seek a more permanent solution. We should also pressure governments in the area to help them. That part of the world is occupied by governments that benefit greatly from oil money, there is no reason those rich governments cannot help the people in their area.

We must pursue a solution that does not bring potential terrorists to our shores.