Crying for ‘New Americans’ from the Lands of Jihad
And a lawsuit tries to stop Trump’s executive order barring refugees from terrorist hotbeds.
The executive order by which President Trump aims to temporarily stop the issuance of visas to “immigrants and non-immigrants” from seven hotbeds of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and Africa says, in the plainest of English, that “in order to protect Americans,” it is vital to “ensure that those admitted to this country” clearly “support the Constitution,” “do not bear hostile attitudes toward [the U.S.] and its founding principles,” do not “place violent ideologies over American law,” do not “engage in acts of bigotry or hatred,” and do not seek to “oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.”
If Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were to have uttered these same words, the Left would be lauding their sober eloquence. But with things being as they are, the Left is instead apoplectic with both rage and torment. The normally cold-blooded political assassin, Senator Charles Schumer of New York, was reduced – by what he called Trump’s “mean-spirited and un-American” action – to sniveling like a little girl who’d just dropped her favorite doll into a muddy puddle. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said there were “tears in the eyes” of the Statue of Liberty.
But the Left’s reaction has consisted of much more than tears. As Aaron Klein reports, immigration lawyers from four leftist organizations have banded together to file a lawsuit aimed at blocking President Trump’s executive order. The first is the Immigration Legal Services clinic at Yale Law School, which represents refugees from more than twenty countries around the world. The second is the ACLU, which denounces the “destructive” and “discriminatory” intent of Trump’s “Muslim ban wrapped in a paper-thin national security rationale.” The third is the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), whose executive director has characterized Trump’s order as a “heartless” and “discriminatory” policy that “turns its back on some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.” And the fourth is the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), which boasts that its own efforts in 2013 helped bring about a twelve-fold increase in the number of visas issued to newcomers from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The mindset of IRAP – a typical “blame-America-first” operation – is emblematic of the worldview that animates each of the four organizations involved in the suit.
After having initially emphasized “the clear obligations of … the United States in particular to provide relief to those who were unintended victims of the Iraq War,” IRAP has since expanded its list of beneficiaries to include also refugees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, “Palestine,” Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen.
Would an influx of migrants or refugees from those particular countries be a positive development for America? The good news is that we have plenty of information about the types of people we’d be bringing in. The bad news is that the Left couldn’t care less.
We know, for instance, from voluminous data provided by the Pew Research Center, that in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and “Palestine,” 84 to 99 percent of adults fervently believe that divinely ordained Sharia – as opposed to any “man-made” legal construct like the U.S. Constitution – should serve as the official law of the land. In other words, importing newcomers from these places means that we would be receiving people who embrace Sharia principles like the call to jihadism, the quest for Islamic supremacy across the globe, the rejection of free speech and conscience in matters related to religion, institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslim “infidels,” and brutal punishments such as beatings, amputations, and death-by-stoning for sins like theft, adultery, the consumption of alcohol, and converting to another faith.
Sharia likewise entails the denial of many civil rights and liberties to women. Thus in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, “Palestine,” and Egypt, the percentage of Muslims who “completely or mostly” agree with the notion that a wife should always obey her husband ranges between 85 and 94 percent. How would that reality play among the “pussy hat” brigade that swarmed Washington a few days ago?
In those same five countries, 52 to 78 percent of Muslims believe that honor killings can be a justifiable means of punishing someone for engaging in pre- or extra-marital sex. In some Muslim countries, substantial proportions of the population (i.e., 40 to 50 percent) consider polygamy and suicide bombings to be morally acceptable, while scarcely half hold an unfavorable view of the monstrous, bloodthirsty savages of Al-Qaeda. Would there be something noble or beneficial about importing into our country a large number of people who hold these opinions and values?
There are also very significant economic issues to consider. What happens, for instance, when refugees to a given country instantly become dependent upon taxpayer support, perhaps for the rest of their lives? Has the Left learned nothing from the experience of Europe? Of the 163,000 Middle Eastern migrants who came to Sweden as asylees in 2015, fewer than 500 – or about three people per thousand – ever found a job. And of the 1 million Middle Eastern refugees who entered Germany in 2015, fewer than 100 – or about one person per ten-thousand – ever made it into the work force. Are numbers like these acceptable to a nation with a $20 trillion fiscal operating debt and $220 trillion in unfunded liabilities already casting a dark, menacing shadow over future generations?
The Left is incapable of factoring such realities into its thinking. It only understands American oppression and exploitation on the one hand, and Muslim victimization on the other. Thus we see the pathetic spectacle of NILC executive director Marielena Hincapié comparing the Muslim populations of present-day terrorist breeding grounds, to the helpless Jews who tried to flee genocide in Europe during World War II. “It would serve the president well to remember that our country’s past indifference and inaction led to the senseless killings of thousands of Jews who sought unsuccessfully to flee persecution in Nazi Germany,” she says, complaining that Trump’s executive order “attempts to punish people based purely on where they’re from and what they believe.”
And that, in a nut shell, is the leftist worldview on full display: We’re not supposed to notice – or even care – what people actually believe about life, death, law, violence, and civility when they arrive in the United States. We’re supposed to simply roll the proverbial dice and have faith that the magic of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” will somehow resolve things happily for everyone involved, and that the lion shall inevitably lie down with the lamb.
