Jesse Berney writes for Rolling Stone:
GOP Politicians Rejecting Refugees Sound Like Racist Internet Trolls
When our elected officials start spouting rhetoric like that found in the ugliest corners of the Internet, watch out.
White supremacists didn’t like my suggestion that we open our borders to Syrian refugees. After that piece ran on RollingStone.com Saturday, I was flooded with messages on Twitter calling me a “retard,” “moron” and “faggot.” When they found out I was Jewish, I was a “lying kike motherfucker.”
Those were the open extremists, of course, the ones who put hashtags like #WhiteGenocide in their Twitter bios; I saw at least one Hitler photo as an avatar. But whether they were open with their Nazi sympathies or more subtle, one thing was clear: The white-rights crowd does not want Syrian refugees – refugees who are fleeing the very kind of terrorism we saw in Paris last week – to be allowed into the United States. They expressed, in no uncertain terms, that they oppose allowing foreign – and brown! – refugees to come to Europe and America, and they’re using the fear of terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks to spread their racist message.
Nothing they said was surprising. This was the worst the Internet has to offer, after all.
What may be more surprising is how many U.S. politicians are now saying things that sound frighteningly close to that ugly rhetoric.
It is now the mainstream position of the Republican Party that we should immediately stop accepting refugees because of the dangers of terrorism. Former Arkansas governor and B-team presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has even suggested we “close the borders,” as though ISIS is sneaking over the Detroit River from Canada.
Republican governors all over the country are announcing they won’t allow refugees to be resettled in their states – a power they don’t actually have. Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, which has the largest Muslim population in the country, said “our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.” Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley tweeted, “We refuse Syrian refugees” because he “will not stand complicit to a policy that places the citizens of Alabama in harm’s way.” (Because I’m sure ISIS had imminent plans to attack Birmingham.)
What the West is importing isn’t some kind of Saudi Arabia in its midst. It’s importing a permanent underclass plagued by the same kind of social dysfunctions we see among many non-white minorities in the United States.
In Sweden for example, violent crime is “soaring.”
Forty years ago, 421 rapes were reported to the police in Sweden annually. By 2010, according to a BBC report, police recorded the highest number of offences — about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants — of any force in Europe. That was the second highest in the world — surpassed only by Lesotho in southern Africa.
In 2014, according to the Gatestone Institute, a respected American think tank, the number of rapes had risen to 6,620, an increase of 1,472 per cent since 1975.
In August, a double murder in an Ikea store in Vasteras, a small city in central Sweden, sent shockwaves through the nation. The victims were ethnic Swedes, 55-year-old Carola Herlin and her 28-year-old son, Emil. Their attacker was a 36-year-old Eritrean migrant who confessed to the random killings, apparently carried out with knives seized from the store’s kitchenware department.
[Sweden is seen as Europe’s most liberal nation, but violent crime is soaring and the Far Right is on the march, by Sue Reid, Daily Mail, November 13, 2015]
How many of these criminals are Muslims? Probably a majority are nominal Muslims who may even go to the mosque once in a while. But truly devout? There’s no way to be sure, but probably a small number. However, in terms of their catastrophic impact on Swedish society, they are almost as harmful as an ISIS sympathizer who spends his days brooding on the injustices of the Crusader West.
What Europe is importing is a permanent underclass. Islam is a complicating factor because, like in American prisons, it can provide an ideological justification explaining the failure of this underclass as the fault of “discrimination” and “religious oppression.” Occasionally, some degenerate will turn his life around by becoming a more devout Muslim, like Ibrahim Abdeslam did. And as the denizens of this underclass are now sufficiently numerous they cannot be tracked, the minority of terrorists now have the “sea” they can swim in, as Mao famously said of guerrillas.
For the members of this underclass, we have to hope they remain parasites, instead of becoming murderers. But they never actually provide a benefit to Europe. Assume Ibrahim Abdeslam had never become a terrorist. Instead, pretend he stayed at home doing drugs all day and mooching off Europeans like he did before. Would the Republic still have benefited in any way from his presence?
More to the point, why is it so important Europeans import millions more parasites just like him?
Mark Krikorian: “Each resettled refugee costs as much as helping 12 refugees in their home region.”
“Idiot heir to Target fortune wants to make Minnesota one big target.”
