Fox News: The son of Holocaust survivors, Harry Maryles tells stories of his father hiding out in underground bunkers and his mother living off food scraps in a Polish forest for years to avoid the clutches of Hitler’s henchmen.
So Maryles is in a unique position to push back against a rising narrative from those claiming Americans fearful of accepting Syrian refugees are repeating the “jingoistic” mistakes of a country that rejected Jewish asylum seekers prior to World War II.
“No Jew would have come in disguised as a peace-loving individual and then joined a sleeper cell and become a suicide bomber,” Maryles told FoxNews.com on Thursday. “It was a different situation. Now you have situations where [terrorists] will do anything to achieve their goals. And keeping out innocent people is part of the price you pay.”
Maryles, 69, who is retired from a Chicago dental laboratory business, said he is “torn” when he sees the Syrian refugees who have fled their country’s civil war and the expanding ISIS caliphate.
“How could you not want to help?” Maryles said.
But Maryles also recognizes the risk that Islamists have infiltrated the refugee’s ranks, and he questions the wisdom of the Obama administration’s plan to shrink the vetting period from at least 18 months – while at the same time increasing the number of refugees accepted into the U.S. five-fold, to 10,000 in 2016.
“The problem is you now have a situation where people of similar backgrounds and similar looks can easily come in with these refugees and create the kind of problems that we saw in the Paris terror attacks,” Maryles said.
