The rabbis don’t bother to argue that this immigration will be good for America. That argument does not come up in their essay. That does not interest them. What does interest them? “Success in dealing with the first wave of immigrants will help build bipartisan support for other refugees from the Middle East to come to America.”
Their rabbinic agenda is to flood America with refugees.
They have no interest in what is good for America.
That they wrap themselves in the mantle of “As rabbis” is obnoxious. Judaism legislates nothing about how gentile countries should handle immigration.
Donald Trump’s proposal for a temporary ban on Islamic immigration is only bizarre if your agenda is to destroy the United States of America. For those who want Americans to be safe, the proposal is common sense.
What is the immigration policy of Orthodox rabbinic groups? This is representative: “Finally, in the area of immigration, Agudath Israel urges that American borders continue to be open to Jewish and other refugees who seek to come to the United States after escaping from oppressive political environments. The United States is a nation of immigrants and has long been distinguished by its generosity toward refugees from all across the globe. It is essential that such generosity continue to be maintained in today’s era of international volatility. Agudath Israel accordingly opposes any efforts to impose caps or quotas on refugees seeking safe haven in the United States. Agudath Israel further supports the provision of welfare benefits to needy non-citizen immigrants.”
They want immigration without limit and welfare without question.
This essay isn’t really about bringing more beleaguered Christians to America. It’s about bringing more Muslims to America, people who will rape, torture and kill us until they eventually succeed in setting off a nuclear weapon and take out American cities.
Why do so many rabbis want to bring more Muslims to America? They have such an addiction to hating white Christian goyim that they don’t care about how many Jews are slaughtered in the process.
By ABRAHAM COOPER and YITZCHOK ADLERSTEIN
Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.
Islamist terror attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have underlined the need for more and better vetting of refugees from the Middle East who seek safety in the U.S. But with tens of thousands pushing at the gate, who should to get first preference?
In our view, as rabbis, any immediate admissions should focus on providing a haven for the remnants of historic Christian communities of the Middle East. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been suffering longer than other groups, and are fleeing not just for safety but because they have been targeted for extinction. In a region strewn with desperate people, their situation is even more dire. Christians (and Yazidis, ethnic Kurds who follow a pre-Islamic religion) have long been targeted by Muslim groups—not only Islamic State, or ISIS—for ethnic cleansing. Churches have been burned, priests arrested.
In the worst cases, Christians have been tortured, raped and even crucified. Mosul, Iraq, which was home to a Christian population of 35,000 a decade ago, is now empty of Christians after an ISIS ultimatum that they either convert to Islam or be executed. In Syria, Gregorios III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, said in 2013 that “entire villages” have been “cleared of their Christian inhabitants.”
Unlike some others, Middle East Christians have nowhere else to go. As a result of turmoil not of their making and beyond their control, these Christians are the region’s ultimate homeless. Should some sort of peace ever return, the likelihood is that maps will be redrawn, carving up the pie among larger ethnic groups. There will be no place for Christians among hostile Muslim populations.
The animosity toward Christians is illustrated by a horrific incident earlier this year off the Italian coast. In April, Italian police investigating events on a boat that had departed from Libya said 12 Christian refugees who were attempting to cross the sea to Europe were thrown overboard by Muslim migrant passengers, and drowned.
The U.S. can do much good for Christian refugees. Their religious heritage establishes an important basis of commonality in the many Christian communities in our country.
When Secretary of State John Kerry announced in September that the U.S. will accept as many as 100,000 refugees by 2017, many of them Syrian, the State Department provided a list of more than 300 agencies in 190 locations that would assist on the local level. Of those agencies, no less than 215 are Christian. It makes sense to play to the strengths of those agencies.
Success in dealing with the first wave of immigrants will help build bipartisan support for other refugees from the Middle East to come to America.
Tragically, present policy does not take into account the uniquely precarious situation of displaced Christians. Instead of receiving priority treatment, Christians are profoundly disadvantaged. For instance, the State Department has accepted refugees primarily from lists prepared by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which oversees the large camps to which refugees have flocked, and where they are registered. Yet endangered Christians do not dare enter those camps.
Notice that the rabbis say nothing about Israel needing to take in these people, only the gentile countries must feel this moral imperative.
COMMENTS POSTED AT WSJ:
* Refugees – It is hard enough for civilized people who Speak English to immigrate. Seems like the government’s reasons for admitting refugees is more for socio-political reasons than humanitarian reasons.
* Why is there so much reluctance to admit Syrian refugees? Because a large majority are Muslim and jihad is a moral obligation for every Muslim. Jihad almost always translates to some of the most inhumane and barbaric behavior ever – as exemplified by recent events in Paris and San Bernardino – with little or no outrage expressed by so called “moderate” Muslims.
My point is that would not be the case with Mideast Christians who morally, ethically, and ideologically have more in common with our western values than Muslim refugees and are even more violently treated / threatened by their mideast Muslim brothers than fellow Muslims. The deliberate persecution of Christians by Muslims should be something we, as a Christian nation, should respond to and act on.
Of course this line of reasoning would simply fall on deaf ears in Obama’s administration that is much more interested in building the dems future voting base than taking rational steps to ensure our national security or protect mideast Christians from extinction. They’d rather leave that to Slovakia that shows more courage as a nation than we do.
* All you have to do is read this:
“Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S. has overshadowed a more legitimate concern regarding religion and immigration: Middle East Christians who are desperate to escape the genocidal campaign against them by Islamic State.”
To know that Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein are liars through omission.
* To be on the fair side. Should the two rabbis present the case to the Israeli government instead of that of the United States?
* “Deserve” is now politically correct newspeak. Everyone on the losing side of most every political/economic/social problem/issue is now “deserving.”
* “Deserve” infers “earn.” How does a Christian “deserve” something by the mere act of living in a location?
* What is bizarre about barring a group of people that contains a real and present threat until we can ascertain how to properly vet them? Isn’t that a) common sense and b) the position of the US government? You undermine the seriousness of your article by gratuitously smearing Trump. Maybe that’s the price of getting in the WSJ. They have had a steady campaign against Trump since he came out against open borders.
* Dear Rabbis, your opening sentence is a head scratcher because the remainder of your column lays out the argument to ban all Mohammedans from entering the U.S. This tolerance of the intolerant is simply baffling.
* Everyone got their panties in a wad over Trump’s proposed moratorium on Muslims entering the US but totally overlooked the US government’s refusal to consider mid-Eastern Christians as targets of Genocide that, among other benefits, gives them some assurance that they can reclaim their property when hostilities are ended.
But now the US government, rather than aiding the mid-Eastern Christians who are being tortured and killed, has joined with its Muslim friends in a total ethnic cleansing of Christians from the region and all we hear from the media and unfortunately, from mainstream pulpits, is silence.
Elections do have consequences.
* “Donald Trump’s bizarre proposal to bar all Muslim immigrants from the U.S.”
Keeping America safe is bizarre? Millions of Americans disagree.
