{"id":79972,"date":"2015-11-22T15:39:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-22T23:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=79972"},"modified":"2015-11-22T15:39:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-22T23:39:29","slug":"there-are-serious-unbigoted-reasons-to-be-wary-of-a-flood-of-syrian-refugees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=79972","title":{"rendered":"There Are Serious, Unbigoted Reasons to Be Wary of a Flood of Syrian Refugees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Tuttle writes for National Review Nov. 18, 2015<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians \u2014 29 governors chief among them \u2014 call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement program on the grounds that it might be exploited as a conduit for terrorists, pundits are invoking the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler\u2019s Germany in an effort to soften American hearts. The Washington Post\u2019s Dana Milbank wrote Monday, \u201cThis growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,\u201d while his colleague Ishaan Tharoor contended: \u201cToday\u2019s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939\u2019s German Jewish child.\u201d Meanwhile, a Daily Kos headline shouts: \u201cReplace \u2018Syrian\u2019 with \u2018Jewish\u2019 and we\u2019re back to 1939.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is prima facie nonsense, which should be obvious from the terms being compared: Jews, an ethnic group, with Syrians, a national one. An honest, apples-to-apples comparison would line up German Jews and Syrian Muslims \u2014 the relevant ethnic group within the relevant political entity. But do this, and the failure of the analogy becomes clear.<\/p>\n

The first, and most obvious, difference: There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no \u201cJewish State\u201d establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance. Among Syrian Muslims, there is. The vast majority of Syrian Muslims are not party to these strains of radicalism and violence, but it would be dangerous to suggest that they do not exist, or that our refugee-resettlement program need not take account of them.<\/p>\n

On a related note, the sympathies of Syrian Muslims are more diverse than those of Nazi-era German Jews. A recent Arab Opinion Index poll of 900 Syrian refugees found that one in eight hold a \u201cto some extent\u201d-positive view of the Islamic State (another 4 percent said that they did not know or refused to answer). A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13 percent of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi party.<\/p>\n

Third, European Jews in the early 20th century were more amenable to assimilation than are Syrian Muslims in the early 21st. By the time of the rise of Nazism, Jews had participated in the intellectual and cultural life of Germany for a century and a half \u2014 a life that, despite regional particularities, indisputably fell under the broad banner of Western civilization, in which America participated, too. Moving from Munich to Miami took some getting used to, but you could hear Beethoven in both. Syria stands largely outside of that tradition. For 500 years, Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire. When it collapsed, Syria fell briefly under French rule, eventually gaining independence only to succumb to the dictatorship of the Assads, p\u00e8re et fils. The intellectual, cultural, and political traditions of Syria are not in concert with those of the West, and it would be foolish to think that that does not matter \u2014 especially when combined with the uncertain sympathies noted above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Tuttle writes for National Review Nov. 18, 2015: Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians \u2014 29 governors chief among them \u2014 call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,139,29639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration","category-islam","category-syria"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79973,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79972\/revisions\/79973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}