{"id":81999,"date":"2015-12-11T15:10:25","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T23:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81999"},"modified":"2015-12-11T15:10:25","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T23:10:25","slug":"ann-sterzinger-why-im-scared-of-widows-orphans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81999","title":{"rendered":"Ann Sterzinger: Why I\u2019m Scared of Widows & Orphans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ann Sterzinger writes<\/a>: There\u2019s a lot of raspberrying and dismissiveness in the debate over whether to let the wave of \u201cSyrian\u201d \u201crefugees\u201d wash up on U.S. shores. In the partisan sandbox-fights to which we tend to reduce even the most serious questions, it\u2019s easy to forget that in a case like this, there is probably a strong moral argument to be made on either side. <\/p>\n

And while I ultimately come down on the side of \u201cGet these nutjobs far, far away from me!\u201d\u2014I continue to subscribe to the Daffy Duck school of pain\u2014each argument in a case like this suffers greatly when it dismisses the opposition out of hand.<\/p>\n

By now we\u2019ve all heard the loudest argument for opening the gates: Barack Obama\u2019s snide little speech in which he informed the GOP that they\u2019re crybullies to sound the tocsin over a pack of harmless widows and orphans. (They may well be crybullies, but not for that.) Never mind that many of the terrorists who have been rocking European civilization are second- or third-generation immigrants.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time Obama has ridden his love-unicorn roughshod over the realities of what Muslims themselves actually think and believe. In his 2009 must-read summary, The Complete Infidel\u2019s Guide to the Koran, Robert Spencer describes how in a 2009 speech Obama \u201cproved\u201d the peacefulness of Islam by cherry-picking a few peaceful-sounding phrases from a Koran passage that\u2019s mostly about violence:<\/p>\n

Obama cited verse 5:32: \u201cThe Holy Koran,\u201d said the President, \u201cteaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.\u201d This sounds peaceful enough, but Obama studiously ignored the next verse (5:33), which mandates punishment for those whom Muslims do not regard as \u201cinnocent\u201d\u2014punishments including crucifixion or amputation of a hand and a foot for those who fight against Allah and Muhammad.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpeace\u201d that Islam promises is less like unicorn turds and more like a Muslim Pax Romana: we\u2019ll have peace when everyone else is subjugated.<\/p>\n

To be fair to this side of the question as a whole, however, one must remark that the welcome-wagon-in-chief has hamstrung himself in his ability to present the case. He\u2019s stuck repeating the weakest arguments\u2014twisting scripture and screeching \u201cLet\u2019s be nice!\u201d\u2014because, if he were to present the best argument for his side, he would have to draw attention to his own foreign policy.<\/p>\n

To wit: while American taxpayers do not owe every foreign human being on Earth an apartment and a welfare check, it could certainly be argued that we have some moral responsibility to open our doors to people whose countries we\u2019ve bombed the shit out of, particularly in proxy wars. (I still hold that it\u2019s valid to bomb ISIS wherever they are on Earth, since we\u2019re for all intents and purposes at war with that entity; but playing chicken with the Russians over Syria\u2019s civil war? Not so much.)<\/p>\n

However, though this argument is perfectly valid, it is trumped by two equally moral counterarguments.<\/p>\n

First, fewer and fewer Americans want anything to do with being the world\u2019s damn policeman anymore. But who listens to the serfs who foot the bill? I\u2019m not willing to be dismembered in my hometown because my government keeps pretending to the rest of the world that we\u2019re a democracy.<\/p>\n

Second, however many stupid things our government might have done in the past, that doesn\u2019t override our imperative to steer it to the right course whenever we see a possibility for doing so.<\/p>\n

And d\u2019ya know what is always the right thing for a government to do? Protecting its own citizens. <\/p>\n

I said it about Gee-dub when he sent young men to die to avenge his father, and I\u2019m saying it about Obama as he prepares to sacrifice his civilians so he can look charitable on the world stage: Could you at least pretend to give a shit about your subjects?<\/p>\n

A government that doesn\u2019t care about the lives of foreign citizens is bad, but considering the overall history of the world, it\u2019s not particularly bad; you could even say it represents a normative dose of human evil.<\/p>\n

But a government that\u2019s just as glib about its own citizens\u2019 lives is completely psychotic.<\/p>\n

Clearly, we need to quit killing Muslims abroad, even if we think we\u2019re doing them some sort of twisted favor; if they want to pretend it\u2019s 700 A.D., that\u2019s their problem. (I\u2019ve argued elsewhere that Islamists would want to kill us even if we weren\u2019t bombing them; as Spencer says, \u201c[Obama] doesn\u2019t seem to have considered that if the Koran mandates jihad against non-Muslims, displays of U.S. goodwill are unlikely to have much effect.\u201d But even if you threw out the ethical question, this is clearly a case of \u201cbetter safe than sorry\u201d . . . and in case you hadn\u2019t noticed, these wars have nuked the federal budget.)<\/p>\n

But if we can\u2019t do that, at least we need to quit importing people who hate us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ann Sterzinger writes: There\u2019s a lot of raspberrying and dismissiveness in the debate over whether to let the wave of \u201cSyrian\u201d \u201crefugees\u201d wash up on U.S. shores. In the partisan sandbox-fights to which we tend to reduce even the most … 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":[139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81999","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=81999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82000,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81999\/revisions\/82000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}