He can’t conceive that there might be any other perspective but his own. Any other viewpoint is bigoted and racist.
From the WP comments section:
* Maybe it’s because no one thinks or ever thought that the Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union would include, embedded among them, fanatics intent on causing harm in the US?
* The naive and far leftist position expressed by the author is not shared by me, the Russian Jew living in America or most of my ex-countrymen. The person who wrote this nonsense is not a “refugee” – because he came here strictly for economical reasons and very likely has nothing to do with “Jewishness” either. So, no wonder he draws parallels between him and (in their majority) Muslim immigrants who are trying to get to the US for strictly economical reasons.
* Perhaps, they appreciate living without Muslim troublemakers.
* Ummm…Maybe because Russian Jewish refugees don’t blow things up and machine-gun people?
* Israel has a land border with Syria but has taken no Syrian refugees.
All the while canvassing for world Jewry to settle in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
The reason: Syrian refugees fail the religion text.
And other reasons as well similar to that used about Jews prior to WWII trying to flee Nazi Germany.
Of course, our other great ally, Saudi Arabia, has also taken no refugees.
* History is important, but don’t base your projected stock returns on the past performance, as they say at every brokerage firm. What we have today is that the majority of “refugees” are young males who are avoiding the fight for their own country, who are expecting free handouts, and get upset when they don’t get them. Do you really expect them to integrate into our society and build up our country? If you are – you are very naive.
* Islam preaches that all Jews are worthy of death. It teaches the same about other Muslims who are not the right kind of Muslims. It is a violent religion based on violence, ordering violence and condoning violence. This is the problem. It is not simply being biased or prejudiced to worry about Muslim influence. Nothing said about Islam and its followers is any worse than what Islam and its followers say about it. As the old saying goes, “It’s in the book”. If you don’t believe it, go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of the Koran.
* To paraphrase an classic Soviet joke:
A dying Jewish grandfather gathered his children and grandchildren around his bed to hear his last words. “Children,” he said “Above all, you must protect the Syrian Refugees from extermination.” “But grandpa…why the Syrians,” the puzzled children asked. “Because,” he replied, “when they finish dealing with the Syrians, we’re next.”
* It is ironic that the Syrian refugees are compared to Jewish refugees. The former come from a culture that is virulently anti-semitic. The author of the article would get a real education if he initiated conversations with these refugees to find out what they think about Jews. In fact, it is less than 70 years ago that the ancient Jewish community of Syria was wiped out, such that essentially not a single Jew is left living in that country today. My fear is that the majority of these refugees, like Milton’s Lucifer, cannot escape purgatory, in their case the purgatory of hatred, by coming here, because like Lucifer, they carry their purgatory within. It is instructive that Europe is presently being emptied of its remaining Jews, who are now fleeing persecution at the hands of that continent’s recent and not so recent muslim immigrants.
* For Jews in America (native born, naturalized, refugee, etc.), here is the most important reason to object to the Syrian refugee program: For whatever the percentage of Syrian refugees who may be __________ , they are most likely 100% anti-Semitic, and that is reason enough for Russian Jews — or any Jews — to limit their number.
* Huge difference between Russian Jewish refugees and so-called Syrian refugees. The Jewish refugees from Russia can actually be vetted and we can be assured that they are who they say they are but the Syrian ones cannot. There is no way to ensure that Syrian refugees have legit documents and are who they say they are. Just because they aren’t already on a watch list, doesn’t mean that they aren’t a terrorist. Russian Jews are being persecuted for their religion in Russia. Syrian Muslims aren’t being persecuted for their religion in Syria. The only ones in Syria being persecuted and systematically exterminated are the Christians and other minority religions including Jews and yet few of those people have been let into this country – it’s almost exclusively Muslims who aren’t being persecute for their religion.
Jews aren’t trying to attack the U.S., whereas radical Muslim extremists are and want to topple our government. The Jewish faith encourages women to be educated and doesn’t treat them like property.
* Why the lack of Jewish sympathy? Maybe its because the Syrians and Iraqis were among the biggest Jews hating and anti Israel people in the Middle East. It’s rather ironic that people such as the Syrians, who were violently against Jewish refugees coming to Palestine, now are seeking refuge in the West.
* A teacher at a Muslim faith school in France has quit his job, writing in a leading newspaper that the establishment was riddled with anti-Semitism.
Philosophy teacher Sofiane Zitouni wrote in left-leaning daily Libération on February 5 that the Averroès Lycée (high school) in the northern French city of Lille was a hotbed of “anti-Semitism, sectarianism and insidious Islamism”.
* The criminal activity by the so called Russian Jewish immigrants is astronomical. They are even destroying the other country they all immigrated to….
Ilya Lozovsky writes for the Washington Post:
I am a Russian-born American Jew, and this week some of my fellow escapees from the Soviet Union — there are around 800,000 of us in the United States — have broken my heart. With the indifference many of us have expressed toward the plight of Syrian refugees, we’re breaking faith with our values and forgetting our history.
By and large, the American Jewish community has been on the right side of history on the question of Syrian refugees. Recognizing the obvious humanity of the hundreds of thousands fleeing the twin horrors of the Islamic State and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, American Jews have remembered that, barely a generation ago, our own people were unwelcome on these shores — and that, in many cases, inhospitality meant death. It’s no wonder that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which typically does not take positions on specific policies, has publicly urged Americans to remember this ugly history as we wrestle with the latest crisis.
As the museum’s Cameron Hudson explained, “we have a mandate to be the voice that the Jews of the 1930s did not have.”
But in the ex-Soviet corner of Jewish American life, the picture looks different. With growing despair, I have fought on Facebook this week with a parade of Mishas, Sergeis, Galinas and Julias — individuals who share my background. In their opposition to President Obama’s proposal that Americans accept 10,000 Syrian refugees (even as countries with fewer resources, like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, take in hundreds of thousands) they’ve seldom bothered to hide their prejudiced justifications.
I suppose I hoped that the shared experiences of my fellow Soviet exiles would serve as some kind of inoculation against bigotry. I remember reading the brilliant “Maus” as a child and, perhaps beyond anything else, being shocked by the sequence in which the narrator’s father, a Holocaust survivor, refuses to pick up a black hitchhiker. The concept of a racist Holocaust survivor made no sense to me then. Of course, I was young and naïve — I understand now that suffering does not necessarily inspire empathy for others.
But shouldn’t our experience count for more? We, too, were refugees. Unlike our American cousins who’ve been here for generations, we know what it means to have to leave your homeland. For many of us, the words “visa” and “green card” still hold emotional, almost totemic significance. Even now, over 25 years after my own (relatively painless) immigration, these words bring forth a reverential shudder. It was in this bureaucratic language that our futures were written.
So it has been wrenching to see my people react with such a startling lack of empathy. Many have called it insulting to compare Jewish and Syrian waves of immigration. The Syrians are not like us, they say. They are too poor, too fanatical. “Do they have a culture of contributing to society or taking from it?” one Facebook commenter asked, as if one’s worth as a human being is not a given, and must be earned. Never mind that many European Jews turned away from the United States during the Holocaust — particularly those with Eastern European origins — would also have been poor, religious and relatively uneducated.
Moreover, questioning Syrians’ ability to assimilate to American society overlooks the perennial debate over assimilation that all immigrant communities face — including our own.
I’ve never felt as helpless, indignant or exasperated with my people as I have as this debate has progressed. I’ve heard Syrian refugees described as savages, animals and roaches. I’ve seen Jews who I know have Holocaust survivors in their families, perhaps still living, use this language — the language, yes, of fascism — without any sense of self-awareness. As Jews, we ought to know, and feel viscerally in our guts and bones, which way that road lies.
After I posted my dissent from this ugly trend, one commenter on my Facebook page objected, saying, “There is nothing racist about not wanting Syrian refugees here.” Perhaps sensing that some qualification was necessary, he added: “I mean, it’s ‘racist’ in the same sense as being afraid to go to a high crime and predominantly black area at night. … it’s driven by reasonable fear and common sense.” Would a high crime white area make him feel any safer?
This attitude is not uncommon. A quick scroll through the Russian Jews Facebook page, where a picture of Obama is captioned with “leader” of ISIS, and where blanket comparisons are made between Muslims and Nazis, is sadly instructive.
This racism that is all too common among Jews of Soviet origin is a painful topic — seldom discussed openly, but commonly acknowledged. Current events have brought it to the surface. Many of my American Jewish friends have noted (in private) that Russian Jews, particularly older generations, seem, well, un-liberal. In Israel, too, the community of Soviet émigrés — a large and powerful block of voters — leans hard to the right. Their views are aptly expressed by former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a Soviet-born politician, who has called for compulsory loyalty oaths for all Israeli citizens and openly supported Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There’s no particularly Jewish reason for these attitudes. The Soviets failed at creating Homo Sovieticus — a new species of human dedicated to communism and destined for global domination — but even now, 25 years after the empire’s fall, the legacy of growing up in a paranoid, undemocratic society remains. And, given the path Russia has trod since 1991, I suspect these views will be with us for years, perhaps generations, to come.
