After the November 13th terrorist attacks on Paris, many Facebook users added a French flag to their profile picture. The reason I didn't was simple: in January of this year the Islamic terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, and the French learned nothing from it. The French continued to follow the European Union's open border policy, they continued to allow "refugees" in to their country, and they allowed the Muslims already in their country to remain. As the old saying goes: "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
Je ne suis pas Charlie.
President Obama wants to resettle 10000 "refugees" over the next year into our country. Most governors have stated that they would not accept Syrian "refugees", but a few, like Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf, welcome them with open arms. Well, that's not quite true: Wolf will not allow the "refugees" to live in his house or in the Governor's Mansion. He will not be paying for their expenses out of his own pocket. It will therefore be more accurate to say that Wolf is welcoming the "refugees" with other people's open arms and open pocketbooks.
This is the first of many problems with "refugee" resettlement: proponents have no "skin in the game". They play fast and loose with other people's safety, lives, and money.
Those in favor of admitting "refugees" could (if they had a sense of history) point to the 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner whose captain attempted to smuggle 900 Jews out of Nazi Germany only to be turned away by the United States. The Jews were returned to European countries that were soon conquered by the Nazis. Those who use this argument conveniently ignore the fact that Jews are not known for practicing Sharia law, nor beheading people, nor hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings.
Proponents of resettlement further claim that those "refugees" would be vetted - something that FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said would be "challenging".
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders simply continue to wear their rose-colored blindfolds, refusing to name the problem, or claiming that global warming is the cause of Islamic terrorism. Republican presidential candidates aren't doing much better - Ted Cruz is proposing a religious test, as if that would be any more reliable than the background checks that Comey and Clapper discredit. Most damning of all is the answer given by Donald Trump and Ben Carson: monitor the Muslims and their mosques. I'll get to them in a second.
Even if there were some way of determining that a "refugee" was never, is not now, and will never become a terrorist, this is not enough. The reason why it is not sufficient is that it is simply impossible for said "refugees" to check their Islamism at the door.
Religious faith is by nature the most fundamental set of beliefs that one can have. It is how a believer views the world, and is how the believer judges himself as well as the other people, things, and events in that world. It colors everything about them. It is for this reason that people who adopt a faith out of convenience appear so phony, and why it is simply not possible for an individual to have a "religion d'jour."
At this point, some people might start swapping verses from the Koran or the Hadith, but those quotes are just the trees getting in the way of the forest. The faith is the cause, and it is the consequences of that faith that are at issue.
What are the consequences for changing faiths in an Islamic country? What is the punishment for being gay or lesbian in an Islamic country? When a man rapes an Islamic woman, which one is held responsible? This is what Obama, Wolf, and the various aid agencies are bringing into our country. They're not just admitting "refugees", they are admitting the rationalizations for savagery that come along with them, rationalizations that made them "refugees" in the first place.
When you have a population of savages, you need a police state to keep them in check. This is why the "Arab Spring" was and is so disastrous. This is why Trump's and Carson's proposals to monitor Muslims and their mosques are so disappointing: they are following the usual politician's line of having the government solve a problem that was itself created by the government. The only reason Trump and Carson are as popular as they are is their "anti-politician" positions.
The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. Our government is not the world's policeman, or the world’s babysitter, or the world's enlightener of savages. By allowing the "refugees" in, Obama and Wolf are defaulting on their jobs as head of their respective governments.
If they were indeed doing their job, they would understand the following: a potential immigrant to this country should only be granted admittance if it is in our best interest, and sowing the ideological seeds of barbarism in our own land is certainly not in our best interest. Continuation of the surveillance state is not in our best interest, either. Having savages in our country pits our freedom against our safety from them. Whether the immigrant is a "refugee" is irrelevant. What is relevant is this: you can take the Muslim out of the Caliphate, but you can't take the Caliphate out of the Muslim.
NOTE: as I was finishing this essay, Muslims were in the process of killing people in San Bernardino. Does it matter whether the perpetrators were "refugees"?
