Thoughts on Syria: Part II

This is part II of a three part series on Syria. If you like what I said here (or even if you don't) please check out parts I and III.  


"In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power."
-Bertrand Russell

Remember the fury over the Wall Street bailout and inflation? Or the Obamacare death panels? Or the insistence that we can't allow Africans into the country during the Ebola epidemic? Or the current theme that any action against climate change will cripple our economy?

In yet another example of the fear mongering and partisan pandering inherent in American Democracy, yesterday the Republican party (with the support of some conservative Democrats, including Hawai'i' Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard) passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act. I won't go into the details, because I know that you'll close the browser window, but, if it becomes law it will temporarily halt all refugee resettlement and ultimately add a cumbersome layer of bureaucracy to an already cumbersomely bureaucratic process.

As I wrote about the other day, the UN accepts less than 1% of refugees for resettlement. And then the US takes only a tiny fraction of them after an 18-24 month background check.

Since September 11, 2001-- the US has resettled 748,000 refugees. You know how many of them have committed an act of terrorism against the US? Zero. How many of the attackers in Paris were refugees from Syria? Zero. The Syrian Passport was a fake, and they were all French and Belgian nationals.

The US has accepted 1,500 Syrian Refugees since the civil war began. In comparison, Turkey has taken in 2.2M, Lebanon 1.2M, Jordan 1.4M, Saudi Arabia 100-500K, Iraq 247K, and Germany 200K.

I don't think that anyone who is not running for an election is saying that our Syrian refugee program is too lenient.

So, what if the Republican party wanted to actually do something to limit the chances of terrorism in the US. How about making it so that terrorists can't buy guns? According to the Government Accountability Office: "Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law... Between 2004 and 2014, suspected terrorists attempted to purchase guns from American dealers at least 2,233 times. And in 2,043 of those cases-- 91 percent of the time-- they succeeded."

This insane loophole was highlighted by an al-Qaida operative in 2011 who released a video saying: "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms, you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center... So what are you waiting for?"

Despite widespread support among Democrats, gun safety advocates, and even the Director of the FBI-- the NRA opposes any legislation limiting the rights of terrorists to purchase guns. As the NRA goes, so does the Republican Party. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a measure that would ban guns for those on the FBI's terrorist watch-list.

Yet, instead of gun control, Presidential candidate and Senator Rand Paul thinks it would be a better idea to eliminate all welfare support for resettled refugees from 34 mostly Middle Eastern countries.

My wife is a refugee. She subsisted off of food stamps for her entire childhood. She lived in government sponsored housing until she was eighteen. She went to college with federal aid. And now she pays the government somewhere around $20,000 a year in taxes. She is a proud American who is a productive member of our economy. That's how our system works.

When you cut off aid to refugees you create a second class tier of citizens. When you refuse to integrate those citizens, you create a hotbed of terrorism-- regardless of religion. Which is what is happening across Europe. And is exactly what ISIS wants.

The Intercept recently published a chilling look into the stated strategy of ISIS and Al Qaeda:

The [Charlie Hebdo] attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group [ISIS] said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.

In a 2004 letter to Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, laid out his proposal for provoking such a conflict, calling for terrorist attacks against the Shiite majority population that would lead to a harsh crackdown on the Sunni minority. In such a scenario, his group could then coerce the Sunni population into viewing it as their only protector. “If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war,” Zarqawi wrote, “it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death. 

... Through increasingly provocative terrorist attacks, hostage executions, and videotaped threats, the Islamic State is consciously seeking to trigger a backlash by Western governments and citizens against the Muslim minorities living in their societies. By achieving this, the group hopes to polarize both sides against each other, locking them into an escalating spiral of alienation, hatred and collective retribution. In a such a scenario, the group can later attempt to pose as the only effective protector for increasingly beleaguered Western Muslims.

Yet, what do Republicans (and Tulsi Gabbard) do? They fall right into the trap.

As The Wahington Post reports, Donald Trump "is refusing to rule out extreme measures that include warrantless searches or faith-based identification cards." When asked how his plan differs from that of Nazi Germany requiring Jews to register, he responded, "You tell me."

Speaking of fascism, Presidential Candidate Ben Carson who has repeatedly compared the Obama administration to Nazi Germany is now saying that "you have to reject the tenets of Islam" in order to be President of the United States.

Good thing that Ted Cruz is setting the record straight by reminding Ben Carson that "the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office... The president's faith is between him and God." But Cruz's religious tolerance doesn't stretch much further than the Oval Office. He is advocating that the US only accept Christians from Syria, because, in his words, "there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror."

Huh? As The New York Times reports, "Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims." Or, what about the 4,743 lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan in the name of Protestantism.

We could dismiss these bigoted and unconstitutional claims if these three guys weren't the front runners. But between them, they represent 64% of the Republican electorate. The more inflammatory they get, the higher they rise in the polls. 

Let me pause here.

I want to be clear that I recognize that radical Islam presents an extreme danger to the west. To go one step further, I agree with the words of moralist Sam Harris when he says that "my concern [is] that the political correctness of the Left has made it taboo to even notice the menace of political Islam, leaving only right-wing fanatics to do the job." As he points out, "there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence."*

It is important to recognize the unique danger of extremist Islamic ideology. For example, the Charter of Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party of the Gaza Strip, quotes Muhammad as saying "The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

While we need to condemn the aspects of religious violence in the Koran, we also need to understand that the vast majority of Muslims also reject the extremist tenets of ISIS. 

According to The Washington Institute, only 3% of Egyptians and 5% of Saudi Arabians "expressed a favorable opinion of ISIS." Those numbers aren't too scary.

This, in my opinion, is much more frightening: in one South Carolina poll, 40% of respondents said that "Islam should be illegal in the United States," and 72% said that "A Muslim should not be allowed to be President of the United States." More broadly, a Gallup poll found that 50% of Republicans "Feel a great deal of prejudice against Muslims."

I know that this post is more inflammatory and politically polarizing than I have ever been. However, since I feel strongly that the Muslim community should denounce ISIS and extremist Islamic ideology-- it's equally my role as an American to denounce extremism in our political system. In that same Gallup poll, only 17% of Democrats felt the same level of prejudice. Other than Tulsi Gabbard and a group of other democrats, the SAFE Act that just passed the house was a Republican initiative. I hate to say it, but Hillary Clinton's plan makes her sound like the only adult in the room.

Just like we can't separate the recent terrorist events from the extremists wing of Islam, we also can't separate the nationalistic fear mongering and blatant bigotry from the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

While it's gotten them plenty of votes, none of the GOP fear mongering of the last five years has come true. Obama is not a muslim. The US never experienced rampant inflation after the stimulus. There are no Obamacare death panels. Nobody died of Ebola. Nobody took anyone's guns in Texas. And Syrian Refugees are not going to take over our country. Refusing to accept and integrate refugees into American Society will only widen the divide between East and West while perpetuating the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.

But, it does help Donald Trump.

*Just to be clear, Sam Harris's arguments are fascinating, complex, and very easy to take out of context. He criticizes Catholicism's teachings which enable pedophilia and Christianity for teachings which block stem cell research. And he also says that Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy "are the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They're worse than the Koran. They're worse than any part of the New Testament." Please check out his blog at Samharris.org.