This is a well-reasoned warning concerning the Muslim migrant crisis. As others have noted, the Good Samaritan helped the man who was waylaid by thieves, but he didn't welcome him into his home.
"Whether or not a particular group of refugees has been infiltrated by ISIS, there remains the fact that many refugees subscribe to the
same general worldview held by members of the Islamic State. After all, they’ve been steeped in the same cultural-religious milieu that produced the terrorists."
Medina—The First Muslim Refugee Resettlement Program
by William Kilpatrick,
Crisis Magazine, December 1, 2015
With all the talk about the Syrian refugees, one point is often overlooked. Much of the debate focuses on the question of whether or not the refugees can be reliably vetted. If they can be certified as one hundred percent terrorist-free, then, presumably, the resettlement can safely proceed.
But even if every terrorist could be excluded from the ranks of the refugees, a problem would remain. Many analysts are concerned that the resettlement program might facilitate the growth of terrorist-tolerant communities in America. By “terrorist-tolerant” I don’t mean that its members are thinking every minute about what they can do to support jihad, but rather that they have come to take for granted things that aren’t assumed in other societies.
Terror, for instance. Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim who grew up in Egypt, puts it
this way:
One of the reasons that the so-called moderate Muslims have become irrelevant … is that over the centuries they have become tolerant of Islamic terrorism and considered it as part of normal life.
“Life under Sharia itself is a life under terror,” observes Darwish. And that daily low-level terrorism accustoms Muslims to view it as something “like a natural disaster or part of life that must be tolerated.”
So, although a Syrian refugee may have no personal taste for terror, he can be surprisingly tolerant of it. A
2007 public opinion poll of Syrians revealed that 75 percent of those polled supported financial aid for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and “Iraqi fighters” (at that time, mostly al-Qaeda). Need it be mentioned that all these groups are designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government? A
more recent poll of 1,365 Syrians found that one out of five considered ISIS to be a positive influence on the country. And living in the West doesn’t seem to change these attitudes. A
2014 opinion poll showed that 27 percent of the French population in the 18-24-year-old demographic supported ISIS. Assuming a random sample, and assuming that the majority of pro-ISIS respondents were Muslim, that would mean that the vast majority of young French Muslims support ISIS.
That kind of supportive environment is a factor that’s often overlooked in the debate over Syrian refugees. As defenders of the resettlement program like to point out, terrorists can get into the U.S. by other means than by mingling with refugees. But once here, they need a network to support them and give them cover. And the network itself can only function if the larger community is willing to look the other way.
Europe is now dotted with such networks—in the Paris suburbs, in the Brussels borough of Molenbeek, in the Neukölln district of Berlin, and in numerous other places. There is
evidence that similar networks already exist in nascent form in the U.S. Beyond the question of whether terrorists will mix in with refugees lies a larger question about the refugee resettlement program. Will it contribute to a strengthening of our society, or will it lead instead to the strengthening and expansion of terror-supportive networks?
