“Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America,” Obama said of Republicans. “At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”
If Barack Obama wants to know why there is such widespread and visceral opposition to his plan to bring thousands of Syrian refugees into our country, he needs to take a good long look in the mirror. The kind of outright contempt for the vast majority of the American people expressed in his statement above is one of the specific reasons that he is facing such widespread opposition.
Let’s start with why these Syrians are refugees in the first place: They are being savagely attacked and brutalized by the most hardcore and vicious Islamists in the world, who are now organized into an army and quasi-government calling itself ISIS. And the rise of ISIS can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama.
Yes, I said it. Barack Obama’s policies are responsible for the rise of ISIS.
When Obama took office in January 2009, the war in Iraq was largely won, and the country was stable. American forces remained in Iraq to maintain that stability while we trained the Iraqis to be able to provide their own security. But Obama withdrew our forces for crass political reasons well before that mission was completed. And the result is that many Saddam Hussein alumni were able to collude with others of like mind to create ISIS and ultimately take over wide swaths of Syria and Iraq and subject them to fascist governance not this widely seen since the defeat of the Nazis.
If Obama had followed the counsel of his military advisers (and of common sense) and kept our forces in Iraq until the training mission was accomplished, ISIS never would have had the opportunity to coalesce in the first place.
So in a very real way, the Syrian refugee crisis is a crisis of Obama’s making – and I believe that on some level most Americans instinctively know it.
The American people have also seen how the bad guys throughout the world have been emboldened by Obama’s weakness and refusal to exert American leadership. Whether it was his declaring a red line in Syria if Assad used chemical weapons and then refusing to enforce that red line when Assad did so or his capitulation to Russia when it annexed the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine, everyone knows that Obama has no backbone and that there is no reason to fear defying his pronouncements.
And then there’s Obama’s track record on immigration. Over the course of Obama’s tenure, we have seen thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants stream across our southern border, and we have seen them not only not prevented from entering but openly embraced by Obama. Obama has thwarted every effort to achieve meaningful border security while at the same time deliberately ignoring the will of the people as expressed in the 2014 election and their elected representatives in Congress by announcing a diktat that he himself had previously stated was unconstitutional to grant unconditional amnesty to the 12 million illegal immigrants already in our country.
Fortunately, the courts have stopped this dictatorial action by Obama cold in its tracks, although we recently learned that Obama is considering the Nixonian move of ignoring the courts and moving forward with his tyranny anyway. But regardless of whether he does so, the American people have already seen that Obama places his desire to import future Democrat voters ahead of national security in his reckless immigration policies.
The American people have seen Obama respond to sustained terrorist attacks by Palestinians on innocent Israelis by blaming the Israelis, and they have seen him pave a path for Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terror, to gain nuclear weapons. And when 229 people (including 1 American) were killed in France last week by ISIS, Obama initially responded by refusing to “speculate” on who was responsible and by making no changes in his limp-wristed opposition to ISIS. And the American people then heard Secretary of State John Kerry actually declare that the Islamists had an arguably legitimate rationale for its murderous attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo some months ago because they published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed. To this day, Obama and his fellow Democrats stubbornly refuse to acknowledge even the existence of radical Islam.
So, when Obama declared his intention to bring tens of thousands of refugees from Syria to the United States, the American people’s reaction very understandably was viscerally opposed. And this opposition became even more passionate after we learned that at least one of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks apparently got into Europe disguised as a refugee.
The fact is that there are good reasons that we should try to bring these refugees here, as laid out in Brian Schoeneman’s excellent article yesterday. But we live in a representative democracy, and before we can even consider doing so it is vital to win the hearts and minds of the American people. On this, Obama has not only utterly failed; he has not even tried.
Survival is the most primitive and basic instinct in the human psyche. It is reptilian and governs literally everything that we do, from eating and sleeping to loving our children to entering into social compacts. So when a president with a track record that is horrendously weak on security declares his intention to bring thousands of people into the country from an area and culture that is the center of the greatest threat to our survival today, only a fool would be surprised that the opposition would be not only widespread but highly emotional.
A great and wise president would recognize these facts and make the case in a respectful and sincere way as to why admitting these refugees is consistent with both our fundamental Judeo-Christian values and our fundamental instincts for survival. There is such a case to be made. After all, if you and your family were at the mercy of savages who wanted to kill you and enslave your children, wouldn’t you want to know that there was a place you could go to escape – a refuge?
But Obama has not engaged in that kind of a respectful dialogue. Instead he attacks the motives and the very morality of those who have a very reasonable fear of his policy. His supporters make a perverse comparison to the U.S.’s unforgivable rejection of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and early ’40s. (There was no history of Jews engaging in terrorism and trying to sneak terrorists anywhere disguised as refugees.) In other words, once again Obama tries to exploit the issue for crass political purposes rather than serve as the president of all Americans at a time and with an issue in which we need national unity.
And so, in response to the passionate opposition of the American people, a majority of our nation’s governors have made the extraordinary (and probably unconstitutional) announcement that they will not allow any Syrian refugees into their states. And today, the U.S. House of Representatives also voted by a bipartisan veto-proof majority to thwart Obama’s refugee policy. In a representative democracy, that’s what elected leaders do to – you guessed it – survive. And, of course, rather than engaging in a respectful and constructive dialogue, Obama has threatened to veto this bill.
The case for Obama’s refugee policy is rooted in compassion, but there is no compassion to be found in the contemptuous tenor of his advocacy for it. And so his advocacy fails, and ultimately so too might his policy. And if that happens, how many more thousands of people will be enslaved or killed due to Obama’s hubris?
