“We have no earthly way to know who they are,” exclaimed Republican Congressman Michael Burgess while speaking about the Syrian refugees on MSNBC Monday night. “The FBI doesn’t even have a database.”
But there’s one man who can sort it all out. A special dude from Texas, by way of Canada, who has the ability to decide which refugees are good and which are bad. And that person is Ted Cruz: The Muslim Hunter.
You see, Cruz, as opposed to Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, who oppose any Syrian refugees being admitted into the United States, has a more creative way to deal with this human catastrophe. He’s announced plans to introduce federal legislation to ban the Muslim refugees, but accept the Christian ones.
Why the distinction? Well, the Muslim Hunter tends to believe that any Muslim might be evil. In contrast, he declared that “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.” Ooops, looks like Cruz never heard of Christian terrorists like Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph, the killer of “abortion doctor” George Tiller, Robert Doggart (the Christian minister on trial for plotting terrorist attack to kill Muslims in New York State) the KKK, Timothy McVeigh, etc.
With that aside, Cruz’s plan raises a few questions. For example, how do you accurately determine a refugee’s religion? I would imagine many would be willing to claim they are Christian in order to save their families and start a new life in America.
Have no fear because The Muslim Hunter undoubtedly will come up with some tests to sniff out those stealth Muslims. Maybe the refugees will be required to eat a bacon cheeseburger while drinking Jagermeister. Or perhaps each refugee will be shown a photo of Bill Maher—if they reflexively recoil, it’s no USA for them. Possibly Cruz will employ a subtler test like asking them which way is Mecca? If the refugee quickly points in the right direction, he’s got ’em!
Of course, the bigger question is how Cruz will define who is a Muslim for purposes of his legislation. I mean, what if a person is only culturally Muslim—you know, the type who has a glass of wine once in a while and only goes to mosque on the Eids.
Or what if an orphaned refugee child had one parent who was Muslim and one Christian? Does the child get to pick her religion?
Cruz’s proposed legislation brings to mind the laws of a certain other country that codified discrimination based on religion. I’m speaking of course of the Nuremberg laws implemented by the Nazis in the 1930s. Under that set of vile laws not only were non-practicing Jews considered subject to discrimination, but even those with simply a Jewish grandparent were deemed Jews even if they didn’t so identify.
Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need a thorough and comprehensive vetting process. That is the key to keeping Americans safe as well as preventing ISIS from taking a spot that should go to a refugee in need. And here’s the thing, we appear to have such a process.
Vetting Syrian refuges typically takes more than 18 months to complete and is carried out by various U.S. agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The protocol includes rounds of meetings, biometric information, background checks, etc.
And that’s after the United Nations High Commission for Refugees first determines that the applicant has made the required showing of having “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality.” We are not talking about what we see in Europe where people simply can walk into our country.
Keep in mind that since 2012, there have been almost 2,000 Syrian refuges resettled in the United States. There have been no reports of any of these refugees being involved in any type of terrorist activity or killing Americans. In contrast, since the 1980s, almost 65 percent of mass shootings have been perpetrated by white men. Maybe we can accept the good Syrian refugees who have been vetted and send to Syria the white men who like to shoot people so they can fight ISIS? It’s win-win.
Now Cruz’s plan to discriminate against Muslims may play well with the GOP base, but I can assure you that it plays even better with ISIS. ISIS wants the refugees to remain in Syria so our turning them away is great from their point of view. In fact in the latest issue of the ISIS magazine, Dabiq, ISIS specifically addresses this issue and tries to convince Muslims to stay by deeming it a “dangerous major sin” to take your children from ISIS-controlled land to places they will surrounded by “fornication, sodomy, drugs, and alcohol.” Bottom line, ISIS wants more subjects under its control.
Plus Cruz, and others like him, who frame this fight even implicitly as Islam versus the West are assisting ISIS in its goal of framing this conflict as such. It’s not. It’s ISIS, a terror group of maybe 100,000 people that represents less than .01 percent of all Muslims, versus anyone who refuses to submit to them.
Christians are greatly suffering under ISIS. They desperately need our help. But so do Muslims. Indeed, Muslims are far and away the number one victim of ISIS’s barbarism. Consequently, the vetting should be religiously neutral, just like the laws of our nation, and be based on objective standards to ensure that those in the most danger are allowed a chance to live in our great nation.
Look, If Cruz wants to personally sponsor a Christian Syrian family to live with him, that would be the epitome of Christian kindness. But passing a law that codifies religious discrimination is not only wrong, it’s the very definition of un-American.
