Liberal actress Susan Sarandon appeared on The View, Monday, to lecture “xenophobic” Americans on letting Syrian refugees into the country. The movie star, who has just returned from a trip to Greece where she talked to fleeing Syrians, also incorrectly claimed that terrorists have not come into America disguised as refugees.
Regarding the ongoing debate over allowing Syrians into the country, Sarandon derided, “I start hearing this fear-based, hate-based, xenophobic dialogue that's going on in this country, you know, where we've taken these people and we've reduced them to a concept for political reasons.”
The actress sneered, “I just thought, ‘My God. We're better than this.’ This is not who we are. This is America.”
The star of such film classics as The Banger Sisters and Romance and Cigarettes proclaimed, “There needs to be a conversation that's on a moral level, not a political level. And there haven't been terrorists that have come through as immigrants.”
This, of course, is incorrect. As ABC News revealed that “dozens of terrorists could live in the U.S." after entering the country as refugees:
Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky -- who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.
Fox News alerted:
An Uzbek refugee in Idaho was found guilty of conspiracy and attempting to support a terrorist organization, after he had allegedly been stockpiling explosives. His sentencing is scheduled for January.
A partial transcript is below:
View
1/4/15
11:36WHOOPI GOLDBERG: One of our favorite people, Susan Sarandon, just got off a plane from Lesbos, Greece on a mission to help the nearly 4,000 Syrian refugees who arrive on their shores each day. Now, with other countries around the world turning their backs, it’s a crisis that’s reached epic proportions. And People magazine documented every moment of Susan’s emotional, eye-opening journey and she’s here to tell us about it.
...
SUSAN SARANDON: My grandfather was 15 when he left Sicily because of the war and was a refugee. He came here. He made a life, made kids, the whole thing. He struggled. He contributed. And then I start hearing this fear-based, hate-based, xenophobic dialogue that's going on in this country, you know, where we've taken these people and we've reduced them to a concept for political reasons. And I just thought, my God, you know, we're better than this. This is not who we are. This is America, you know. This is the land of immigrants and refugees. So I thought, these people just don't have a way to tell their stories. They don't have a voice. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody knows why they're there. What if I went over by myself, not affiliated with anybody so I could just go wherever it was happening.
...
JOY BEHAR: What do you say to Donald Trump's, you know, supporters who say that, you know, there could be a terrorist among them? What do you say to them?
SUNNY HOSTIN: That is the argument, right? Because people are saying that some of these terrorists, especially the ones in Paris, slipped through Greece.
SARANDON: Let me tell you that nobody said they wanted to come to America, not one of the people that I asked. They want to go to Germany. They want to go to, you know, Norway. There are a lot of volunteers from all the Scandinavian countries. There's not a rush to New York.
...
11:43
GOLDBERG: Maybe the thing to do, maybe right now the thing to do is to sit down at the coalition of governors and show what you've — what your experience has been and get this conversation back where it needs to get to about who — what we're doing.
SARANDON: There needs to be a conversation that's on a moral level, not a political level and there haven't been terrorists that have come through as immigrants. I mean, you know, down the line we're going to look at this crisis and we're going to say where were we? This is going to be one of those historic — this is a moral moment. And what they want, all of them say, all they want is what we want.
