New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continued his sanctimony over Syrian refugees from his previous column with "'The Statue of Liberty Must Be Crying With Shame,'" in the Sunday Review. He led with yet another liberal internet meme, comparing the refugee situation to Mary and Joseph's plight from the New Testament, and downplayed the terror threat with a classic "yes, but" evasion: "Sure, some Syrians are terrorists...." But two other liberal columnists Sunday had iconoclastic takes on the issue of refugees and ISIS.
Kristof wrote:
As anti-refugee hysteria sweeps many of our political leaders, particularly Republicans, I wonder what they would have told a desperate refugee family fleeing the Middle East. You’ve heard of this family: a carpenter named Joseph, his wife, Mary, and their baby son, Jesus.
According to the Gospel of Matthew, after Jesus’ birth they fled to save Jesus from murderous King Herod (perhaps the 2,000-year-ago equivalent of Bashar al-Assad of Syria?). Fortunately Joseph, Mary and Jesus found de facto asylum in Egypt -- thank goodness House Republicans weren’t in charge when Jesus was a refugee!
The vote by the House of Representatives effectively to slam the door on Syrian refugees was the crassest kind of political grandstanding, scapegoating some of the world’s most vulnerable people to score political points. As a woman named Maria Radford tweeted me after the vote, “the Statue of Liberty must be crying with shame.”
Yes, security is a legitimate concern. And, yes, we can’t rule out the possibility that a terrorist will slip in with the refugees. Among refugees admitted to the U.S. since 9/11, there has been about one arrest for terrorism offenses for every 250,000 refugees, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
The text box was ugh-worthy: "Luckily House Republicans weren't in charge when Jesus was a refugee." Kristof encouraged the liberal route of inaction voiced by colleague Paul Krugman:
The Islamic State’s strategy is to create a wedge in the West between Muslims and non-Muslims. Whether that strategy succeeds depends on us: Will we clamp down with the harsh reaction the Islamic State sought?
....
The demagoguery about refugees leaves me with an ache in the gut because, as I noted in my last column, I am the son of a refugee. Some 65 years ago, my Armenian/Polish/Romanian father was wandering Europe just as the Syrian refugees are today. Because Americans took a chance on him, I’m in a position to write this appeal for similar empathy today.
Sure, some Syrians are terrorists, but some of the people I most admire in the world are Syrian doctors and “White Helmets” who help the victims of violence. House Republicans would block these heroes, would bar even the Yazidi and Christian victims of terrorists.
Republican leaders say they simply want to tighten security to keep America safe. That’s an echo of what American officials claimed in the late 1930s and early 1940s as they blocked the entry of Jewish refugees.
Kristof graciously allowed (in yet another "yes, but" formulation to justify inaction):
Yes, security was a legitimate concern then, as it is now, but security must be leavened with common sense and a bit of heart.
To seek to help desperate refugees in a secure way is not naïveté. It’s not sentimentality. It’s humanity.
Reporter turned liberal columnist Frank Bruni had a more reasonable take in Sunday's "How ISIS Defeats Us," placing a pox on both parties.
We lose it if President Obama can’t shake off his annoyance with critics and his disgust with some prominent Republicans’ xenophobic pandering long enough to re-examine his strategy and recognize that many Americans’ doubts about it are warranted and earnest.
He was at his worst just after the Paris attacks, when he communicated as much irritation with the second-guessing of his stewardship as he did outrage over Paris and determination to destroy the Islamic State, or ISIS.
....
From Obama we needed fire. Instead we got embers, along with the un-presidential portrayal of Republicans as sniveling wimps whose fears about refugees were akin to their complaints about tough debate questions.
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But we also can’t indulge in wishful thinking, and worries that we’re doing that aren’t solely the province of Republicans. Senator Dianne Feinstein has registered doubts about our response to ISIS, qualms about refugees. So have other leading Democrats, to varying extents.
Covering himself, Bruni went even harder after the top two Republican candidates:
We lose the war against ISIS if we don’t get serious about our presidential candidates. How much more garbage and nonsense do Trump and Carson have to spew before the people supporting them wake up, grow up and realize that it matters greatly who our next commander in chief is?
International columnist Roger Cohen scored again with a poignant tribute to Paris from that city: "The Danger of Placing Your Chips on Beauty."
Paris is afflicted with absences -- the dead, of course; visitors frightened away; minds frozen by fear; and tranquillity lost. The city feels vulnerable. Its luminous tolerance is intolerable to the jihadi fanatics. In this sense it is a symbol of a Western civilization and an openness that now seem fragile. Terrorists are interested in potent symbolism. They passed on Brussels. Perhaps no metropolis carries as much symbolism as the French capital, home to the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
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Insouciance is a Parisian pleasure. This is the city of aimless wandering and casual delight. But today, insouciance feels freighted with danger. There is too much of it in the West. The enemy has been underestimated. His maxim is maximum damage. He defies classification. He may be the middle-class, private-school-educated son of Moroccan immigrants in Belgium. Saving Paris from the Islamic State will take ruthlessness -- but save it we must.
....
“We’ll always have Paris” -- Humphrey Bogart’s comment to Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca” -- is one of the most famous movie lines. Yet her desperate question that precedes it is sometimes forgotten: “But what about us?” Bogart is telling Bergman to leave him and be with her husband so that the Paris of their brief but eternal affair can be preserved. He is telling her that Paris -- their Paris, the Paris of so many dreams -- is a delicate and infinitely precious thing whose survival requires painful, courageous decisions such as his.
