LETTER: Kindness and common sense
The prospect of accepting Syrian refugees into the United States has aroused two conflicting feelings within me.
The first is fear. ISIS has said that they are sending terrorists in with the refugees, and in Paris, they proved that they were not kidding.
Therefore, I think it would be insanity for us to simply admit Syrian refugees in without any sort of screening process (which we currently do not even know how to implement). Doing so will almost guarantee that America will be subjected to attacks that are as bad or worse than what happened in Beirut and Paris.
What frightens me as much as the prospect of further Islamist violence in America is that so many Americans do not see the danger, and some are even calling those who see the danger bigots.
Common sense has not only become uncommon in America; it has become unpopular.
On the other hand, the kindness behind America’s desire to help the Syrian refugees is a beautiful thing. I see it as a manifestation of human spiritual evolution.
We need to carefully encourage this spirit of kindness and unity among humans because it is not only a good thing, it is also probably the only thing that will stop humanity’s headlong race toward self-destruction.
So, what do we do? We see these desperate fellow human beings, looking to us for help. And it is within our power to give them help. But at the same time, we know that there are wolves among the sheep; predators who see our kindness as weakness, and who want nothing more than to shed as much American blood as possible.
We also sometimes see, in Islamic communities that are already established in America, a tendency to become demanding of accommodation. Rather than integrating into society as preceding immigrant waves have done, they remain tightly isolated and begin to demand their own little caliphates where they can practice sharia law with all of its brutal and unconstitutional provisions.
We need to be kind, but we must not be stupid. We need to proceed cautiously with a carefully thought-out plan for helping these Syrian refugees, because whatever we do will be largely irreversible. We can prosecute individuals who break laws, but we cannot bring the victims of Islamist terrorism back to life, and we cannot deport entire communities that have become hostile to the culture of their hosts.
When facing dilemmas like this, people sometimes ask, “What would Jesus do?”
Well, Jesus willingly allowed himself to be crucified by Middle Easterners who lived by a very brutal politico-religious code. They are still doing things like that there, but I am neither qualified nor inclined to be their sacrificial lamb. —David Conner, Kalispell