For the past several months I have been thinking about the
Middle East refugee crisis, as an American and as a Jew, and what my conscience
and intellect tells me our response should be. I am fully cognizant of the
tremendous good that immigration has provided in the development and growth of
the United States during its history. I fully appreciate America’s moral
obligation, as a rich and relatively stable nation, to take in refugees, and the
role of Jews in that endeavor, as a people who have had to leave places throughout
history, en masse and at a moment’s notice, dependent upon the aid of strangers
for their survival. I am also most
mindful that gross negligence and
irresponsible decisions by the US government have contributed greatly to
the current Arab refugee crisis, making us particularly responsible for helping
solve it (to call it the Syrian refugee crisis would be ignoring the many
Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans and others participating in the massive migration to
Europe in 2015).
Americans are not racists, by and large, and we are very
sensitive, perhaps too sensitive, to any treatment of Muslims that may be
deemed to be discriminatory or threatening. However, in spite of Attorney
General Loretta Lynch’s declaring that her “greatest fear” is of a rise in
anti-Muslim violence in the U.S., a sentiment echoed by President Obama and virtually
every other leading politician, the
FBI’s
Uniform Crime Report for 2014 indicates that, of the 1,014 hate crime
incidents in the U.S. motivated by religious bias in that year, only 15.2% of
them were anti-Islamic, but over 60% of such incidents were anti-Semitic. Put
another way, we have roughly one anti-Muslim crime for every 29,000 American
Muslims versus one anti-Jewish crime for every 11,000 Jews.
If we are to consistently apply the attitude of Lynch,
President Obama and others about protecting American Muslims from hate violence,
we should resist actions that risk causing a significant increase in the level
of anti-Semitic intimidation as well. After all, our Constitution was written
under the Lockeian philosophy that government exists solely for the protection
of the natural rights of its community, whose members only surrender some
degree of their natural rights in return for that protection of their life,
liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. The government’s aiding anyone
else from outside our citizenry is of secondary importance if providing such
aid imperils those natural rights of American citizens, such as Jewish
Americans. Unfortunately, as explained below, applying this logic requires us
to virtually close the doors to Middle Eastern Muslim refugees, prohibiting Muslim
refugees in higher risk categories from entering the U.S. (the highest risk
cohort being single young men, though younger men and women, both married and
unmarried could be viewed as being high risk – as witnessed by the married,
with child, protagonists of San Bernardino).
These refugees come from a very different place in terms of
social norms, which would undoubtedly negatively impact the extant American
Jewish community, as it has our European Jewish cousins over the past two
decades. Following the Cologne New Year’s eve incident, much has been written
about the
misogyny
evident in the culture of these Middle Eastern Muslim refugees. But
anti-Semitic pathologies also run deep in Arab Muslim communities throughout
the Middle East. The high levels of Muslim anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe have
been manifested in the steady growth of Muslim-perpetrated violent and coercive
anti-Semitic acts. A regrettably large amount of polling data and real life
experience is available in Europe to support this view, and show that the worst
crimes against Jews in Europe are perpetrated by European Muslims of Middle
Eastern and North African descent, which attitudes are highly likely to follow an
Arab Muslim refugee wave to the US. The percentage of Muslims in France,
Germany the UK, Spain, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden who had
“very unfavorable view of Jews” or agreed that “Jews cannot be trusted” was
typically 3-6 times higher than that of their Christian neighbors, with the
worst attitudes among more devout Muslims (see the
2015
study by the Institute of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP), which
relies on surveys of over 40,000 European individuals in nine countries,
including almost 13,000 Muslims). These attitudes have resulted in a highly
disproportionate
participation level by these minority Muslims in anti-Semitic behavior in
Europe over the past decade.
While
occasional flare ups of mob anti-Semitic violence are blamed on anti-Zionism,
any cursory study of the ISGAP study, individual violent anti-Semitic
incidents, and the words of the perpetrators, makes clear that this is about
anti-Semitism, not anti-Zionism.
As a result of this anti-Semitic behavior, nearly a third of
European Jews are considering emigration because they do not believe themselves
to be safe in their home country, according to a
detailed
EU survey. More than three-quarters of respondents in Belgium and France,
both of which have large populations of Muslim immigrants, identified
anti-Semitism as a problem, eighty percent of whom described Muslim immigration
as the principal source of the “problem”.
As a result, entire Jewish communities in Sweden have begun
emptying out, and in 2015 close to 2% of the French Jewish population departed.
Are there right wing (and left wing) non-Muslim anti-Semites
in Europe? Yes, but the greatest physical and psychological threat to Jewish
well-being in Europe that has resulted in this exodus emanates from the Muslim
population, and that is simply a fact.
It is important to stress that most of this Jewish
insecurity is not so much the
result of headline-grabbing terrorism that is likely to evoke a strenuous
official reaction, as much as of violent day-to-day street harassment and
ethnically-directed crime, rapes, beatings, stabbings, and property damage that
obliterate a sense of Jewish personal and communal safety – incidents that
require resolve to address and typically derive little reaction from
politically sensitive local authorities who would rather not identify Muslim
anti-Semitism as a motive, to avoid being judgemental. Indeed, even with
respect to an indisputably terrorist attack, the Paris Kosher market episode,
President Obama and Secretary Kerry, in a new feat of insensitivity and
political correctness, both ignored
the statement of the terrorist himself and have repeatedly undermined the
notion that this incident targeted Jews for being Jews (in Obama’s referring to
an attack “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”, and Kerry’s implication that there was
some logical justification to this attack – as if bold and direct declarations
of anti-Jewish motive can be rationalized by anti-Zionist underpinnings). To
some political leaders, fearful of being called out as racists and being caught
between voting blocks, Jewish lives matter less, increasing the danger to the
American Jewish community of a mistake with Muslim refugee resettlement here.
Against this background, the question of “safe” admission of
Muslim refugees into the U.S. is not merely a case of arguing over the adequacy
of our government’s vetting policies and procedures for refugees (though it is worth
noting the
failure
to stop admission into the US
of Tashfeen Malik, the female half of the San Bernardino terrorist couple,
partly resulted from the negligent inability
of government bureaucrats to examine social networking
history of refugees). No, as the Europeans have discovered over the past
decade, and as we have begun to discover in the U.S. as well, the greater threat
of terrorism does not come from the infiltrated active terrorist, but, instead,
from the homegrown terrorist, whether native or immigrant, whose radicalism is
cultivated in the U.S. in a Petri dish of receptive (Muslim) religious and
cultural values. The Europeans, and particularly Jewish Europeans, have
experienced this phenomenon of homegrown violent anti-Semitism/terrorist acts
again and again in France, Belgium, Sweden and elsewhere.
Syed Farook, Tashfeen’s husband in San
Bernardino, was such a homegrown fanatic, born and bred here, as was the Fort
Hood terrorist Army psychiatrist, Nidal Hasan, and a number of others caught
before they could perpetrate acts of terrorism (the Riverdale synagogue
attackers, the Times Square bomber born abroad but naturalized and later
radicalized in the U.S., etc.).
The experiences of European Jews are clear, the statistics
are clear – like it or not, Middle Eastern Muslim societies creates an
environment that is receptive to violent anti-Semitism that can make a place
inhospitable for Jews. If the same Middle Eastern Muslim refugee cohort that
has precipitated the beginning of the end of Jewish communal life in Western
Europe comes to the U.S., is there any reason to believe that the results will
be different here?
American Muslims tend to have more liberal attitudes than
Muslims from elsewhere around the world. For example, “only” 8% of America’s 3
million Muslims favor suicide bombings in certain circumstances (do the math),
according to a
2013
Pew Poll. However, we have already had ample experience with homegrown
radicalization, and the importation into the U.S. of Muslims raised with a very
different world view will in all likelihood contribute to instability and
result in significantly greater threat to the Jewish American
community (not to speak of threat to
the broader U.S. populace). Let’s be clear – according to another
2013
Pew Poll, 56-99% of Muslim immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African
countries (with the exception of Lebanon – 29%)
favor making Shariah the official law in their country. We
have the right to be concerned with the treatment and diminished rights of
non-Muslims under Shariah, and accordingly, with the attitudes inherent in
those who support Shariah. And while it is difficult to find reliable
statistics regarding Muslim participation in anti-Semitic crimes in the U.S.,
it stands to reason that such participation is increasing, with approximately
40-50% of
attempted and thwarted terror plots in the US since September 11 having been
directed at Jewish citizens or institutions, and the significant level of
American Muslim participation in anti-Israel protests on college campuses, that
often devolve into grossly anti-Semitic displays.
With
Pew
estimating that the Muslim share of the U.S. population will double by 2015,
Jewish community leaders should
consider whether it is really a good idea to inject into this population a
significant number of Middle Eastern refugees who almost certainly possess more
extreme views towards Jews than the broader American Muslim populace. It is a bad
idea to bet the fate of our families and communities on the ability to
successfully assimilate into an American mindset large numbers of aliens
possessing these attitudes, especially in a United States where
multiculturalist, moral relativist trends have diffused America’s traditional
ability to successfully assimilate refugees into the melting pot and have them
adopt the values of broader society. Basically, immigration without
assimilation is invasion, and the Jewish American community is the most threatened
by miscalculations in this equation.
For the Jewish people, the US has been the promised land of
safety, peace and harmony with our neighbors. Unlike my European
co-religionists, I can freely walk to synagogue Saturday mornings without
having to look over my shoulder for a slow moving car or bunch of Middle
Eastern-looking men, my children’s Jewish day school bus does not have to
conceal the identity of its occupants when travelling to a high school basketball, and I don’t have to
warn my children not to wear a kippah or a decorative Jewish star around their
necks before going out, worrying
for their safety as Jews until they return home. I am not willing to see
my sense of peace and safety as an American end as a result of some sort of humanitarian
duty to take in significant numbers of Arab Muslim refugees -- a duty that is
secondary to my Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness as an American citizen. Unlike my European cousins, I do not want to be
forced, out of a sense of perceived necessity, to explore sending my children to Israel to create a new life,
or upend my own life to move there.
These views do not make me a racist monster.
