As we approach a holiday that celebrates the charity of a native people to a refugees fleeing persecution, we would do well to consider our response to the plight of another set of refugees. This in the aftermath of terrorist attacks that slaughtered 129 innocents in Paris on Nov. 13.
First, the French, who have responded incisively with bombing attacks of the ISIS stronghold in Syria and a storming of the apartment block in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis that killed the mastermind of the attack and another terrorist. Intelligence and security services in the U.S. and across European have swung into action.
The residents of Paris have responded with uncommon grace.
Antonine Leiris, whose wife was killed in the Bataclan Theatre wrote on Facebook, “Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred. … If God, for which you kill blindly made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife has been a wound in his heart. So no, I will not give you this gift of hate to you.”
An impromptu performer playing a piano set up in the Gare du Nord, one of Paris’ train stations told NPR’s David Greene, “Tonight we are going to spend time with friends. We have to go out and have fun, you know? And trying to be happy with everyone, it is our revenge.”
With candles, notes and mementos, Parisians have made shrines of the sites where the terrorists struck.
Meanwhile, here in the States, more than 30 governors, Gov. Phil Bryant among them, and some Republican presidential candidates, have responded to the attacks with a resounding “no” to the acceptance of Syrian refugees fleeing the violence and bloodshed in their homeland.
We should remember the Japanese internment camps in World War II and, less well known, our refusal to accept Jews fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s. These are not among our proudest moments.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof compares the governors’ xenophobia to our refusal to accept Jewish refugees.
“[In] January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany,” Kristof writes. “That year, the United States turned away a ship, the St. Louis, with Jewish refugee children; the St. Louis returned to Europe, where some of its passengers were murdered by the Nazis.”
Kristof’s Nov. 19 column, titled “They are us” elicited almost 500 comments. Here’s one of them:
Historian/Aggieland, TX
I sometimes ask my students, “What do you suppose Anne Frank would have become if her father had had the sense to seek refuge in America?” Trick question. The sad answer is, a concentration camp victim; her father did try, in vain. The real reason they and countless others like them were turned away was primarily American anti-Semitism, but the official excuse was the fear that Nazi agents might be smuggled in among refugees. Sound familiar? … Even translators who risked their lives to aid the U.S. military often wait years for a visa. And yet the fearmongers are at work once again, this time disguising their undifferentiated anti-Muslim bigotry with security concerns that apply only to a tiny fraction, who would have much easier ways of access to the U.S. …
The path to asylum in the U.S. is arduous.
State Department officials in a Nov. 17 briefing said refugees are subject to an 18- to 24-month intensive screening process involving multiple federal intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies. That includes biometrics and biographic checks and a lengthy in-person overseas interview conducted by specially trained Dept. of Homeland Security officers.
In the centuries following the arrival of the Pilgrims, we have become a fearful people. This is not to say as a nation we should not be ever vigilant. But this is America, a nation founded by immigrants, the land of the free and home of the brave. We should do all we can to be just that.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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