image courtesy of wikimedia.org

The Syrian refugees who are currently undergoing a two year vetting process had nothing to do with the attacks in Paris. They are the Albert Einsteins trying to get out of Nazi Germany, and we are stopping them. This is how we lose the war. We burn a whole city to get revenge on two already-dead homicidal maniacs. There are a limited number of brainwashed suicide bombers. Remember Japan. It’s an act of desperation. It’s the hallmark of a General out of options.

In Syria, Assad has been punishing his people for years, for no other reason than that they want to be free. They’re getting pretty good at guerrilla resistance. We did not intervene in the Syrian revolution. This was a deliberate, calculated move, and it paid off. Our true enemy strode out onto the battlefield, declaring victory. It was not Assad. He’s just a tyrant like Saddam Hussein. It was Daesh, the phony-Muslim death cult. We now know what we’re fighting. It’s pretty ugly.

So now we have ten thousand people who saw this thing up close, who ran away from it through proper channels, who were repeatedly interviewed and researched, who can tell us things about what we’re fighting that our own intelligence cannot, and we want to send them away? Are we afraid we might learn something that will improve our strategy? Are we afraid we might develop new ways to resist terror? Are we afraid that the Syrians and the Americans are part of the same human family? What’s the problem?

It is conceivable that a few Syrian immigrants will go on to careers of terrorism. Many more will go on to careers in mathematics, computers, the armed forces, business, journalism, arts. Can we spare the few for the sake of the many? Perhaps, as civilization progresses, terrorism will delete itself. It is currently obsolete. It doesn’t work. More likely, it will not. Our physiology is designed to perceive threats. Some few may perceive threats and act upon them in an illogical way, like a terrorist.

Let’s not leave ten thousand Syrian refugees out in the cold, people who jumped through all the hoops trying to make a new life. Every other civilized country is accepting more refugees, except Sweden and Jordan, bless their hearts, who accepted more than they could afford in the first place. This is not a partisan question. This is a human question. Will you condemn upstanding citizens because of a whisper campaign of xenophobia?

These are people who have already met the highest standards in the world for refugee status. They don’t want to vote. They don’t want benefits. They just want to live where hard work counts. They want a chance to prove themselves. Are we not curious about what they can do in America? They’re not sneaking into the country. They’re filling out forms. They have long term plans.

Nobody said it was easy. We all understand statistics, that terror attacks are less dangerous than peanuts, bees, automobiles, even lightning. Yet we instinctively recoil. When confronted with the unknown, we revert to animal self-preservation. In order to do what is right, we must overcome that instinct.