The US Holocaust Museum's response to the dailywire article.
Reposting from David Karger's facebook:
---------------------------
Last month, a Facebook friend shared an article arguing that Trump's ban on Muslim refugees was fine because it was completely different from the ban on Jewish refugees prior to World War 2. The article dressed it up but its basic "reasoning" was that Jews were good while Muslims are bad. I hated this article and knew it was full of lies, but I didn't have the historical references need to refute the many lies it deployed.
So I reached out to the US Holocaust Museum, hoping for a pointer to an article or something that would help me collect that information needed for a proper refutation. Instead, I got a many-page, extensively researched response from Dr. Elizabeth White, a PhD. historian and expert on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust genocide and mass atrocities who works at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With her permission, I am including her response verbatim here. I encourage you to read it, share it, and use it in your own arguments against this particularly hypocritical strain of bigotry that's emerging now.
I'm also linking to the article, which I refused to do when I originally complained about it, so that you can have the proper context for the refutation. Obviously, I reject every argument the article is making---I wish there was a way to indicate this on Facebook.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/1217/no-muslim-refugees-are-not-jewish-wwii-refugees-michael-qazvini
Dear Mr. Karger:
Once again, thank you for your inquiry to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and my apologies for the delay in responding. There are many fallacies in the article you sent, some of which I address with individual bullets below. First, as you have noted, bigotry reduces people to one aspect of their identity, such as their race or religion, ascribes to everyone sharing (or perceived to share in) that identity the characteristics, actions or beliefs of some members of the identity group, and judges members or perceived members of the identity group not by their actions as individuals but based on that one aspect of their identity. A common device of hate speech is to present facts or factoids indicating that some members of the target identity group think or behave in a manner that is offensive or dangerous and then to use this “evidence” to condemn everyone in the group. This is particularly true of antisemitic hate speech. For example, the Nazis ascribed to all those whom they regarded as Jews - whether or not they considered themselves Jews - the intent to corrupt and destroy the German people through capitalism and Bolshevism, using as “evidence” the role that a few Jews played in finance and in socialist and communist movements. The article on “Muslim refugees” you forwarded takes a similar approach: it reduces to one aspect of their identity a large group of people who are quite diverse in their national, ethnic and cultural origins, their professional, social and educational backgrounds, their political beliefs, and even their religious views and practices, and it selectively uses facts as well as misinformation and false analogies to “prove” that everyone in the group presents a threat.
· The first sentence of the article implies that thousands of Muslim refugees are being allowed into the United States “without proper security screenings.” Refugees undergo the highest degree of security screening of any entrants to the United States, and the process takes 12 to 18 months or longer. Refugees from Syria undergo an even more rigorous screening process than refugees from other countries. For a description of the refugee screening process you may wish to read the following from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington: http://www.heritage.org/…/how-the-refugee-vetting-process-w…. While this article makes repeated reference to the San Bernardino attack, please note that refugees did not commit the attack.
· The second sentence states that the comparison between Muslim refugees fleeing political and religious persecution today and Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust during World War II is not only false but insulting to Holocaust victims. I can assure you that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is very attuned to and sensitive toward the views of Holocaust survivors in the United States, many of whom have in fact made exactly the comparison that the article claims is false and insulting to them. This is why the Museum has issued two statements on the refugee problem in recent months.
· The article states that the resistance to admitting Jewish refugees during World War II was founded on “isolationist policies developed as a consequence of World War I” and not security concerns, while acknowledging that antisemitism may have played a role. Antisemitism is based, of course, on the belief that Jews present a threat, such as to a society’s religious, social or political order, economy, culture, or racial or ethnic composition. The view of Jewish immigrants as a threat influenced U.S. immigration policies during the interwar years and, after the start of the war, became the principal reason advanced by the U.S. government for refusing to admit Jewish refugees.
Following World War I, the United States sharply restricted immigration and in 1924 instituted strict quotas that limited both the number of immigrant visas that could be granted and the countries whose nationals could qualify for those visas. The effect of the 1924 immigration law was to advantage immigration from Northern and Western Europe, sharply restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and effectively bar immigration by natives of Africa or most of Asia. What primarily drove these changes was not isolationism but a combination of racism and fear. As reflected in the testimony of the “expert eugenics agent” to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that proposed the 1924 immigration law, many in the American ruling elite feared that the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (the latter including over two million Jews) in the previous 30 years had brought in people with inferior physical and mental capacities who, through their high birthrate, were degrading the superior stock of white, largely Protestant Americans of Western European origin. Adding to this sense of insecurity was the “red scare” that erupted in the United States following the communist uprisings in Europe and labor unrest in the United States during and following World War I. Eastern European immigrants in particular, and especially the Jews among them, were suspected of espousing radical ideologies and seeking to subvert American democracy. This attitude is reflected in a State Department memo addressed to one of the Congressional authors of the 1924 immigration act and describing Russian and Polish Jewish emigrants: “They are filthy, Un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” (Quoted in Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-45, p. 32)
During the Depression, economic concerns became the primary argument for restricting immigration. In 1930, President Hoover ordered a broad interpretation of the 1924 act’s clause barring immigrants likely to become a public charge: during a time of high unemployment, he viewed any immigrant likely to seek a job as falling under this bar. The State Department filled only a small fraction of the quotas - for Germany, 10% or less - for most of the 1930s. As the issue of refugees from Nazi persecution became more urgent during the late 1930s, isolationist arguments joined economic justifications for restricting and even ending immigration. Undergirding these arguments was an increasing and increasingly vociferous antisemitism that portrayed Jews as an anti-Christian force that had caused the Depression and was plotting to destroy the nation by embroiling it in foreign wars and fomenting revolution. 67% of Americans polled in July 1938 opposed admitting political refugees from Germany and Austria; when the question explicitly referenced Jewish refugees, the percentage opposed was 75% in March 1938, falling to 71% in November 1938, following the explosion of anti-Jewish violence and persecution in Nazi Germany ushered in by the Kristallnacht pogrom. 62% polled in January 1939 opposed even admitting German Jewish children. The following month, 41% of Americans polled believed that Jews held too much power in the country.
With the outbreak of World War II and as the Nazi conquest in Europe advanced, the chief reason advanced for not admitting refugees became national security: Nazi Germany and its then ally, the Soviet Union, were supposedly embedding their agents among the refugees or coercing legitimate refugees to act as their agents by threatening their relatives at home. There was widespread belief that a fifth column was actively working to destroy the United States. U.S. political leaders encouraged this belief, blaming France’s swift fall in the spring of 1940 on the work of a fifth column and warning the public about the infiltration tactics of the totalitarian powers. U.S. Ambassador to France William Bullitt claimed that more than half the spies captured in France were Nazi and Communist agents who had posed as refugees. Jewish refugees came under particular suspicion, with the State Department claiming that Germany was helping Jewish criminals to get visas and the U.S. Ambassador in Havana reporting rumors that Jewish refugees in Cuba had celebrated the fall of Paris. FDR himself stated at a June 1940 press conference that there were spies among the refugees in the US and some “definitely proven spies” among Jewish refugees in other countries who had been coerced to act as German agents. Citing the danger of subversion by immigrants, the State Department reversed the liberalization of visa procedures that had allowed increased numbers of Jewish refugees to enter in 1938-1939. In June 1941 (four months before Nazi Germany barred emigration for Jews), it even ordered that no visas be given to applicants who had close relatives in Germany or any area dominated by Germany. The public perception of Jews as presenting a threat to Americans actually increased after the United States entered the war and even after the government acknowledged that Nazi Germany was exterminating the Jews: 51% of Americans polled believed that Jews had too much power in December 1942; that number continued to rise during the war and peaked at 58% in June 1945.
· The article claims that Muslim states are refusing to take in refugees who are Muslim and implies that the reason the United States should have admitted Jewish refugees from the Holocaust was that they did not have a Jewish state to go to, rather than to protect them from persecution and murder. In any event, like refugees generally, refugees from the Muslim countries targeted by the recent temporary travel ban have fled primarily to neighboring countries. Over 80% of Syrian refugees are in the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq; Afghani refugees have fled overwhelmingly to Pakistan and Iran, Tunisia has the largest number of Libyan refugees, Chad the most Sudanese refugees, and Somali refugees are primarily in Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as Yemen. All but two of these are majority Muslim countries. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the top six countries that have taken in refugees are: Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia and Jordan, all but one majority Muslim. Large inflows of refugees put serious strain on the resources of host countries (consider that Lebanon, with little more than 4 million in population at the start of the Syrian uprising, has taken in more than 1 million Syrian refugees), and lead to tensions that can be destabilizing. Lightening the burden on the primary host countries is thus a security as well as a humanitarian issue.
In addition to being wrong on the facts, this claim is logically flawed. It seems to argue that all refugees should be processed according to their religious faith -- as opposed to their nationality, which is the current process -- and imposes a religious requirement for resettlement of refugees. If refugees should only go to states where their faith is the established religion, whither the Yezidis? Since the United States does not have an established religion, under this logic it should not take any refugees who have a religious faith; or, if it should only take refugees who belong to the faith of the majority of Americans, it should have refused to take in Jewish displaced persons or Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union once the state of Israel had been established.
· The article states that Muslim refugees are fleeing persecution stemming from a schism within the Islamic faith that has at times fueled violence. Surely this is an argument for admitting Muslim refugees into the United States, many of whose original European settlers fled persecution fueled by often violent sectarian strife within the Christian faith. In any event, the Sunni-Shia schism has played no role in the conflicts that have produced refugees from Libya, Somalia and Sudan, three of the countries targeted in the recent temporary travel ban. Most Syrian refugees are fleeing violence at the hands of the Assad regime, which is responsible for 75% of the casualties in the Syrian conflict. The regime chose to confront peaceful demonstrations demanding a democratic and pluralistic Syria in 2011 with massive violence that particularly targeted civilian members of Syria’s Sunni majority. It intentionally sought to transform the uprising into a sectarian conflict that would allow Assad (a member of the Alawite Shia sect) to present himself as the only alternative to a Syria ruled by Sunni Islamist extremists. The regime has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against its citizens not out of religious motives but a ruthless determination to cling to power, no matter the cost. The motives of other factions involved in the conflict, whether in support of or opposition to the regime, are varied: some, for example, seek autonomy for their ethnic group, some to impose their version of Sunni or Shia orthodoxy, some to create a democratic Syria. The article is at least correct in noting that the largest category of victims of the self-styled Islamic state is Muslims.
· The article contends that Muslim refugees are more religious than the Jewish refugees during World War II, who constituted a largely secular and highly assimilated “ethno-religious block.” The Jews who sought to escape Nazi persecution and murder during World War II were highly diverse in terms of national origin, religious practice, socio-economic status, political views and degree of assimilation. Many German and Austrian Jews were highly assimilated; many were also religious - one does not preclude the other. The German attack on Poland that started the war drove hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews to seek refuge elsewhere, and as the war progressed they were joined by Jews from other countries in Eastern Europe. These Jews tended on the whole to be observant as well as poorer and less assimilated than Jews in Western Europe. They were thus quite similar to the masses of religiously devout immigrants who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the poorer parts of Europe and marginalized sectors of their home society.
· The article states that because of their religion, Muslim refugees “may have sympathies and views that are antithetical to Western values.” This is similar to arguments made in the United States against admitting various groups of immigrants, such as Catholics, as well, of course, as Jews. The 2013 Pew Research Center poll that the article cherry-picks to support a different point found that a majority of Muslims, including in the Middle East, prefer democracy to authoritarian government and support religious freedom. For many Muslim refugees fleeing persecution at home, their support for democracy and pluralism is what led to their persecution.
· The article cites the 2013 Pew Research Center poll referenced above to show that the majority of Muslims from certain countries, such as Pakistan, favor the imposition of sharia law. The same Pew study also finds that:
“even in many countries where there is strong backing for sharia, most Muslims favor religious freedom for people of other faiths. In Pakistan, for example, three-quarters of Muslims say that non-Muslims are very free to practice their religion, and fully 96% of those who share this assessment say it is “a good thing.” Yet 84% of Pakistani Muslims favor enshrining sharia as official law. These seemingly divergent views are possible partly because most supporters of sharia in Pakistan - as in many other countries - think Islamic law should apply only to Muslims. Moreover, Muslims around the globe have differing understandings of what sharia means in practice.”
· The article claims that Muslims have “disproportionately contributed” to racist attacks against other minorities, especially Jews, and that European Jews are victims of “anti-Semitic [sic], white and Islamo-Supremacist harassment, bullying and intimidation.” It cites to “the latest” Pew Center for Research poll, but the link goes to a 2008 study that does not contain this information (nor could I find it in any other Pew publication). Instead, it polls the views on religion of many groups of people throughout the world. Among other things, it tracks a rise in antisemitism in Europe but shows that anti-Muslim sentiment is far stronger. Both this poll and the 2013 poll cited earlier in the article show that sizable majorities in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed reject terrorism and violence in the name of Islam. Muslims are also being subjected to “white and Islamo-Supremacist harassment, bullying and intimidation,” as well as outright violence, including by the same groups that commit antisemitic attacks.
· Citing another Pew study, the article warns that Europe’s Muslim population is younger than its non-Muslim population and therefore increasing more quickly and that the influx of male migrants to Europe will “exacerbate this demographic shift.” The Pew study cited by the article notes that Muslims make up 6% of Europe’s population and that they will likely make up 8% in 2030, not enough to qualify as a “demographic shift.”
· The article cites two deadly terrorist attacks as evidence that the migrants are “import[ing] anti-Semitic ideologies and beliefs that may harm existing minority populations, especially Jews.” Neither of the cited attacks was carried out by migrants. The article also conflates the problem of large numbers of migrants from Muslim states going to Europe without any prior screening with the issue of a much smaller number of refugees (mostly women and children) being admitted to the United States after extensive screening.
· The warning in point Five of the article echoes warnings that have been made since the founding of the United States about various groups of immigrants (such as the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Jews): through their high birth rate and alien beliefs, they were going to undermine the ethnic composition, social order and political institutions of the country. The dreaded offspring of these groups have helped make the United States the world’s strongest military and economic power, have contributed to its advances in science, technology, and the arts, and have sacrificed their lives to protect its freedom and security.
I hope the above points will be of some use to you.
Regards, I have chosen to move to dreamwidth.org. Please join me there: http://angerona.dreamwidth.org/1536891.html?mode=reply ;
comments
---------------------------
Last month, a Facebook friend shared an article arguing that Trump's ban on Muslim refugees was fine because it was completely different from the ban on Jewish refugees prior to World War 2. The article dressed it up but its basic "reasoning" was that Jews were good while Muslims are bad. I hated this article and knew it was full of lies, but I didn't have the historical references need to refute the many lies it deployed.
So I reached out to the US Holocaust Museum, hoping for a pointer to an article or something that would help me collect that information needed for a proper refutation. Instead, I got a many-page, extensively researched response from Dr. Elizabeth White, a PhD. historian and expert on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust genocide and mass atrocities who works at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With her permission, I am including her response verbatim here. I encourage you to read it, share it, and use it in your own arguments against this particularly hypocritical strain of bigotry that's emerging now.
I'm also linking to the article, which I refused to do when I originally complained about it, so that you can have the proper context for the refutation. Obviously, I reject every argument the article is making---I wish there was a way to indicate this on Facebook.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/1217/no-muslim-refugees-are-not-jewish-wwii-refugees-michael-qazvini
Dear Mr. Karger:
Once again, thank you for your inquiry to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and my apologies for the delay in responding. There are many fallacies in the article you sent, some of which I address with individual bullets below. First, as you have noted, bigotry reduces people to one aspect of their identity, such as their race or religion, ascribes to everyone sharing (or perceived to share in) that identity the characteristics, actions or beliefs of some members of the identity group, and judges members or perceived members of the identity group not by their actions as individuals but based on that one aspect of their identity. A common device of hate speech is to present facts or factoids indicating that some members of the target identity group think or behave in a manner that is offensive or dangerous and then to use this “evidence” to condemn everyone in the group. This is particularly true of antisemitic hate speech. For example, the Nazis ascribed to all those whom they regarded as Jews - whether or not they considered themselves Jews - the intent to corrupt and destroy the German people through capitalism and Bolshevism, using as “evidence” the role that a few Jews played in finance and in socialist and communist movements. The article on “Muslim refugees” you forwarded takes a similar approach: it reduces to one aspect of their identity a large group of people who are quite diverse in their national, ethnic and cultural origins, their professional, social and educational backgrounds, their political beliefs, and even their religious views and practices, and it selectively uses facts as well as misinformation and false analogies to “prove” that everyone in the group presents a threat.
· The first sentence of the article implies that thousands of Muslim refugees are being allowed into the United States “without proper security screenings.” Refugees undergo the highest degree of security screening of any entrants to the United States, and the process takes 12 to 18 months or longer. Refugees from Syria undergo an even more rigorous screening process than refugees from other countries. For a description of the refugee screening process you may wish to read the following from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington: http://www.heritage.org/…/how-the-refugee-vetting-process-w…. While this article makes repeated reference to the San Bernardino attack, please note that refugees did not commit the attack.
· The second sentence states that the comparison between Muslim refugees fleeing political and religious persecution today and Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust during World War II is not only false but insulting to Holocaust victims. I can assure you that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is very attuned to and sensitive toward the views of Holocaust survivors in the United States, many of whom have in fact made exactly the comparison that the article claims is false and insulting to them. This is why the Museum has issued two statements on the refugee problem in recent months.
· The article states that the resistance to admitting Jewish refugees during World War II was founded on “isolationist policies developed as a consequence of World War I” and not security concerns, while acknowledging that antisemitism may have played a role. Antisemitism is based, of course, on the belief that Jews present a threat, such as to a society’s religious, social or political order, economy, culture, or racial or ethnic composition. The view of Jewish immigrants as a threat influenced U.S. immigration policies during the interwar years and, after the start of the war, became the principal reason advanced by the U.S. government for refusing to admit Jewish refugees.
Following World War I, the United States sharply restricted immigration and in 1924 instituted strict quotas that limited both the number of immigrant visas that could be granted and the countries whose nationals could qualify for those visas. The effect of the 1924 immigration law was to advantage immigration from Northern and Western Europe, sharply restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and effectively bar immigration by natives of Africa or most of Asia. What primarily drove these changes was not isolationism but a combination of racism and fear. As reflected in the testimony of the “expert eugenics agent” to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that proposed the 1924 immigration law, many in the American ruling elite feared that the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (the latter including over two million Jews) in the previous 30 years had brought in people with inferior physical and mental capacities who, through their high birthrate, were degrading the superior stock of white, largely Protestant Americans of Western European origin. Adding to this sense of insecurity was the “red scare” that erupted in the United States following the communist uprisings in Europe and labor unrest in the United States during and following World War I. Eastern European immigrants in particular, and especially the Jews among them, were suspected of espousing radical ideologies and seeking to subvert American democracy. This attitude is reflected in a State Department memo addressed to one of the Congressional authors of the 1924 immigration act and describing Russian and Polish Jewish emigrants: “They are filthy, Un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” (Quoted in Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-45, p. 32)
During the Depression, economic concerns became the primary argument for restricting immigration. In 1930, President Hoover ordered a broad interpretation of the 1924 act’s clause barring immigrants likely to become a public charge: during a time of high unemployment, he viewed any immigrant likely to seek a job as falling under this bar. The State Department filled only a small fraction of the quotas - for Germany, 10% or less - for most of the 1930s. As the issue of refugees from Nazi persecution became more urgent during the late 1930s, isolationist arguments joined economic justifications for restricting and even ending immigration. Undergirding these arguments was an increasing and increasingly vociferous antisemitism that portrayed Jews as an anti-Christian force that had caused the Depression and was plotting to destroy the nation by embroiling it in foreign wars and fomenting revolution. 67% of Americans polled in July 1938 opposed admitting political refugees from Germany and Austria; when the question explicitly referenced Jewish refugees, the percentage opposed was 75% in March 1938, falling to 71% in November 1938, following the explosion of anti-Jewish violence and persecution in Nazi Germany ushered in by the Kristallnacht pogrom. 62% polled in January 1939 opposed even admitting German Jewish children. The following month, 41% of Americans polled believed that Jews held too much power in the country.
With the outbreak of World War II and as the Nazi conquest in Europe advanced, the chief reason advanced for not admitting refugees became national security: Nazi Germany and its then ally, the Soviet Union, were supposedly embedding their agents among the refugees or coercing legitimate refugees to act as their agents by threatening their relatives at home. There was widespread belief that a fifth column was actively working to destroy the United States. U.S. political leaders encouraged this belief, blaming France’s swift fall in the spring of 1940 on the work of a fifth column and warning the public about the infiltration tactics of the totalitarian powers. U.S. Ambassador to France William Bullitt claimed that more than half the spies captured in France were Nazi and Communist agents who had posed as refugees. Jewish refugees came under particular suspicion, with the State Department claiming that Germany was helping Jewish criminals to get visas and the U.S. Ambassador in Havana reporting rumors that Jewish refugees in Cuba had celebrated the fall of Paris. FDR himself stated at a June 1940 press conference that there were spies among the refugees in the US and some “definitely proven spies” among Jewish refugees in other countries who had been coerced to act as German agents. Citing the danger of subversion by immigrants, the State Department reversed the liberalization of visa procedures that had allowed increased numbers of Jewish refugees to enter in 1938-1939. In June 1941 (four months before Nazi Germany barred emigration for Jews), it even ordered that no visas be given to applicants who had close relatives in Germany or any area dominated by Germany. The public perception of Jews as presenting a threat to Americans actually increased after the United States entered the war and even after the government acknowledged that Nazi Germany was exterminating the Jews: 51% of Americans polled believed that Jews had too much power in December 1942; that number continued to rise during the war and peaked at 58% in June 1945.
· The article claims that Muslim states are refusing to take in refugees who are Muslim and implies that the reason the United States should have admitted Jewish refugees from the Holocaust was that they did not have a Jewish state to go to, rather than to protect them from persecution and murder. In any event, like refugees generally, refugees from the Muslim countries targeted by the recent temporary travel ban have fled primarily to neighboring countries. Over 80% of Syrian refugees are in the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq; Afghani refugees have fled overwhelmingly to Pakistan and Iran, Tunisia has the largest number of Libyan refugees, Chad the most Sudanese refugees, and Somali refugees are primarily in Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as Yemen. All but two of these are majority Muslim countries. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the top six countries that have taken in refugees are: Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia and Jordan, all but one majority Muslim. Large inflows of refugees put serious strain on the resources of host countries (consider that Lebanon, with little more than 4 million in population at the start of the Syrian uprising, has taken in more than 1 million Syrian refugees), and lead to tensions that can be destabilizing. Lightening the burden on the primary host countries is thus a security as well as a humanitarian issue.
In addition to being wrong on the facts, this claim is logically flawed. It seems to argue that all refugees should be processed according to their religious faith -- as opposed to their nationality, which is the current process -- and imposes a religious requirement for resettlement of refugees. If refugees should only go to states where their faith is the established religion, whither the Yezidis? Since the United States does not have an established religion, under this logic it should not take any refugees who have a religious faith; or, if it should only take refugees who belong to the faith of the majority of Americans, it should have refused to take in Jewish displaced persons or Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union once the state of Israel had been established.
· The article states that Muslim refugees are fleeing persecution stemming from a schism within the Islamic faith that has at times fueled violence. Surely this is an argument for admitting Muslim refugees into the United States, many of whose original European settlers fled persecution fueled by often violent sectarian strife within the Christian faith. In any event, the Sunni-Shia schism has played no role in the conflicts that have produced refugees from Libya, Somalia and Sudan, three of the countries targeted in the recent temporary travel ban. Most Syrian refugees are fleeing violence at the hands of the Assad regime, which is responsible for 75% of the casualties in the Syrian conflict. The regime chose to confront peaceful demonstrations demanding a democratic and pluralistic Syria in 2011 with massive violence that particularly targeted civilian members of Syria’s Sunni majority. It intentionally sought to transform the uprising into a sectarian conflict that would allow Assad (a member of the Alawite Shia sect) to present himself as the only alternative to a Syria ruled by Sunni Islamist extremists. The regime has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against its citizens not out of religious motives but a ruthless determination to cling to power, no matter the cost. The motives of other factions involved in the conflict, whether in support of or opposition to the regime, are varied: some, for example, seek autonomy for their ethnic group, some to impose their version of Sunni or Shia orthodoxy, some to create a democratic Syria. The article is at least correct in noting that the largest category of victims of the self-styled Islamic state is Muslims.
· The article contends that Muslim refugees are more religious than the Jewish refugees during World War II, who constituted a largely secular and highly assimilated “ethno-religious block.” The Jews who sought to escape Nazi persecution and murder during World War II were highly diverse in terms of national origin, religious practice, socio-economic status, political views and degree of assimilation. Many German and Austrian Jews were highly assimilated; many were also religious - one does not preclude the other. The German attack on Poland that started the war drove hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews to seek refuge elsewhere, and as the war progressed they were joined by Jews from other countries in Eastern Europe. These Jews tended on the whole to be observant as well as poorer and less assimilated than Jews in Western Europe. They were thus quite similar to the masses of religiously devout immigrants who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the poorer parts of Europe and marginalized sectors of their home society.
· The article states that because of their religion, Muslim refugees “may have sympathies and views that are antithetical to Western values.” This is similar to arguments made in the United States against admitting various groups of immigrants, such as Catholics, as well, of course, as Jews. The 2013 Pew Research Center poll that the article cherry-picks to support a different point found that a majority of Muslims, including in the Middle East, prefer democracy to authoritarian government and support religious freedom. For many Muslim refugees fleeing persecution at home, their support for democracy and pluralism is what led to their persecution.
· The article cites the 2013 Pew Research Center poll referenced above to show that the majority of Muslims from certain countries, such as Pakistan, favor the imposition of sharia law. The same Pew study also finds that:
“even in many countries where there is strong backing for sharia, most Muslims favor religious freedom for people of other faiths. In Pakistan, for example, three-quarters of Muslims say that non-Muslims are very free to practice their religion, and fully 96% of those who share this assessment say it is “a good thing.” Yet 84% of Pakistani Muslims favor enshrining sharia as official law. These seemingly divergent views are possible partly because most supporters of sharia in Pakistan - as in many other countries - think Islamic law should apply only to Muslims. Moreover, Muslims around the globe have differing understandings of what sharia means in practice.”
· The article claims that Muslims have “disproportionately contributed” to racist attacks against other minorities, especially Jews, and that European Jews are victims of “anti-Semitic [sic], white and Islamo-Supremacist harassment, bullying and intimidation.” It cites to “the latest” Pew Center for Research poll, but the link goes to a 2008 study that does not contain this information (nor could I find it in any other Pew publication). Instead, it polls the views on religion of many groups of people throughout the world. Among other things, it tracks a rise in antisemitism in Europe but shows that anti-Muslim sentiment is far stronger. Both this poll and the 2013 poll cited earlier in the article show that sizable majorities in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed reject terrorism and violence in the name of Islam. Muslims are also being subjected to “white and Islamo-Supremacist harassment, bullying and intimidation,” as well as outright violence, including by the same groups that commit antisemitic attacks.
· Citing another Pew study, the article warns that Europe’s Muslim population is younger than its non-Muslim population and therefore increasing more quickly and that the influx of male migrants to Europe will “exacerbate this demographic shift.” The Pew study cited by the article notes that Muslims make up 6% of Europe’s population and that they will likely make up 8% in 2030, not enough to qualify as a “demographic shift.”
· The article cites two deadly terrorist attacks as evidence that the migrants are “import[ing] anti-Semitic ideologies and beliefs that may harm existing minority populations, especially Jews.” Neither of the cited attacks was carried out by migrants. The article also conflates the problem of large numbers of migrants from Muslim states going to Europe without any prior screening with the issue of a much smaller number of refugees (mostly women and children) being admitted to the United States after extensive screening.
· The warning in point Five of the article echoes warnings that have been made since the founding of the United States about various groups of immigrants (such as the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Jews): through their high birth rate and alien beliefs, they were going to undermine the ethnic composition, social order and political institutions of the country. The dreaded offspring of these groups have helped make the United States the world’s strongest military and economic power, have contributed to its advances in science, technology, and the arts, and have sacrificed their lives to protect its freedom and security.
I hope the above points will be of some use to you.
Regards, I have chosen to move to dreamwidth.org. Please join me there: http://angerona.dreamwidth.org/1536891.html?mode=reply ;
comments