Is there something in the water in the US that makes it necessary for people to be in a state of perpetual hysterical fear?
There is something truly ugly about the latest manifestation, the anti-refugee hysteria in the US following the ISIS attacks in Paris and Beirut. (Incidentally, why is the media focusing almost entirely on Paris? Or is the answer too obvious to even bother to mention?) Politicians in various states are falling over themselves to grandstand on this issue, stating that they will not accept refugees because they need to keep their residents safe even though they lack the power to stop migration into the country and the movement of anyone across state borders once they are in.
Tierney Sneed has a good round up of what they have been saying, though she does not mention the terrible proposal by a Tennessee Republican leader to use the National Guard to round up Syrian refugees already settled in the state and ship them out.
As has been pointed out many times, refugees face much tighter scrutiny than other categories of people entering the US so the idea that this channel would be used to infiltrate the US with would-be assailants makes no sense. As far as is known now, all the attackers in Paris were of Belgian nationality and not refugees.
But you cannot expect Republican, and even some Democratic, politicians to let facts or logic or even basic human decency to stand in the way of both creating a sense of fear and then pretending that they are doing something about it.
Tierney Sneed has a good round up of what they have been saying, though she does not mention the terrible proposal by a Tennessee Republican leader to use the National Guard to round up Syrian refugees already settled in the state and ship them out.
What? Wait a minute! Weren’t the rightwingnuts screaming a while back that Guatamalan children were actually ISIS infiltrators filled with ebola? By the rightwingnuts own “logic”, anyone can be an ISIS infiltrator and so it wouldn’t make any sense to single out any particular nationality. In order to be safe, Tennessee would actually have to round up Syrians AND Belgians AND Canadians AND Kentuckians AND everyone else.
Yeah, the panic and hysteria of the right wingnuts is infinite.
1. Last year it was…Ebola. To the point where real heroes coming back from fighting the Ebola epidemic were looked upon like…plague carriers. Even people coming back from Africa who were thousands of miles away were being asked to stay away from their jobs. It was irrational.
2. Followed by the biggie. Children. Central American children. Carrying diseases like TB which have been in the US for centuries. Or Ebola which is an African virus.
3. Now it is Syrian refugees. There are 2 million in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon, almost a million in Jordan, and…2,000 in the USA. And we are acting like they are Ebola infected children from..Honduras.
National guard roundups. concentration camps. yellow crescent armbands. It’s all just a movie we’ve seen before. Fascism, bigotry, panic, hate. I used to be proud to be an American. Not any more. I’m a lot more afraid of Trump or Carson supporters than Ebola, children, or Syrian refugees.
I am just waiting for Trump to propose the use of nuclear weapons. I give him two months.