Pro-Hamas Demonstrations Prove We Need to Change Our Immigration Strategy. By Bruce Bawer.
If the jihadist butchery of October 7 was monstrous, the spectacle of huge crowds applauding it was appalling. It shocked many people. It shouldn’t have. Many of us have spent years writing endlessly about the ugliness of Islamic ideology — notably the murderous hatred of Jews that is enshrined in the Koran, taught in the madrassas, and preached in the mosques — only to feel that our words were falling on deaf ears. …
Radical proposal:
America not only needs to stop accepting sharia-following immigrants, but needs to identify and deport every immigrant in the country who has been observed celebrating Hamas terrorism. This is a proposal that, before October 7, would have sounded offensive to many American ears. Perhaps after October 7 it doesn’t sound quite so harsh. But if the truth offends, so be it.
We’re all living in the aftermath of a massive misstep by George W. Bush, who, after 9/11, rushed to proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace whose adherents long for freedom and whose teachings are entirely virtuous. The terrorists, Bush insisted, hadn’t just hijacked planes — they’d hijacked their faith.
Whether Bush himself believed these misrepresentations or not, the fact is that they’ve persisted throughout American society for the last twenty-two years. They led to two long, expensive wars and to countless unnecessary deaths. And they continue to mislead many Americans into thinking and acting irresponsibly. After 9/11 we could have closed our borders to devotees of sharia and prevented any number of horrors. The brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings moved to America in 2002 and 2004. The perpetrator of the 2017 truck attack in New York City immigrated in 2010. …
Imported the wrong team:
There are many people around the world who would love to emigrate to America because they truly do yearn to breathe free and to be productive members of American society. These are people who aren’t fans of terrorism, and who may even be victims of it. They’re people who would happily wave Old Glory and never think of hoisting a Hamas flag.
And they’re people, in a great many cases, who want desperately to leave Muslim countries because they’re persecuted for being Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, ex-Muslims, or Ahmadi Muslims.
Recall that when Obama was president, he severely limited America’s intake of persecuted Middle Eastern Christians while accepting unprecedented numbers of Muslim migrants — “the terrorists of tomorrow,” as Daniel Greenfield has put it — who weren’t fleeing anything. It was a deeply cynical, morally bankrupt, and America-hating policy.
Another radical proposal:
Why can’t we do the opposite of that? Instead of admitting armies of Muslims, why not focus on admitting non-Muslims who’ve suffered under Islam — a cohort whose numbers, frankly speaking, are colossal?
The evidence is so obvious:
Taking in all those faces at pro-Hamas rallies, full at once of inhuman hate and (despite their claim to be in pain over the deaths of Gazans) of near-manic glee — so different from the looks of perplexity, anguish, and despair at pro-Israeli events — one couldn’t help wondering: why do these people, enamored as they obviously are of sharia tyranny and of the brutal exercise of Islamic power against the infidel, want to live in America in the first place, unless they hope to help transform it from a free and pluralistic country into something more like Iran or Qatar or, yes, Gaza?
Presumably they want to enjoy all the economic advantages of being in a modern Western country even as they maintain fully intact their prehistoric non-Western ideology, with all its profoundly challenging social and cultural aspects, its inherent problems and prejudices.
Beyond a certain point, of course, that combination of Westernism and Islam is not only unworkable but malignant – a chemical experiment doomed to result in an explosion.
Maybe it’s time to take stock and maybe change course.
