November 18, 2015 at 4:12 p.m.
We shall never surrender
We shall never surrender
No sooner had the president boasted that he had ISIS contained, its terrorists slaughtered 129 innocent people in Paris and seriously wounded hundreds more. We suppose it depends on what your definition of "contained" is.
Now Obama is very mad because some governors - well, OK, most governors - don't want to take any of the millions of Syrian refugees that need somewhere to go to escape the ruthless barbarity of Islamic fanatics.
It's irrational, the president believes, to think these refugees are terrorists. His liberal media allies agree. Here's how Slate puts it: "People who climbed mountains or crossed the Mediterranean on rafts did not arrive in France and transform themselves immediately into armed terrorist killers."
That's very true. It's also very true that no serious people - even those who oppose resettlement in the United States - believe the Syrian refugees are terrorists.
That is only what Obama and the liberal media want you to think they believe. What they actually believe is this: It isn't the refugees who are the threat, it's the terrorists who will pose as refugees and enter the country with them that pose the danger.
One of the Paris attackers did just that. The liberal media is crowing to anyone who will eat it that the terrorist's passport was fake and he wasn't a refugee.
So what? He posed as a refugee and got through.
All of which leads to a very simple truth: The more Syrian refugees entering the country, the more terrorist imposters we will have coming in with them.
After all, ISIS has vowed that it is going to do just that, and, as far as we can tell, ISIS has either made good or tried to make good on its threats.
But, Obama and Democratic apologists say, we don't have to worry because all of our refugees will be thoroughly vetted by our very superior immigration and border forces.
Only thing is, even senior Obama administration officials are frankly worried they can't filter the terrorists out, and this was underscored this week in none other than the liberal Washington Post in an article entitled "Senior Obama officials have warned of challenges in screening refugees from Syria."
In other words, these officials are fretting about the vetting.
Here's how the Post puts it: "While they say U.S. security measures are much better than in the past, vetting Syrian refugees poses a quandary: How do you screen people from a war-torn country that has few criminal and terrorist databases to check?"
Here's director of National Intelligence James Clapper: "I don't, obviously, put it past the likes of ISIL to infiltrate operatives among these refugees, so that's a huge concern of ours."
And, as FBI director James Comey pointed out, it's happened before, when known terrorists slipped through the screening process during the Iraq War.
So while it's right to want to help the refugees, it's not our moral responsibility to get blown up trying to do so. The Syrian refugees need to stay out, at least for now.
But what about them? What do they do?
Fortunately, there's a way to help them and in so doing we can help ourselves. We can join France and Russia and other nations in a determined campaign to expel ISIS from the face of the Earth.
Instead of resettling the refugees, let's resettle the terrorists - off the planet. Then the refugees could go home and live in peace.
Incredibly, however, we have a president who does not have the will or the inclination to fight this enemy.
Our bombing raids in Syria don't even deserve to be called bombing raids. We refuse to strike at the heart of ISIS because they embed themselves within populated areas, and so our bombs fall far away, with no impact, like sprinkles in a drought.
A heavy rain is needed in the garden, though, and, thankfully, Russia and France are beginning to bring it.
In the end, fighting the war against Islamic radicals and then helping refugees resettle will be a costly mission, but it will surely cost less in the long run than the painful human costs we will incur by opening our borders in the short run.
We would make one exception, and that is for Christian refugees around the world, who are under increasing and extraordinary persecution. This is especially true of Syrian Christians.
The Wall Street Journal said it best, we believe: "The U.S. would have been right to accept and save more Jews from Nazi genocide in the 1930s and 1940s. Syrian Christians are no different today."
There's another parallel with the 1930s and 1940s we should avoid at all costs - the pathetic attempts to appease an enemy who is determined to destroy us.
Britain's Neville Chamberlain looked the other way, trying in every possible manner to accommodate Hitler to avoid war, and he continued to do so even as Nazi atrocities were publicly exposed as early as 1938.
At one point, Chamberlain even thought he had the Nazis contained. Sound familiar? All the while the foot-dragging allowed Hitler to build an ever more powerful force.
Today, the atrocities are mounting again - some 400 innocents dead, including those in the Beirut blasts, and more than 650 gravely wounded in less than three weeks - as the world faces another fascist machine. The consequences of foot-dragging will only grow more horrific.
Unfortunately, as in the pre-World War II days, appeasement and containment are the words of the day. But now is not the time for Neville Chamberlain.
Now is the time for Winston Churchill. When he got mad, he got fighting mad, and his words are worth recalling:
"We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ..."
We shall never surrender.
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