If You Are Jewish And Against Syrian Refugees, You Are A Hypocrite

I was nearly 5 years old, and soaring from the excitement of my first plane ride. Now 83, he is a pathologist in Buffalo, New York.

A key concern was the destabilising effect that large numbers of refugees might have on society, driven by the perception that they would be unable to assimilate, a notion that is still front and centre of the current debate over the Syrian refugee crisis.

Polling methodology at the time was less exact than it is today, but anti-Semitism was prevalent during the run-up to World War II, historians say, and contributed to the hesitation about accepting Jewish refugees.

Of course, those men with rifles were not our executioners, but our escorts.

Presidential candidates such former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have said the USA should give preference to Christian refugees and help Muslims fleeing Syria to relocate to other Muslim nations.

America risked reacting similarly toward Syrians fleeing for their lives, he warned. Syrian refugees, however, theoretically have many options.

Left: Final notice of approval for entry.

The backlash against Syrian refugees arriving in the United States was sparked by the Paris terror attacks, where it’s suspected – but not confirmed – that one of the assailants came through a refugee processing facility in Greece on a fake Syrian passport. California Gov. Jerry Brown joined him, saying in a statement, “I intend to work closely with the President so that he can both uphold America’s traditional role as a place of asylum, but also ensure that anyone seeking refuge in America is fully vetted in a sophisticated and utterly reliable way”.

Seth Jones, director of the global Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, testified to Congress in June 2015 that the terrorist threat from refugees is low.

“We mustn’t forget our values as a Jewish people, things that we learn from tradition and from our historical memory”, he said. And the question in its entirety was, ‘What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian and other political refugees to come into the US?’ European Jews. But the United States was a lot stingier in handing out actual visas to German emigrants (most of whom were Jews) during the early years of Nazi rule in Germany than it had to be. Here’s a contemporary stat, from the Migration Policy Institute think tank: Since 9/11, America has taken in roughly 745,000 refugees.

In the meantime, the passengers had arranged documents before their trip that allowed them to enter Cuba.

“The State Department cooperated in preparing a Saturday Evening Post article warning the public that ‘disguised as refugees, Nazi agents have penetrated all over the world, as spies, fifth columnists, propagandists, or secret commercial agents, ‘” he wrote. “Onboard the St. Louis, they had passed close enough to Miami to see the city’s lights”. Her husband was later sent to a concentration camp in southern France. A few of them even cabled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt begging to be allowed entry into the United States, but they were forced to return to Europe where 254 of them were eventually killed in the Holocaust. Almost a thousand refugees, majority German Jews, boarded the ship with the hope of finding safety across the Atlantic. By 1944, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau would write a blistering memo complaining that State Department officials had “not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Government machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews”.

But USA limits on refugees during World War II, influenced by anti-Semitism, were fed by fears the Nazis “would plant agents, spies and saboteurs among the Jewish refugees and that they would pressure the Jews, particularly those whose families were still in Germany, to act as agents on behalf of the Third Reich”, Lichtman said.

The danger of stigmatization: Focusing our hatred and fear on refugees is not only wrong-headed and un-American, it also plays directly into ISIS’ goals. They simply had no choice, because otherwise their relatives back home would be in danger-an approach the article called a “blitzkreig of blackmail”.

Such fears have been echoed by a number of elected officials since the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. The dehumanising portrayal of refugees as vermin, as bringers of disease and danger, tapped into deep-seated prejudices against those of other faiths, as they do today.