Stuck on Stupid: Progressive Facebook edition (Part 1)

facebook-thumbs-downMy Progressive Facebook friends have received their marching orders from Democrat central and the result has been a cascade of stupid cluttering up my Facebook feed. (This is the curse of a life spent living in Blue zones.) Lest I say something unforgivable to people whose good will I need in order for my children and me to get through our daily lives, I’m venting my spleen here.

I’ll start with my own Congressman, Jared Huffman, who is more than adequately filling Lynn Woolsey’s shoes, since she’s hard Left and not very bright:

Jared Huffman on refugees

If you’ll bear with me, let me just break out the problems with that self-congratulatory paragraph:

Ignoring the ad hominem attack with which Huffman begins his post, let’s get to the “factual statements.”  First, he says that “[t]hese people [are] overwhelmingly women and children. . . .”  Really?  That’s not what the demographics in Europe were.  In Europe, according to the UN, a source I’m sure Huffman trusts implicitly, the fleeing refugees were overwhelmingly men:  In the beginning, the UN was reporting that 72% of the refugees were men.  That number has since dropped to 62%, although I have to admit that I don’t trust the UN not to have fiddled with the numbers after the outcry about a huge tide of military-aged Muslim men swarming Europe. So no, if Europe is anything to go by, we’re not getting the widows and orphans.  We’re getting the fighting men.

Widows and orphans amongst refugees

Second, he says that they “are the most heavily scrutinized of any people entering the U.S.”  That’s a semantic game, because it doesn’t say what that heavy scrutiny consists of.  To begin with, it starts at the UN, which is a combination of inefficiency, corruption, and malevolence, with a heavy antisemitic and anti-American bias.  Next, the refugee goes to a “Refugee Support Center,” which is a foreign agency with which the State Department contracts:

The RSC is not an American entity.  International and local organizations are contracted to staff and operate the RSCs, and while there is a measure of screening applied to the workers, it is largely limited to typical employment information as opposed to high-level security clearance screening.

The gatekeepers to America aren’t Americans.  Couple this with the reality on the ground in Syria – there are no government records to search – and the dossier prepared on Syrian refugees is thin indeed.  There have been credible reports that at least one of the RSCs tasked with processing requests for asylum has been routinely rejecting applications from Christians – not after careful consideration, mind you, but rather by tossing them directly into the trash.

The RSCs in these areas are staffed by Muslims, and clear preference has been given to Muslim applicants, resulting in a 96:4 ratio of Muslim asylees to Christian/non-Muslim asylees.

When they get to the State Department, there’s an electronic database search, except we don’t have electronic databases for war torn Syria.  This vetting process is therefore a sham.

And add to that our government’s notorious inefficiency (think VA or OPM) and you know that this “heavy scrutiny” is effectively meaningless.

Third, he says that “no refugee has EVER committed a terrorist act in the US.”  Again, this is word play.  We haven’t yet had “refugees” from Syria come to our country, but we’ve certainly had some “immigrants” from Muslim majority areas come.  We’ve also had true “refugees” come from Somalia, and those refugees are doing some interesting things, like going off to join ISIS. The numbers are most certainly small for those refugees (about a dozen in 2014), but they were clearly Islamic supremacists who planned to go off and commit acts of terrorism, although not in the US, at least to start with.

But what about those other immigrants, the ones who aren’t strictly “refugees” but who are still part of the Muslim masses who have made their way to America?  The vast, vast majority haven’t committed terrorist acts, but some most certainly have — like the Tsarnaev brothers, two Chechen boys who set off devastating bombs at the Boston Marathon.  Or the recent shooting at the Marine Recruiting station in Chattanooga, that killed five.  The shooter was Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Jordanian citizen born in Kuwait.  Mohamed Mohamud, who planned to kill dozens when he set off a bomb amongst Christmas revelers in Portland (mostly children), was originally from Somalia.  The only thing that stopped him was solid FBI work.

So Huffman’s main argument is premised on three big lies.  Once one gets passed the lies, the meat of his argument, of course, is to grab guns: “How about better securing the homeland against foreign and homegrown terrorists by tightening our absurdly permissive gun laws?”

How stupid does one have to be to think that terrorists are going to obey gun laws?  If they can’t get guns one way, they’ll get them another way — as is shown daily in gun control Chicago and Detroit, or as was shown vividly in fiercely gun control France, which saw not one, but two, utterly savage terrorist attacks in 2015 using guns.  The only thing that will happen if law abiding citizens are denied guns is that they will be sitting ducks when a terrorist comes along.  The best scenario is when citizens are armed, as happened with the attempted terrorist attack against Pamela Geller’s draw Mohamed event in Texas. There, where the planned victims were armed, the only ones killed in a terrorist attack were . . . the terrorists. For another example of guns’ utility in preventing terrorist attacks, look at this video from Israel, where a gun carrier instantly thwarted a knife attack:

That’s how a law-abiding citizenry protects itself against ideological killers — or, heck, against any killers.

Whenever someone lies first and grabs guns second, I’m always deeply suspicious of the point they’re trying to make. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. shouldn’t admit refugees fleeing from the fighting in Syria — many are just ordinary people caught in the crossfire — but it does mean that I would proceed with incredible care and distrust anything that comes from the Obama administration.