Ignorance Towards Syrian Refugees at All-Time High in South Carolina Hearing

A South Carolina Senate committee hearing on proposed legislation to restrict refugee resettlement included misleading testimony. Reporter Eva Moore authored this article published in the Free Times of January 27, 2016.

And one woman went all in on themes touched on by a number of other speakers.

“Not only is the federal government bringing South American and Central American foreigners to disenfranchise me,” she said, “But in their frenzy to import a more favorable voting bloc the federal government is compelling South Carolinians to accept Muslim refugees as well.”

She invoked the recent mass assault in Cologne, Germany, suggesting a deeper agenda to refugees’ desire to come to America.

“I find it curious that Syrian men of fighting age have abandoned their country in a time of crisis; American men did no such things during our bloody Civil War,” she said. “Could it be that wealthy older male Muslims have taken for themselves a disproportionate number of wives? Perhaps these older polygamists are only too happy to send their young men out to take women through conquest. And if they die trying, their imams have assured them that their deepest sexual and social frustrations will finally be satisfied. How disastrous that European men relinquished their duty to defend their wives and daughters and permitted their government to strip them of the means to do so.”

The racism & religious bigotry reported in this article are outrageous, but pointing that out hardly seems to matter these days. A few basic facts should be mentioned, however.

The idea that the majority of refugees are young men is false. Most refugees leaving Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (thanks, USA warmongers!) first arrive in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran and elsewhere. From those camps, typically a male member of the family takes the expensive and dangerous crossing to Europe in the hope of either working illegally to save enough money to transport the rest of his family to a safer destination or establishing an asylum claim which would allow him to work legally, save money and then bring his family safely by airplane rather than dangerously by rubber dinghy.

Some military-age males leave their families in Syria with the same logic, with the additional motive of fleeing the government’s draft or the draft of one of the rebel militias. They may regard the journey out of Syria to one of the refugee camps in Jordan or Lebanon or Turkey to be dangerous and hence not want to risk the entire family just to arrive at a refugee camp where the family would linger again for 4-5 years without opportunity for work or education for the children.

Basically, these people have an array of bad choices, and generally they are sending the younger males ahead to make the rest of the family’s journey safer.

If you want to understand this better, start following Iyad Baghdadi on Twitter.

More important than all of this, however, is that those young men’s destination is Europe, not North America. Why do you ask? People cross the Aegean Sea on rickety boats, but they don’t attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean that way.

The refugees who would settle in the U.S. would most likely be coming as families from refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

Finally, the idea that military-age males should fight instead of flee is strange. For which side would this woman have people fight? The government which refuses fair elections and responded to peaceful protests with massacres and sectarian incitement? Daesh? Al-Nusra front? Free Syrian Army?

Perhaps if whites in the rebellious states refused to fight the federal government the U.S. Civil War would not have been so bloody.

And let’s not neglect the witness’s call to protect white womanhood.

P.S. “Ignorance at an all-time high” is a phrase I’ve adopted from Public Enemy’s Can We Get a Witness?.

P.P.S. Romanticizing the US Civil War continues to muddle our thinking.