Jewish Americans are split on the question of Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States.
As the children of immigrants it is exceedingly difficult for us, from an ethical standpoint, to oppose the immigration of others into the United States. This is particularly true given the history of Jews in Europe during the middle of the last century.
The immigration question is largely partisan within American politics.
The Right tends to be wary of Muslim and Latino immigration into the country, when not in outright opposition, while the Left is generally willing to fling open the doors to whomever may come.
As someone concerned about the well-being of the Jewish people, however, it seems to me not unreasonable to be cautious. The scale of migration out of the Middle East that we are seeing today is somewhat comparable to the mass migrations that we saw following World War II.
It will, in fact, change the nature western societies, particularly in Europe.
Many Americans are concerned about Latino illegal immigration. As a Californian, I can tell you, that my neighbors tend to be concerned about gang activity, the prospect of rising crime, housing prices, and the economic hit that the tax-base will take in order to integrate the immigrant population into the schools and the medical facilities and so forth.
I am not.
What concerns me is that a Jihadi just killed about fifty people in Orlando, Florida, and all the Left can talk about is the NRA and Donald Trump.
As I wrote on Israel Thrives in response to a comment by Empress Trudy:
Can we, or should we, as the children of hounded immigrants deny the rights of other immigrants to come to the United States and enjoy "the blessings of liberty" as the Jewish people were able to do?It's a sticky point, isn't it?We are the children of immigrants, after all.In fact, obviously, the US is a country of immigrants with the exception of Native-Americans.So, if we wish to keep Jihadis out of the country we face an ethical dilemma.Given Jewish history in the 20th century, it tends to be difficult for us to make the argument against immigration.What I would insist upon, I guess, is a recognition of the fact that Islamic immigration is largely an anti-Semitic immigration - given polling data from the region - and therefore as a matter of basic common sense, and self-preservation, we are under no ethical obligation to support it.
It seems to me that there are two things that American Jews, and our friends, need to acknowledge.
The first is that the rise of political Islam is the single most significant international political happening since the demise of the Soviet Union and the second is that the gun control issue is a "red herring" when it comes to the issue of American Jihad.
Political Islam
We must recognize that political Islam is a very serious international political movement that represents a direct threat to the Jewish people and the secular West.
The Right seems to recognize this, but the Left does not.
In fact, the failure of the progressive-left to acknowledge the significance, or even existence, of political Islam represents a terrible and hypocritical form of bigotry. The "anti-racist" Left, I would argue, is the most racist political movement in Europe and the United States, outside of political Islam, today.
We call it Humanitarian Racism and it is a form of racism that presumes that "people of color," particularly Arab-Muslim men, are so "backward" and so deformed by western imperialism that they cannot be held to any standards of contemporary human decency. So, for example, if Arab parents and Arab media encourage their children to run out into the streets of Israel with hand-axes for the purpose of chopping down the first Jew that they see, we're supposed to believe that this is the fault of those Jews.
This is Humanitarian Racism and it is the prominent form of bigotry in the contemporary West.
The hypocrisy, of course, is profound.
If a Jewish kid wears dreadlocks at San Francisco State University he get accused of "cultural appropriation."
However, if Arab kids call for the genocide of the Jews via calls for "Intifada! Intifada! Long live the Intifada!" they are told by SFSU president, Leslie Wong, that they represent the very best of what the university stands for.
Gun Control, Orlando, and Immigration
It is reasonably obvious that Americans are going to have their handguns for home defense and their rifles and shotguns for shooting woodland creatures of various sorts.
The American Left, which used to represent my political hom, wants to argue that Orlando is about gun control.
It is not.
Orlando is about a violent political trend within the Muslim community that goes back at least to the 1920s with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
Some, for good reason, would argue that it actually goes back to Mohammad in the 7th century with his suggestion that Muslims should strike at the neck of the kuffars, the infidels. And although Omar Seddique Mateen was a native-born American with Afghani roots, the Orlando shooting points to the question of Arab-Muslim immigration into the United States because of the Jihadi inclinations of a significant percentage of its population.
This is not to argue that gun control is unnecessary, but merely to suggest that the Democratic Party is using gun control as a deflection of the real issue, the Jihad, which Democrats refuse to discuss lest they end up pointing the trembling finger of blame at one another while screaming from the hillsides "racist!"
We can never honestly face the Jihad, much less defeat it, if we cannot bring ourselves to discuss it.
The American Right seems comfortable enough discussing what is, in fact, a major international threat - just ask any freshly raped woman in Sweden - while those in the American Left would rather have root canal surgery than so much as breathe the words "radical Islamic terrorism."
There is a grand hypocrisy at work here.
The western-left claims to be "anti-racist" and yet represents the most racist political movement throughout Europe and the United States today with the sole exception of political Islam. The contemporary form of this racism is not entirely different from white western nineteenth-century imperial notions of "white man's burden." Smug and self-righteous white western leftists look upon their "little brown brothers" with benevolent contempt.
They honestly have such a low opinion of non-white people that they feel they must indulge any and all wrong-doing - up to and including the slaughter of around 50 people in an Orlando nightclub for the purpose of enforcing Sharia - as the fault of the US government for not rounding up guns. Or as the fault of a generalized, free-floating hatred for Gay people within American society. Or as the fault of right-wing "Islamophobia" which drives some Muslims into murderous fits of rage.
The truth is that most Muslims have no particular interest in waging Jihad or slaughtering their Gay neighbors. But, nonetheless, there is a trend within Islam that is highly traditionalist and that despises Gay people, Jewish people, non-Muslims, in general, and that believes that women should live their lives within a potato sack.
That trend is known as al-Sharia and it resides directly within the heart of the faith.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
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