The emergence of a viral photo depicting a drowned toddler on a Turkish beach two weeks ago renewed the political debate over Syrian refugees being accepted in the U.S.
Presidential candidates like Lindsey Graham, Martin O’Malley, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump have all called on the U.S. to accept more refugees than the current number. But the counter point to accepting Syrians, one that has largely been led by politicians like Peter King (R-NY), has focused largely on ISIS-infiltrators posing as refugees.
“What I’ve seen and speaking to people involved in the screening, I don’t how they’re going to go from 1,500 to 10,000,” King said. “We know that ISIS wants to infiltrate its people through refugees.”
This argument — that has been regularly paraded out by right wing media and by people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh — appears to be little more than thinly veiled Islamophobia.
“This whole effort to block Syrian refugees from America is Islamophobic at its core,” Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told ThinkProgress. “The basic theory is to block any immigration of any kind from any Muslim country.” Hooper added that the move had a bit of irony considering that the Syrian-American community has been religiously diverse for decades.
Attacks on U.S. soil are always a concern in the post 9/11 world. That’s why any refugee considered for resettlement in the United States goes through a series of checks. The United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR screens and tracks refugees. In order to get any form of aid or resettlement, you must be registered. Before resettlement in the U.S. in particular, officials conduct interviews and do a thorough background check on each person.
National security should never be taken lightly, but that shouldn’t stop us from asking whether ISIS even wants to send operatives disguised as refugees to the U.S. in the first place. So far, the group has prioritized buttressing their self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq over attacks on outside targets. Nonetheless, the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January and a number of foiled plots inspired by the jihadi group shook the nation along with other Western countries. These incidents were not committed by infiltrators though. They were committed by people with valid passports who were born in the countries they were attacking.
ISIS currently has thousands upon thousands of people with valid western passports fighting for them in the Middle East. These people are a much more pertinent threat than refugees largely because they can travel so easily. A voyage that might take a Syrian refugee months would take a European or American passport holder less than a day.
What this opposition comes down to is American’s generally negative view of Islam. A YouGov/Huffington Post poll conducted in March 2015 shows that more than half of all Americans have an unfavorable view of the Muslim faith. Of those polled, only 16 percent said they work with a Muslim, 23 percent said they had a Muslim friend, and only 10 percent said they’d actually been inside a mosque. A separate poll from February of this year by LifeWay Research found that 27 percent of Americans felt that ISIS represents true Islam, while nearly half of the senior Protestant pastors interviewed said the same. Meanwhile, a number of Republican presidential candidates regularly criticize President Obama for failing to understand that America’s real enemy is “radical Islam.”
This is all despite stern condemnation from the international Islamic community toward ISIS. As my colleagues Igor Volsky and Jack Jenkins wrote back in September:
Countless Islamic groups around the globe have also vehemently rejected ISIS. French Imams are blasting the militant group from their pulpits. Britian’s largest Mosque has declared them “Un-Islamic.” Sunni and Shia clerics in Iraq have distributed a fatwa to nearly 50,000 mosques announcing that ISIS is “not in any way linked to [the Muslim] faith” and warning that failing to stand up against the group is effectively a sin. Even Egypt’s Grand Mufti has lambasted the group, and Dar al-Ifta, one of the most influential Muslim schools in the world, has launched a global campaign to strike the word “Islamic” from ISIS’s title, seeking to rebrand it as “al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria,” or QSIS, saying the organization has “tarnished image of Islam across the globe.”
Of course Islamophobia extends beyond just American borders. In fact, British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Syrian refugees in Lebanon earlier this week only to be told by a Lebanese minister that “two to three percent” could be members of ISIS. Education Minister Elias Bousaab understandably doesn’t have any statistics to cite, largely because Lebanon has mostly makeshift, unofficial refugee camps and a porous border with Syria that allows those inclined to travel back and forth between countries. So where did he find this figure? “I don’t have any information. My gut feeling is, yes, they are facilitating such an operation,” he told Cameron. “For what reason, I don’t know.”
Bousaab represents a right wing Lebanese party that recently held rallies where two politicians held signs with slogans like “ISIS can also wear ties,” an affront aimed at a fellow political party predominately made up of Sunni Muslims. Lebanese security forces recently claimed they had arrested two members of ISIS who were encouraging people to join massive — largely peaceful — anti-government protests.
While security concerns are real, fearmongering is being used worldwide as a political tool. In the U.S., it is being manipulated to stop refugees in need from being resettled. “Everyone understands security concerns,” Daryl Grisgraber, Refugees International’s Senior Middle East Advocate, told ThinkProgress. “But we can’t let worries over terrorism or counterterrorism overrule international law or humanitarian commitments.”