Obama’s Moral Hypocrisy on the Syrian-Refugee Question Is Astounding

Loading

Charles Krauthammer:

The Syrian-refugee debate has become a national embarrassment. It begins with a president, desperate to deflect attention from the collapse of his foreign policy, retreating to his one safe zone — ad hominem attacks on critics, this time for lack of compassion toward Syrian widows and orphans.

This, without a glimmer of acknowledgment of his own responsibility for these unfortunate souls becoming widowed and orphaned, displaced and homeless, in the first place. A quarter-million deaths ago, when Bashar al-Assad began making war on his own people, he unleashed his air force and helicopters. They dropped high explosives, nail-filled barrel bombs, and even chemical weapons on helpless civilians. President Obama lifted not a finger.

In the earliest days, we could have stopped the slaughter: cratered Assad’s airfields, taken out his planes, grounded his helicopters, and created a nationwide no-fly zone. (We successfully maintained one over Kurdistan for twelve years between 1991 and 2003.)

At the time, Assad was teetering. His national-security headquarters had been penetrated and bombed. High-level aides were defecting. Military officers were forming a Free Syrian Army.

Against the advice of his top civilian and military aides, Obama refused to intervene. The widows and orphans he now so ostentatiously champions are the product of his coldhearted refusal to do anything that might sully his peacemaking image.

Obama has also charged the Republicans with cowardice, afraid to grant admittance to “three-year-old orphans.” He gave zero credit to the very real concern of governors and other officials that terrorists could be embedded amid the refugees. This is no theoretical proposition. At least one of the Paris attackers came to France by way of Greece.

Obama’s own officials have admitted that the absence of thorough data makes it nearly impossible to properly vet Syrian refugees. In response, many Republicans (and some Democrats) called for a pause in admitting Syrians until alternate vetting procedures are developed. In my view, it would have been better to differentiate among the refugees: Admit women, children and the elderly under the current procedures, while subjecting young men of fighting age to a new regime of far stricter scrutiny.

The concerns of GOP officials were quite reasonable. But there was no need for the Republican candidates to allow the Syria debate to be derailed into a cul-de-sac on immigration — as if the essence of the Middle East issue is a relatively small number of potential refugees rather than the abject failure of Obama’s policies.

Terror is rising around the world — Sinai, Beirut, Mali, Paris. Brussels was shut down by fear itself. The president, in denial about the collapse of his Syria policy, denounced those demanding a change in course. His secretary of state actually acknowledged a rationale (if not legitimacy) for the machine-gunning of a room full of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for offending Muslim sensibilities with a drawing.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Not just admit the women, children and elderly, but bump up the admission of Christians.
10-20% of all Syrians are/were Christians but less than 3% of Syrian refugees are Christians.
The UN intimidates Christians into staying in camps, not being vetted to come to USA, Canada or Europe.
The Muslim boat people throw Christians overboard on their way into Europe.
Assad is better for Christians than Obama is.