American Jews Betrayed by Their Leaders. Again

On December 2, a letter signed by one thousand rabbis was delivered to Congress calling on "our elected officials to uphold the great legacy of a country that welcomes refugees." The leadership of virtually all of the Jewish defense organizations, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), have echoed these demands to admit thousands of Syrian refugees. These Jewish leaders have betrayed the Jews of America. They prefer burnishing their liberal credentials and parroting the views of a Democratic president to their duty to sound the alarm about the harm to American Jews from bringing to the US Syrian Muslims, who have been raised in a culture of virulent anti-Semitism. Seeing the destruction of Jewish life in Europe with the influx of Muslim immigrants from Arab countries, it would not take much imagination for these so-called Jewish leaders to see what mass immigration of Arab Muslims will mean for the safety of Americans and for American Jews in particular.

According to data published by the Department of Homeland Security, the US has issued 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim-majority countries in the five years from FY2009 to FY2013. Migration from the Middle East is one of the fastest growing categories of migrants, with 1.5 million Muslims having entered since 9/11. This does not include the hundreds of thousands of Muslim students given student visas since 9/11. This influx may well explain the anti-Semitism now rife on many US campuses. The President's refugee plan would substantially boost the annual number of migrants admitted from this region. These in turn would be able to petition for their relatives to migrate to the US in the future. Rather than raising concerns that an Arab poll of Syrian refugees found that one in eight were supportive of ISIS, these false representatives of the Jewish people opine that it is their role to raise the Jews " beyond their narrow partisan views." Since when is concern for one's life " a narrow partisan view"? The Jewish Establishment has been guilt-tripped by a dishonest HIAS and J Street power play that has grotesquely conflated the Syrian Muslims with the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930's. HIAS tugs on the heartstrings of the largely immigrant Jewish community, pretending that it is the same organization supported by Jewish philanthropy which helped Jewish immigrants in the 20th century. But it is not. HIAS is now virtually an arm of the US government, which as an NGO government contractor stands to reap $100 million in its budget if it can get the US to admit the 100,000 Syrian Muslims that it is petitioning the government to admit. Follow the money. As Daniel Greenfield wrote in Front Page Magazine, "HIAS is now just a factory for importing hundreds of thousands of anti-Semites to America." J Street has supported every initiative that weakens US support for Israel. But there is more than one way to skin a cat. Increasing the electorate with violently anti-Semitic Muslims, thus skewing some Congressional districts, is another way to accomplish its goals. It, too, is demanding that the US admit 100,000 Syrian Muslims. And it is fund-raising for HIAS. How interesting. If either of these groups, or any of the breast-beating Jewish Establishment, cared one bit for the Syrians, they would be fighting for safe havens in Syria and no fly zones rather than making a show of their crocodile tears for an infinitesimal percent of the 4 million Syrian refugees they want to admit to the US. They would be petitioning for humanitarian aid to the Syrians in the camps in Muslim countries where they are now safely living rather than fighting for money for HIAS's own coffers. But like the President, they do not care about the Syrians. If the President had cared about the Syrian people, he would have enforced his famous red line when Assad was gassing and bombing his people. He would have established no fly zones and safe havens. He would have vastly increased US humanitarian aid to the millions of refugees now living in refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon so that there would not be this mass invasion of Europe. But Obama said that he wanted to fundamentally change America and this is just one more crisis he is not letting go to waste in his campaign to reshape the West while vindicating the oppressed peoples who were subject to its colonial, imperialist past. It is Christians in Syria and Iraq who are subject to genocide, not Muslims. But very few Christians are included among the refugees because Obama allows the Islamic-dominated UN refugee system determine who will get into America. Have you heard any of the Jewish leaders raising this issue about the real victims of genocide? No, because they have fallen for the false charge that a religious test in anti-American when In fact it is one of the criteria in American law determining who is eligible for refugee status. Obama knows that 80% of the 1.5 million Muslims who have come to the US legally since 9/11, vote Democratic. They are a reliable constituency. This is the same reason Obama and the Democratic Party have championed legalizing the status of illegal Hispanic migrants. This is a power play, not humanism. The displaced persons camps in neighboring Arab countries give the lie to the comparison to German Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930's. When the US barred their entry, the Jews had no place to go since the British, under Arab pressure, had closed Mandate Palestine in 1939 to Jewish immigration. Unlike the German Jews, there are several Arab nations, with cultures similar to theirs, bordering on their homeland, who have taken them in. The Syrian migration is not about running from persecution. They have safe havens available. It is about running to economic opportunity. The Syrian civil war is three years old. The mass flood of "refugees" started when Prime Minister Merkel said that Germany would take one million displaced Syrians. Then the so-called refugee invasion started. The Jewish leadership should have recoiled from the comparison of fleeing German Jews with the Syrian Muslims swarming Europe. As Ian Tuttle notes in the National Review: "There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930's attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no Jewish State establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance...A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13% of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi Party." If security is such a minor issue, why has the FBI director James Comey expressed concern about the difficulty of vetting the Syrian refugees? Why are our Jewish leaders ignoring ISIS's instructions to terrorists to hide among the refugees, something that has already taken place with the Paris terrorists and may well have taken place in California through our visa program? The FBI reports that there are one thousand ISIS related investigations going on right now in every US state, and growing at a rate that exceeds our monitoring resources. Why do we cringe at charges that we are afraid of "women and children" when there were women among the terrorists in Paris, California and Israel and the Boston bombers came here as children? Why do our Jewish leaders refuse to face the truth that we are at war with a group that wants to destroy the American way of life and would massacre Jews, like they do to Christians, if they could. In the 1930's and 1940's, the Jewish Establishment was largely silent in the face of the Holocaust because they did not want to be seen as raising "their narrow partisan concerns" in the face of the war effort. They have compounded their error by once again refusing to stand up for the survival of the American Jewish community. The Jewish community has often compared America to the golden age in Spain and wondered if this golden medina would end too. If it does, we will have the Jewish Establishment leadership to thank. Carol Greenwald is a Board member, Coalition of Pro-Israel Advocates (COPIA).