During World War II, the U.S. turned away Jews due to security concerns. We sent shiploads back to the camps. ... The lesson of the Holocaust, as I noted here , is that we must deal with threats without rejecting our ethical obligations. We must not send those fleeing persecution back to their persecutors. The definition of moral courage is to resist allowing fear to overwhelm our humanity.

David Bier, the director of immigration policy at the very nutty libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center, writes in the HuffPo that it is more important than ever that we admit unvetted Muslim refugees . He does so by comparing the situation to the Holocaust:

This is an offensive analogy. Jews who came to America were not themselves violent. They did not strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up in theaters; they did not go into restaurants and execute diners, one by one; and they did not attempt to set up a caliphate wherever they moved to, although they did tend to dominate the deli, bagel-making, and stand-up comedy fields.

But a large percentage of Muslim "refugees" do believe in strict sharia law and are intolerant of other religions, and a large subset of those do want to kill people of other religions. Letting Jews into America didn't put American lives at risk, but letting Muslims in does.

A second problem with this analogy is the belief that the refugees have nowhere to go. There are at least two dozen Muslim countries, many of them wealthy gulf states, who could easily afford to take in refugees. During the Holocaust, there was no Jewish state that could take in Jews. That's a big difference.

The Holocaust was about exterminating an entire race of people. Millions were killed. Only a small fraction of that number have died in Syria and Iraq. What is happening in Syria and Iraq is part of what has been happening there for hundreds of years: intolerant Sunnis killing Shi'ites, and intolerant Shi'ites killing Sunnis. Just the names – ISIS, Assad, Hezb'allah – have changed, not the fundamental players.

Another difference from the Holocaust: the Jews fleeing didn't want to go to new countries to find Muslims to kill. But the fleeing Muslims in fact have been persecuting and killing Jews in Europe at an accelerated rate.

Too many of these "refugees" have unclean hands, and we don't know who is who. If you see a survivor of a downed ship in the water, you may feel compelled to reach out your hand, but only a crazy person would give a hand if he knew there was a significant chance that the person in the water was going to pull him in.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.