You’ve got to hand it to Democrats. They rarely miss an opportunity to inflate their sense of moral superiority, particularly when that opportunity also provides them the chance to advance long-held policy objectives.
A quick survey of the opinion landscape on the left over the course of the last week reveals that American liberals are just sickened — positively disgusted, they emphatically claim – with how Republicans have responded to the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. The push to put a pause on Syrian refugee resettlement in the United States, they contend, is a fear-based response that is untethered to anything resembling rationality. “When are we going to learn that this type of hateful targeting is a stain upon us all?” retiring California Senator Barbara Boxer bemoaned. HBO’s John Oliver, who has taken the baton from Jon Stewart as the voice of those liberals who value self-satisfied cynicism over responsible dialogue and mutual understanding, went further. “Peanuts themselves have killed far more people in the last decade than terrorist refugees,” he averred.
The public’s concern over the threat posed by refugees streaming out of the Middle East, and Syria in particular, is hardly limited to conservatives. 47 Democrats joined with majority Republicans in the House to form a veto-proof majority last week when they voted to enhance refugee screening measures and to put a moratorium on new resettlements until those measures were in place. There is, however, something to be said for the left’s contention that the nation’s focus on refugees is misguided.
It seems that many are confusing the refugee crisis in Europe with the American resettlement program. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of migrants are overwhelming the system, flooding villages or winding up in camps, and the crisis is being used by Islamic militants to smuggle aspiring terrorists into the continent where they have succeeded in thoroughly terrorizing the population. America, by contrast, has no refugee crisis — at least, not yet. The United States has sought to relieve some pressure on Europe by augmenting its annual refugee resettlement quota (tens of thousands of refugee applicants are resettled into the United States every year), and just over 2,000 Syrians have been resettled in America since the start of that country’s bloody civil war.
As is so often the case, the left is choosing to posture and preen rather than to critically examine the cause of this frenzy. This collective, bipartisan expression of anxiety is not borne out of prejudice but an appreciation for the commander-in-chief’s disinterest in containing the conflict in Syria. The refugee crisis is one of the president’s own making. He and his allies have spent years preserving an evolving rationale that allowed them to ignore that metastatic civil war, and the fruits of that labor are ripening. Now, Obama and his cohorts have the gall to lecture the world to be not afraid of the objectively unnerving circumstances they have steadfastly declined to address or mitigate.
While liberals have a point about the injudiciousness inspiring the nation to demand a temporary halt to refugee resettlement, the conceit that they are somehow above it all is utterly unwarranted. When it serves Democratic interests, the left is perfectly willing to exacerbate tensions and stoke unfounded fears to further its agenda items. For Democrats, the bloodshed in Paris is just another opportunity to advance their precious objective of stricter gun laws.
The Sunday morning news programs were abounding with Democratic voices demanding the president and the Congress act on a new gun control measure lent added urgency by the Paris attacks. Namely, the imposition of a ban on guns sales to those who find themselves on the terrorist watch list. “By leaving this terrorist loophole open, Republicans are leaving every community in America vulnerable to attacks by terrorists armed with assault rifles and explosives purchased legally, in broad daylight,” said outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The senator’s deputy chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, has spent the better part of a week in a rolling street fight with conservatives over the dire need to ban gun sales to those the “FBI suspects” of “being a terrorist.”
Predictably, a variety of left-leaning news outlets ran with the Democratic narrative; the National Rifle Association is shielding terrorists from their ability to purchase weapons and replicate the chaos in Paris on American streets. This is remarkable, considering how it was only yesterday that Democrats and the left were concerned over the expansion of names on the terror watch list as well as the accompanying violations of the civil liberties of those who have never been convicted, indicted, or even implicated in a crime.
National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke observed that intellectually consistent Democrats have for years warned of the “explosive growth” of the terror watch list’s suspects, and of the negative impacts finding oneself on that list might have. “Predictably, that ‘explosive growth’ has led to the entanglement of almost 300,000 people who have ‘no affiliation with known terrorist groups’ but who fall under ‘reasonable suspicion’ nevertheless,” he noted. This new Democratic proposal isn’t a prospective violation of amorphous civil liberties but rather a suspension of a right protected by the Constitution.
Of course, this is a solution (gun control) in search of a problem (the “terrorist loophole”). The terror watch list is overwhelmingly comprised of foreign nationals, and no alien can purchase firearms in the U.S. without ICE-issued identification and an identification number that accompanies a visa. “Between 2004 and 2014, people on one terror watch list underwent background checks to buy guns 2,233 times and were allowed to make the purchase 91 percent of the time, according to a March report by the Government Accountability Office,” the Associated Press reported. When those suspect purchasers undergo background checks for the purposes of purchasing a gun, the FBI is notified, and surveillance of those suspects is enhanced.
Surely, if the botched gun-walking operation that resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is any measure, the federal government has about as much trouble tracking prospective ISIS-inspired terrorists as it does keeping track of firearms. That’s almost beside the point. This is barely about terrorism – if it were, Democrats would be eager to isolate and rollback an ideology that inspires such violence. Instead, they warn Americans not to call radical Islam “radical Islam” for fear of offending. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias revealed, Barack Obama’s advisors regard Islamic terrorism as a feature of modern life, one that must be lived with, and that the American public should be conditioned to understand they do little or nothing to prevent. All that can be done, they believe, is to hermetically seal the country and to reduce or eliminate the options available for aspiring terrorists to do harm. Gun control is first; perhaps hydrogen peroxide control will be next.
The self-satisfied liberals who have spent years warning that American Christians are responsible for more terroristic bloodshed than are Muslims have not had a change of heart. They have just recognized that a window of opportunity through which they can shove a long-held agenda item down American throats now exists. Never let a crisis go to waste, as Chicago’s mayor once said. It’s one thing for liberals to embrace such opportunism. It’s quite another to do so while scolding the vast majority of the public for an allegedly irrational response to Islamic terrorism.
