Americans Who Are Afraid Of Refugees – OpEd
By Paul Woodward - War in Context
Those now calling for America to close its doors to Syrian refugees are not only betraying the principles upon which this country was founded, but many are also betraying the core of their own faith.
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Matthew 25:35
To be afraid of Syrian refugees is like watching crowds of people fleeing from a burning building and being afraid that one among them might be an arsonist.
Fear of refugees is more than callous — it is simple cowardice.
To be afraid of refugees is to be afraid of people who are themselves living in fear because they have lost everything.
I can admire Mr. Woodward’s frugality, I suppose, and I can feel compassion for the filmed refugee who only wants us to allow him “to live.” But neither admiration nor compassion addresses the real issue, which is Western imperialism and its present desperate quest to control the dwindling natural resources of our exploited planet for the sake of providing affluent lives for a minority of people living in North America and Europe. Americans don’t need to correct their fear of refugees; they need to understand that their government is now very strongly influenced by dual-citizenship-holding neo-Cons whose conceptions have driven the direction of US foreign policy since the collapse of the USSR. Americans need to organize themselves with enough self-discipline to take back a government in which wars are waged without reference to the Congress (Korea, VietNam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, N. Africa) and where US foreign policy and military attacks are carried out at the will of a small coterie of ideologues, on the basis of propaganda about false-flag operations like the one on 9/11/2001, and the one just carried out in Paris (as well as others). The War on Terror is a direct outgrowth of the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and ISIL (ISIS) has been deliberately constructed by the CIA in conjunction with dubious “allies” who run our foreign policy like Saudi Arabia (largest exporter of jihadi fighters in the world) and Israel, whose goal to create a Greater Israel (Yeretz Israel) underlies every aspect of our foreign policy, which seems to consist of CIA operations to overturn legitimate governments in targeted nations like Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine,Syria, and too many others to name here, so as to install US-controlled puppet regimes that will do US bidding. Underlying these false-flag operations and puppet government installations is the corporate quest to control the planet’s dwindling natural resources–especially oil and natural gas. The present intense effort against Syria relates to the Syrian refusal to cooperate in the laying of a nat. gas pipeline through its territory than to any supposed misdeeds of the Assad government. But the propaganda concentrates on personalities rather than on the control of the resources that are driving these horrific conflicts and, in the process, are creating enormous refugee flows. The people who generate these policies have not the slightest interest in the human suffering the policies cause; their real interest is to capture the immoral wealth of globalized capitalism, which largely depends upon the control of certain resources without which the present system cannot survive. What citizens fail to realize is that the “free press” is no longer free. It is almost entirely in the control of the corporate entities that benefit from arms-racing and wars, whether they are waged overtly or covertly. Its lies now dominate our lives and prevent us from looking at the real causes of our present situation. Emotive film clips like the one above of the unhappy man who only wants “to live” play upon our emotions; they do not address themselves to analytical thinking, nor do they help us to think about how we can create a more sane and just world, one free from constant conflict and war-making, which, as Gen. Smedley Butler once observed, is a racket. Now, it is the racket from which most of our profits are derived and US policies are intimately connected with profits.