The ISIS rampage through Paris was barbaric, but the penalty for it ought not be paid by refugees.
Unlike indifferent Rand Paul libertarians or Donald Trump isolationists, an adequate response must be more than crudely xenophobic. Since it must also not be illogically punitive, what is written here will not likely satisfy the Republicans who think slamming the door on the populations "yearning to breathe free" somehow doesn't contradict those celebrated words on the pedestal of Lady Liberty. In brief, this essay assumes that an hermetically sealed police state would be a cure as bad or worse than the illness. Nor will you find support for House and Senate Democrats who feel compelled to do something in response to GOP pandering to panic - especially when the "something" is taking apart a highly successful Visa Waiver Program that allows bona fide passport holders from U.S.-approved countries to travel to the U.S. for short but important trade and exchange programs, not to mention U.S. tourism. That action, while not cataclysmic imposes unnecessary limitations on hundreds of thousands of travelers.
Actions that limit the freedom and opportunities of America and the civilized world in order to catch barbarians in a dragnet need more work not enactment into law - even as the exclusionary House vote may be claimed a rare moment of bipartisanship. As President Obama has indicated, elaborate review of refugees for admittance into the United States is already far and away more complex and thorough than almost any other governmental process. To now add another level of database investigation and certification simply adds to delay.
Delay is consequential since it is the friend of ISIS because every day, week, month, or year that's added to confinement in camps in substandard conditions is an ISIS recruitment tool. Migrants jailed or detained for two years or more for escaping violence in their home countries have largely been ignored by the "civilized" world. Yes, usually unnoticed except when a photographer captures an abandoned refugee boy on a beach and for a passing moment, the world feels the unbearable grief of it all. Yes, delay and misery and grief are powerful conditions of recruitment for ISIS. That of course is explanation, not justification, but walk in those shoes for just a day and see how such pain distorts into acceptability the fundamentalist-stoked hatred of you and me -- those nameless, but ubiquitously affluent Europeans and Americans, who seem endowed with material abundance, yet spiritual indifference, or even hypocrisy.
And when the fundamentalists instruct children to kill, like the young adult children who ravaged an ordinary frivolous Friday in the theaters and cafes of Paris, those leading these tragic assaults on human rights not infrequently turn out to be from "good" families that at least nominally spoke of the universality of the fundamental guarantees due all human beings simply by being human, but then ghettoized or discriminated against those newly arrived after their average two or more years in detention camps "on their way to a better life."
Like many in America, I had little occasion to witness the inhumanity of this widespread deprivation of human rights until President Obama and Secretary Clinton provided me with the opportunity to serve as the U.S. Ambassador in the Republic of Malta. Serving in Malta, I found a small nation given the sea rescue responsibility for a large swath of the Mediterranean. At first, I could not understand how wealthy, populous Europe left it to this tiny nation to safeguard the sea for thousands seeking refuge from many places across the globe, but especially, sub-Saharan Africa - Eritrea and Somalia mostly. But then, when Malta grew overtaxed by the influx and a good portion of the EU changed the subject, I understood. Here was a valiant nation with perhaps the oldest populations on earth that endured one invader after another without losing its candid and uncommonly kind personality, and until the calamity in Syria broke open a spigot and Pope Francis dropped by nearby Lampedusa on his first journey outside the Vatican and put migrants in the spotlight that the rest of the world was finally shamed into pitching in to help.
In truth, the U.S. had acted in modest, but importantly humanitarian ways. Then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed that the United States help resettle the refugees in the Mediterranean long before any other nation took up the nettle. It wasn't a U.S. problem and while there is always the desire to build up good will in one's host country, an outside observer might well conclude there was nothing in it for the United States. It was a matter human right, said the Secretary.But extending human rights to peaceful, impoverished, migrants is one thing; obviously, the same cannot be said for extending human rights to the brutes firing randomly into theaters and restaurants of Paris; they, themselves, have no respect for the integrity of the human person, including themselves?
Understandably, if regrettably, the French president spent little time parsing the philosophical quandaries of how to treat one's enemy, and like the U.S. following 9/11, declared that war had been launched by those who perpetrated the Parisian killings. Within days, with our assistance, the claimed ISIS capital was bombed and the retaliation continues. It was familiar to hear Pres.Hollande talk of a war being declared. We've been there. But prior to the Paris attacks, it was the general consensus that launching a war against a concept like terror with conventional weaponry was costly, ineffective, and mistaken.
Candidate Bernie Sanders' principal response to the Paris rampages is to say that Iraq was a bad idea, and that ISIS resulted from the instability that we brought to the region. Fair enough, but Sanders like the most of the rest of the battery of candidates from both parties has very little in the way of forward advice. Even Sec. Clinton's comments to date seem a bit incomplete, for now is the time to take due credit for her humanitarian concern that she demonstrated through the embassies of the United States around the world for the migrant populations. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton allowed my embassy and I believe others as well to not only sign off on those refugees who met the rigorous screening criteria to enter the United States but to invite them into our embassy homes, to share a conversation, and perhaps a simple meal, in which the possibilities of the life to come, including our expectations of their working to fit into the communities in which they were going.
This was not governmental edict or bureaucratic imposition; it was more in the nature of a conversation among friends. It was the kind of conversation one would have with a friend visiting our home town or state for the first time. It was a highly personal way to express our admiration for the heroism of their journey, but most importantly, through our own words and deeds convey a sense of optimism and pride in the country that was welcoming these new members and to instill a sense of continuing interest in their success. Not surprisingly, emails would typically be exchanged and telephone numbers as well and there have been occasions where I or my staff has stayed in contact, and while this is not planned human intelligence, I can tell you it yields some of the best. You see sometimes being an authentic person and not a posturing politician, pays unexpected dividends even as I'm certain that Mrs. Clinton shares the philosophical belief that virtue is its own reward. (I recount this effort at some length in the book, Lift Up Your Hearts.) The Clinton approach succeeded because it was premised upon the very personal and by respecting human rights it built up the image of the United States across the globe. Take that ISIS; you can't lay a glove on genuine empathy.
I suspect Mrs. Clinton is too modest to describe our embassy efforts at cultivating global friendships as a major foreign policy initiative, but frankly, it was. As Eleanor Roosevelt who helped secure the passage of the UN Declaration of human rights observed:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in, the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
The asymmetrical war on terror is not just uneven because conventional armies no longer fight for conventional occupations of land, but for the imposition of ideology; it is also uneven because those who would look to bureaucratic edict for the security of a nation forget at their peril that human rights can thrive only when individual human security is first achieved. In this, it is fitting as we comfort the fallen in France and wish to assist it in its and our own national security, that we remember another proponent of the Universal Declaration, Rene Cassin, who recalled the words of the poet in accepting the Noble prize to the effect that: "My country imbues me with a love that overflows its borders; and the more French I am, the more I feel part of mankind."