As President Biden considers bringing Gaza war refugees into the United States, he would do well to recall what happened when other good-hearted people took a similar chance – and paid with their blood.
Before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli citizens sponsored work permits for thousands of security-vetted Palestinians to earn money working on some of their farms in towns not far from the Gaza Strip.
Some of those Gazan day laborers are believed to have used their access to provide tactical information that helped Hamas terrorists kill hundreds of Israelis on October 7.
The bad apples lesson of that still developing story – and another where security-vetted Palestinian UN workers directly assisted the October 7 attackers – is central to the problem with an American plan to import Gazan war refugees. It’s an unacceptable national security risk.
That’s because just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.
Hamas relentlessly preaches that humanity’s highest virtues are suicide bombing, armed combat, genocide, intolerance of difference, and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews and Americans.
Yes, there will be exceptions among Gazans who are independent-minded enough to rebel. But if Israel can’t readily suss out the tolerant, then certainly America’s refugee bureaucrats will have far less luck.
A large number of respectable academic and think tank studies have shown how Hamas indoctrinates the people of the Gaza Strip.
Recall the recent reports of jubilant children, women and men cheering, spitting at, and even beating both alive and dead Israeli hostages paraded through Gaza after the October 7 attack.
“These are the people you might be bringing here,” said Nayla Rush, a refugee policy expert for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, who recently penned a column titled “Resettled Refugees Do Not Necessarily Leave Their Beliefs and Biases Behind.” “How are you going to vet them? What do you do, go to the Hamas authorities and ask? That’s a huge breach of any vetting. It’s impossible.”
By Todd Bensman
