THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF

Our 32nd President, Franklin Roosevelt, spoke these words during his inaugural address in 1933. Within a decade our government would turn back thousands of Jewish refugees, desperate people fleeing a terrifying blood thirsty regime. We argued that they posed a serious thtreat to our national security, and we essentially returned them to Germany where many would be exterminated by the Nazis. Later in 1939 we rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come into the country for safety. Three years later Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which resulted in interring nearly 120,000 citizens of Japanese descent while some of their offspring died on the battlefield fighting on our side during the war. At the time well over 80% of residents polled supported Roosevelt's turnabout. Politics trumped what was once a sensible expression of opinion in line with a set of values our country had always stood for. Since that time we have generally expressed regret for what we did back then. However, 70 years later we apparently still have not learned from it.

The terrorist acts in Paris where 130 people died at the hands of, mostly home-grown, criminals are stirring up the same type of political grand standing as what preceded our entry into World War II. More than half of our governors and most candidates running for president have grabbed onto heightened security concerns, misdiagnosed the facts, and again targeted a group of desperate refugees while identifying members of a specific religion to make political points, vastly under estimating real security threats.

This time around our focus is on Syrian refugees and followers of Islam. The House of Representatives passed a bill establishing a pause in resettling Syrian refugees until our vetting process has been reviewed. Mind you, currently refugees admitted to the U.S. undergo between one and two years of screening by multiple intelligence agencies, the State Department and the Department of Defense. Since 9/11 we have resettled 387,938 refugees from majority Muslim countries. Only 2 of these have subsequently been arrested for suspect activities. While pandering to their political base, and while trying to outdo each other, political candidates are falling all over each other making pathetic, pathological, xenophobic statements. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush are suggesting that going forward we should only admit Christian refugees. Trans-Humanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan suggested that small microchips could be implanted under the skin of Syrian refugees as part of the process admitting them into the U.S.. Donald Trump wants to close down or monitor all mosques, place Syrians into internment camps in Syria, send Syrians already processed and in the country back, and register all Muslims into a database. Chris Christy pronounced that he would not even make exceptions for orphans under the age of five. In the mean time Ben Carson, at a campaign stop in Mobile, Alabama, referred to Syrian refugees as "rabid dogs."

As the inflammatory rhetoric escalates and becomes less and less American, it is worth observing that the terrorists in Paris mostly carried French, Belgian and Moroccan passports. Given the vetting time it takes before refugees are allowed into the country, it would be highly unlikely that terrorist groups could muster the patience required to infiltrate their flow and smuggle anyone into the U.S.. The real security risk rests with people who carry passports from countries we typically trust and for which we don't require visas. The political pandering does not only undermine security threats we should focus on, the rhetoric has a way of inflaming those who don't think for themselves. As French writer and philosopher Voltaire noted centuries ago: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Two weeks ago armed protesters showed up at a mosque in Irving Texas, which underscores the point that we should deescalate the discourse before it really gets out of hand.

Finally, one can't escape the fact that, since the attacks on the World Trade Center, we have experienced well over 360,000 gun related killings. In a way these acts of violence resemble a form of domestic terrorism that resulted in more devastation and agony than what we are currently observing internationally. However, these "terrorist" acts don't seem to elicit the same level of outrage. To combat terrorist acts within our borders, the Bush administration suggested in 2007 that we pass a law denying people who we suspect might engage in terrorist activities from purchasing guns and explosives. Almost nine years later this bill still has not passed Congress. Recently Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Peter King reintroduced this legislation, which is now dubbed the "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorist Act of 2015." The point they make, convincingly in my view, is that if we deny people on our "no fly list" from boarding our planes, we should keep them away from explosives and firearms. Unfortunately the lunatic fringe at the helm of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA's lobbying arm which manages its Political Action Committee, and which maintains its grasp over a cowardly Congress, has succeeded in keeping this sensible legislation from becoming law. Their aggressive arm twisting, presumably not by intent, but certainly in effect, appears to support domestic terrorism. Perhaps we should begin re-defining who our real enemies are.