Representative Bob Goodlatte, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is fanning the flames of panic.
Yesterday, a week and a half after a terrorist incident that killed 130 people in a foreign country an ocean away, Goodlatte sent a letter to President Obama warning that, “ISIS will seize every opportunity to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in this Obama Administration’s reckless open border immigration policies, including the irresponsible effort to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States despite the real dangers presented by ISIS operatives posing as refugees.”
If the Islamic State truly will seize every opportunity to exploit security vulnerabilities in the United States, then we are facing an enormous problem. After all, the United States is an open society. There are vulnerabilities all around us.
If Bob Goodlatte is right, then we will be facing terrorist attacks every day. Just look around you, and you’ll see what I mean. There are opportunities for terrorist attacks practically everywhere.
So yes, look around you. Look around you again.
There are opportunities for terrorist attacks practically everywhere. Yet, there are terrorist attacks practically nowhere.
Bob Goodlatte talks about “the real dangers presented by ISIS operatives posing as refugees,” but the truth is that there hasn’t been a single case of an Islamic State terrorist caught entering the United States while posing as a Syrian refugee. It just hasn’t happened.
Certainly, an Islamic State terrorist could pose as a refugee. But then, an Islamic State terrorist could pose as a fan of the New York Yankees. An Islamic State terrorist could pose as a shopper at a grocery store. An Islamic State terrorist could pose as a Republican.
Are we going to prohibit people from attending Yankees baseball games? Are we going to outlaw grocery shopping? Are we going to start surveillance programs against Republicans?
Bob Goodlatte talks as if there are grave dangers of terrorist attacks by Syrian refugees. He talks as if there’s a crisis, but to get accurate sense of the actual danger, we need to take a look at how politicians actually behave.
In action, Bob Goodlatte is behaving as if the possibility of an Islamic State terrorist attack by Syrian refugees is only a minor theoretical possibility, which bears some discussion, but not any urgent action.
Representative Goodlatte had originally planned to hold a hearing on The Syrian Refugee Crisis And Its Impact On The Security Of The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program on October 7. Goodlatte then decided to postpone that hearing for a month and a half, however, because the issue wasn’t as urgent as other important matters.
Now, the day after Goodlatte sent a letter to the President warning that Islamic State terrorists are poised to exploit every single opportunity to attack the United States, in a bloody onslaught that will devastate our country from coast to coast, Goodlatte has closed up his committee, left Washington D.C., and is preparing to settle in with his family tomorrow for a peaceful Thanksgiving turkey dinner followed by a nice long nap.
That’s not what Goodlatte would be doing if he really thought that Islamic State terrorists were prepared to launch attacks across the United States at any moment. If Goodlatte truly believed that the United States was on the verge of a Homeland Security crisis, he would be back in Washington D.C. with his staff, holding meetings throughout the night with staffers, desperately preparing for the carnage about to come.
Instead, Goodlatte is on vacation, and the next action his committee will take on any subject related to Syrian refugees is a bureaucratic oversight hearing, to have discussions about minor operations issues at the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Ho hum. So much for the “crisis”. Pass the gravy.
