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Thread: "Should We Accept the Refugees?" by Dr. Joel McDurmon

  1. #1

    Question "Should We Accept the Refugees?" by Dr. Joel McDurmon



    Dr. McDurmon nails it in his article:

    There simply is no biblical reason to refuse legitimate refugees. The Bible is clear that national borders should be open to all peaceful and law abiding individuals. Further, when we properly understand the meaning of the Bible’s teachings on immigrants, we will understand that to loathe refugees is to loathe ourselves and our own nation.
    The article continues here.
    "Then David said to the Philistine, 'You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the battle lines of Israel, Whom you have reproached.'" - 1 Samuel 17:45

    "May future generations look back on our work and say that these were men and women who, in moment of great crisis, stood up to their politicians, the opinion-makers, and the Establishment, and saved their country." - Dr. Ron Paul



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  3. #2
    I don't agree with some of the application in that article, but it was very good.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Theocrat View Post
    Dr. McDurmon nails it in his article:.
    Let us never forget what our true vision, and therefore priorities, ought to be.
    I was going to make this point reading through some of it, but he ends the article with the above line, which is fitting.

    It isn't that a Christian ignores issues of terrorism and the welfare state and all the other considerations of a complex political climate. But all these things must be weighed against the prime directives. This situation is pretty clear cut biblically.

    And he opens talking about "sojourners". Immigrants, travelers, etc. These people are FLEEING DANGER. Danger that our officials are responsible for.
    When a trumpet sounds in a city, do not the people tremble?
    When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it? Amos 3:6

  5. #4
    Let's prove to everybody how morally superior we are.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    Let's prove to everybody how morally superior we are.
    Is acting morally vanity?

    Is accepting war refugees now over the SJW threshold?
    When a trumpet sounds in a city, do not the people tremble?
    When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it? Amos 3:6

  7. #6

    Getting to Root Causes (Terrorism)

    Quote Originally Posted by wizardwatson View Post
    I was going to make this point reading through some of it, but he ends the article with the above line, which is fitting.

    It isn't that a Christian ignores issues of terrorism and the welfare state and all the other considerations of a complex political climate. But all these things must be weighed against the prime directives. This situation is pretty clear cut biblically.

    And he opens talking about "sojourners". Immigrants, travelers, etc. These people are FLEEING DANGER. Danger that our officials are responsible for.
    Yes, and I enjoyed what Dr. McDurmon said concerning the issue of blowback in U.S. foreign policy, stating:

    Let’s discuss the most obvious and pressing (not to mention dangerous) threat first: terrorism. The question is, is it possible that if we accept Syrian refugees into the country, ISIS terrorists will sneak in with them and blow us up? All we need to ask about is the mere possibility of one terrorist, for that is all it takes. An inquiry about likelihood or probability may be interesting, but when life and freedom are at stake, we cannot take chances, right?

    So is it possible? Absolutely.

    But be consistent with this. Is it possible that the same terrorist will get in even if we don’t accept refugees? Again, the answer is “absolutely.”

    So then the only difference is the likelihood. Is a terrorist more likely to get in if we do or if we don’t accept refugees? It seems intuitive that with a wave of thousands of Syrians, it would be more likely that the terrorist would sneak in. Such a wave would greatly burden any system of vetting, lowering the standards by which each individual gets screened.

    But this hypothetical is not really well thought out. There is no threshold of degree in the level of screening any given individual that would make or break the decision to let them in. The tools by which people are rejected are objective, black and white. The red flag goes up or it doesn’t. If they would get through in a stream of a thousand Syrians, they would get through if they came among the standard stream of international arrivals.

    The bottom line here is this: if a terrorist is motivated enough commit an act of terror, they will find a way to get here no matter what.

    So what would be the requisite motivations to commit such an act of terror?

    ISIS and other terrorists are not motivated to strike non-Muslim targets merely because that’s what Muslims do. The resources available to terrorists for such attacks are limited and strikes in distant countries must therefore be strategic. And we know they have been. They have targeted those nations involved most directly and most prominently in occupying or bombing the Middle East. The main cause of terror strikes is western military occupation and war in the Middle East.

    (The war in Iraq is what created the power vacuum in which ISIS was able to arise to begin with.)

    The Paris bombers were not wandering ISIS jihadis out looking for a random western target. They were Belgian and French nationals. They did not sneak in with refugees. The lived there. They attacked France for its role in attacking Syria and Iraq.

    It’s ironic to me that when a Russian airliner was brought down by what was clearly a terrorist plot, American news called it “blowback” for Russia’s involvement in Syria; yet when terrorists strike the other main countries that have occupied or bombed Iraq or Syria for some time, any mention of blowback is met with a chorus of “you blame America first.” How clearly we see it, though, when it happens to Russia.

    It is not receiving refugees that increases our likelihood of suffering terrorism. I do not believe it would increase the likelihood one bit, because that is not the root cause of terror strikes against the US, nor would it facilitate it. The factors that motivate and that would allow a terrorist through are separate from those associated with the refugee question.

    As Gary North wrote nearly thirty years ago (before even the first war in Iraq),

    Christians should not become advocates of closed borders to those who are coming here to work. Obviously, revolutionaries may accompany the immigrants, but trained revolutionaries are going to get into a free nation anyway. The borders are not that tight, and they cannot be made that tight. We are not Communist nations.

    To close borders is simply to treat everyone as potentially guilty and thus to destroy a free society, while not really ending the threat it purports to end. It replaces the specter of the possibility of terror with the certainty of another terror—that of certain tyranny and on a pervasive, inescapable scale. We cannot tighten the borders enough to stop a motivated terrorist, and the more we tighten, the more we destroy freedom for everyone else. Meanwhile, by not addressing the root motivation that makes America a strategic target for terrorists, we keep the possibility of such a strike as high as it possibly could be. This trade-off is hardly desirable or helpful. If the goal of the terrorists is to destroy western freedom, then they’ve won. We’re no longer free, and we’re still afraid.

    Instead, if we want to minimize the likelihood of a terrorist strike on US soil, we should examine the blowback from our foreign policy.

    Likewise, if we are so concerned that a few bad apples may spread violence in America, Christians and conservatives ought to train their attention more upon police reform than terrorism. By multiple accounts, you are several times more likely to suffer at the hands of a police officer than from a terrorist attack. Multiple such comparisons could be made to a wide variety of phenomena—not the least of which is that most deadly of choices: driving a car. The threat from terrorism has distracted us from more deadly threats that are already in our midst.
    "Then David said to the Philistine, 'You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the battle lines of Israel, Whom you have reproached.'" - 1 Samuel 17:45

    "May future generations look back on our work and say that these were men and women who, in moment of great crisis, stood up to their politicians, the opinion-makers, and the Establishment, and saved their country." - Dr. Ron Paul

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by wizardwatson View Post
    Is acting morally vanity?

    Is accepting war refugees now over the SJW threshold?
    The time act in a morally superior way was back in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq started. As of now this is nothing but grandstanding.

  9. #8

    Just Curious

    Quote Originally Posted by Sola_Fide View Post
    I don't agree with some of the application in that article, but it was very good.
    Which of Dr. McDurmon's applications don't you agree with, Sola?
    "Then David said to the Philistine, 'You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the battle lines of Israel, Whom you have reproached.'" - 1 Samuel 17:45

    "May future generations look back on our work and say that these were men and women who, in moment of great crisis, stood up to their politicians, the opinion-makers, and the Establishment, and saved their country." - Dr. Ron Paul



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  11. #9
    Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and anti-statism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul. - M. Rothbard



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