Just days after 15 major American Jewish organizations and 200 synagogues signed statements affirming their support for the resettlement of refugees fleeing strife-ridden countries, terrorist attacks in the New York area and Minnesota last weekend by men associated with overseas Islamic radicals is giving many some pause.
A record 65 million people worldwide are displaced because of conflict, persecution or to seek a better life. President Barack Obama in his final presidential speech to the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday called on wealthier nations to do more to help resettle them. He then held a special refugee summit with 30 nations on the sidelines of the G.A., which on Monday approved a declaration designed to provide a more coordinated and humane response to the refugee crisis.
But the arrest Monday of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old naturalized citizen from Afghanistan, as the man suspected of placing bombs on the streets of New York and New Jersey overshadowed Monday’s U.N. session. And his arrest, along with a stabbing rampage in a Minnesota mall by a 22-year-old from Africa described as a “soldier” for the Islamic State, has become political fodder in the presidential campaign.
In reply, Trump derided Clinton’s handling of immigration and called for the U.S. to use the same kind of profiling used by Israel in screening its visitors, something he has proposed in the past.
“They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do,” he told Fox News.
The objective of such profiling, Trump once explained to CBS News, is to single out Muslims. “Well, I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, describing a security check he witnessed in which he said it would have made more sense to scrutinize those who “looked like” a perpetrator.
“Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully,” Trump said.
But Steve Pomerantz, a counterterrorism expert, told JTA that such profiling is not designed to single out everyone from a particular ethnic religious group but rather to look for behavioral patterns.
And just as Rabbi Zeplowitz observed, finding would-be terrorists in a particular community is much easier with the cooperation of that community and its religious leaders. Trump’s proposal to target an entire community only alienates its members, according to law enforcement officials here.
During the campaign, Trump has repeatedly called for a ban on accepting Syrian refugees into this country. Initially, he said the U.S. should keep out all foreign Muslim immigrants “until we know what the hell is going on.” Later, he modified that to say there should be “extreme” vetting and an ideological test for those seeking refugee status from countries and regions from which extremists have emerged.
He has also belittled Clinton for her proposal to accept about 65,000 Syrian refugees, in addition to the tens of thousands of refugees from other countries. In the fiscal year ending this month, the Obama administration admitted 10,000 Syrian refugees, plus another 75,000 from other parts of the world. For the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, Obama has increased to 110,000 the number of refugees to be admitted from throughout the world.
Clinton has also said she would continue the current vetting process that can take months to complete.
Asked about the three Syrian migrants arrested last week in Germany on suspicion of being a sleeper terrorist cell, Hetfield told a conference call with journalists that refugees are posing a “real problem” in Europe.
Although the vetting process used to be 18 to 24 months, the Obama administration speeded it up to only three months to make sure that it fulfilled its quota of 10,000 Syrian refugees by the end of this month. The quota was reached a full month early, but Hetfield said the quickened processing did not shortchange the vetting process.
Meanwhile, the website Media Matters pointed out that the recent comments of one of Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., has apparently made him the darling of members of the white nationalist movement. It cited a “gas chamber” reference he made, his comparison of poisoned Skittles to Syrian refugees and his retweet of an anti-Semitic author.