Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant was among the governors who demanded an end to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the U.S., calling the plans to take in at least 10,000 refugees “extremely dangerous” and pledging to “do everything humanly possible to stop any plans from the Obama administration to put Syrian refugees in Mississippi.”
He appeared today on the American Family Radio show “Today’s Issues” to highlight his opposition to refugees, citing a group of Syrians who turned themselves into U.S. authorities on the Mexican border as further proof that America is facing a serious threat from the refugees.
Bryant also told American Family Association President Tim Wildmon that “the president wants to attack our faith” by saying “that we as Christians should be more open and welcoming.”
“I’ve seen the left-leaning media use the Jewish population in World War II that were fleeing Nazi Germany as an example. Well, unless I missed my history lessons, the Jews coming out of Europe at that time were not blowing people up, they were not having terrorist attacks on innocent people throughout the world, they had not dedicated themselves to the destruction of America,” he said. “So the very idea that we would use Jewish refugees as somehow an example of what’s happening now with the governors as we resist the Syrian refugees is just disingenuous and the Jewish population should be angered by that association from the White House and left-leaning media across America.”
In fact, as Daniel A. Gross writes in Smithsonian Magazine, “government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security,” turning away thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II due to “widespread fears of a supposed ‘fifth column’ of spies and saboteurs that had infiltrated America.” Even Roosevelt cited “the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis.”
Bryant may also want to take note of the statement issued by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which recently urged “public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today’s refugees as a group” and “remember that many are fleeing because they have been targeted by the Assad regime and ISIS for persecution and in some cases elimination on the basis of their identity.”
