The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has not helped to diminish the violent stereotypes of Muslims, but Christian-Americans should have more compassion towards the marginalized of society.
History proves that all religions have had some sort of radical group. Have those, specifically Christians who stereotype Muslims forgotten that the Ku Klux Klan, the Oklahoma City bombers, and nearly all the mass shooters in the last decade have all been Christian? It is not the Christian way to murder dozens of people nor be discriminatory. Furthermore, it is not the American way to refuse Syrian refugees because one of them might be a terrorist.
The Statue of Liberty represents friendship between nations and freedom from oppression. A few decades ago, ships would sail into New York Harbor and Lady Liberty would be the first thing the passengers saw. Many of them were immigrants traveling to the United States for the first time, seeing this and America as a safe haven and a new start. This was the image for nearly 320,000 Soviet refugees in 1975 and for 231,000 Vietnamese immigrants in 1980, but for the Syrians of 2015 that image is distorted.
By closing its borders to refugees, America embodies the evil that ISIS has been propagating for the last four years. When Ben Carson compared refugees to a rabid dog in a neighborhood, he did exactly what ISIS wanted America to do. The longer America waits to abandon fear of Muslims, the bigger ISIS will grow as more and more refugees see no other option for survival.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. It is by these words that people fleeing persecution have always been welcomed into our country.
Americans cannot allow Donald Trump’s xenophobia to pervert the values in which this country was founded upon. We cannot believe that a person’s faith causes them to have less morals than that of other people and thus must be surveilled, tracked, monitored and automatically seen as a threat.
To be anti-refugee is to be anti-American.