Barney Frank give anti-refugee Americans a lesson in history
Barney Frank did not disappoint. He took on Americans on their embarrassing behavior with regards to their faux panic to continue accepting Syrian refugees.
Chris Hayes said he had not heard the anti-Muslim political rhetoric sounding this bad in thirteen years, since 9/11. Barney Frank replied that it was much worse than then. Frank is right.
While the establishment of the Republican Party then led by George W. Bush immediately attempted to attenuate any Muslim backlash from the 9/11 attacks, the establishment is in full bigotry mode now. From Donald Trump wanting all American Muslims to register in a national database, to Ben Carson equating Syrian refugees to rabid dogs their behavior was nothing less than despicable.
Barney Frank castigated the Right for their constant articulation of a government incapable of protecting Americans inasmuch as it has. He has pointed out that all attacks since 9/11 have been home grown mostly by white Right Wing Americans like the event in Charleston, South Carolina.
“What you have here is a kind of hysteria that’s born of this somehow — I don’t understand what it is that drive these people so to denigrate our country,” Barney Frank said. “People on the conservative side use to be kind of proud of America and pro American. They are now describing their country that has lost all capacity to protect itself, which is inaccurate.”
He reminded Hayes about the same type of hysteria that occurred with the Ebola crisis. They wanted our borders closed then as well.
“There is this fact that we have to address,” Frank said. “There is a racism here. In all the instances we have here, Ebola, Jews in Germany eighty years ago, the Japanese Americans, the Syrians today, it’s an otherness. It is apparently a view on the part of many Americans, not that we need to worry more about American lives or the lives of others. That is a natural factor. The chilling thing about this equation is, these are people who say any one American life is infinitely more valuable than thousands, tens of thousands of others. That there is no balance at all. Any harm that might come to other people, people who have that otherness, who aren’t like us, no matter how much damage would be done to people, the overwhelming majority of whomever we agree is innocent, that is irrelevant if its going to put even one American slightly at risk. That is a holy immoral calculation.”
Powerful and provably true statement.