Read On: Political moves deny the helpless

I am not proud today of the way my country is behaving. This isn’t the America I know. The nation I grew up adoring was the last great, benevolent hope of the world. The last refuge for the beaten down and disenfranchised. The only place where all things remained possible.

But now I’m told more than half of my countrymen and women are adamant about denying entry to Syrian refugees, that they would tell them to turn around and go home to lives of certain gloom and likely death in a land torn by civil war and back into the hands of the ISIS monsters from whom they fled — women and orphans forced to turn around, assured that we’ve hung out a “Closed Forever” sign. Tough luck, folks. Get lost or get dead. Whatever. We don’t care.

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to so radically tighten screening procedures on refugees from Syria that they would be impossible to enforce, and, in effect, padlock our borders tight. And it’s shameful. This, atop the declarations of governor after governor vowing not to let in a single refugee, with the loudest ugly chorus sung by the Republican presidential candidates led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He pronounced that he wouldn’t even let in a 5-year-old.

Where is the shame? Where is the decency? Where is the compassion? Where is the reason? Where is the understanding that this isn’t who and what we are?

Hysteria and fear have hijacked the discussion in the wake of the horrific Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris that claimed 129 lives. From what we know, not a single one of the terrorists who perpetrated this coordinated act is Syrian. They were instead French or Belgian. But I don’t hear anyone screaming about denying French and Belgian citizens entry into the United States.

We need to just call this what it is: pure anti-Muslim xenophobia. It certainly can’t have anything to do with legitimate security concerns, since we already have a rigorous screening process in place to vet refugees looking to gain admittance — up to two years’ worth of background checks by the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI.

What the House passed this last week is political posturing at its most revolting. Because those in Congress who voted to support this absurd measure (including 50 Democrats) can’t genuinely be concerned with our safety. Cowering in the face of women and children. Really? Yes, some young militant men are also part of the Syrian refugee throng. We can, and do, give them particular scrutiny.

So let’s figure a few potential terrorist has slipped through the cracks. I’m willing to take that risk to give 10,000 people (the modest number of refugees President Obama is pushing to allow in) a second chance at life.

Really, you’re not OK with that possibility? Here is where the argument against the refugees falls apart: Take a guess how many people have been killed in the United States by self-proclaimed jihadists since 9/11/01. The number is 26, according to a count by the Washington research center New America. That’s fewer than two a year.

Now compare this with the more than 400,000 victims who have been killed by guns in the United States during that slightly more than 14 years. Somehow, we hear nothing from these same Representatives vowing to curb the daily carnage wrought in this country by firearms. In fact, we hear the opposite. If they’re really so worried about Syrian immigrants getting their terror-spreading paws on weapons of death, maybe they ought to consider doing something to make them somewhat tougher to procure.

But again, any purported legitimate concern these folks have about national security as relates to the refugees is entirely disingenuous. Instead, those making political hay over this turn their backs on innocent victims of war who find themselves in dire limbo.

It sounds disturbingly like the 1930s and ’40s, when Jews (including Anne Frank herself) were denied emigration to the United States, and left to remain in Europe and die at the hands of the Nazis. We are nothing if not predictable in our knee-jerk bigotry and intolerance. It seems to reside just below the surface. All it takes is a little scratch and boom, there it is in all its ugly glory.

This is, indeed, a seminal moment for America. History is calling, and it has a couple of questions: Are we the narrow-minded voices of hate so much of the world insists we are? Or are we the compassionate, welcoming culture that’s spelled out on the Statue of Liberty — that gift we received from France more than a century ago?

Remember what it says?

“Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It’s high time we relearn how to open our arms, lest our defining monument be dismissed as an antiquated mockery.

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RAY RICHMOND has covered Hollywood and the entertainment business since 1984. He can be reached via email at ray@rayrichco.com and Twitter at @MeGoodWriter.