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5th February 2017, 01:35 PM | #1 |
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Current social media rant against Syrian refugee's
For the record, i'm all for accepting Syria's refugee's, especially since they've suffered such inhumane atrocities ever since the Syrian civil war began. As a result, i've been met with the usual non-objective opposition labeling me as simply a "libtard", or offering up various military experiences as proof of their argument (as seen below). Having not ever served in the military (diabetes and blindness), can anyone here share a comparative experience to what I feel is nothing but a right wingers attempt at convincing others to ban Syrian refugee's simply because their mostly Muslims?
"I was asked to share this by the author: I don't typically go on rants or express my political beliefs here, but I just have to get this off my mind. As some of you know, I'm active duty Army. Aside from that, I am a medic. I've spent 3 years of my life overseas in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I've seen some pretty atrocious sites caused by war, from both sides. I've picked up blown up body parts of friends and I've saved the lives of guys who were trying to kill me and my guys right before I was keeping them from their 72 virgins or whatever they believe awaits them on the other side. Here is an unbiased truthful view to the Syrian refugee situation. My first deployment to Iraq, in 2006, my unit voluntarily ran a childrens burn clinic outside of the FOB. It was a constant target for attacks. You would think that people wouldn't shoot mortars or rockets at their own children, but you would be wrong. We saw hundreds of children, from infants to 18 year olds. The overwhelming majority of the kids we saw (90% or better) were clear cases of abuse. These parents were literally dunking their kids in boiling water, or throwing hot chai at their kids faces... Yes, we're talking about babies, toddlers, kids not even old enough to understand why their parents would do these things to them. HUNDREDS of kids... We saw quite a few of these kids that were sexually abused, both girls and boys. Their parents acted if nothing was wrong with this, even when confronted by our doctors. This is the mentality of their society, not the viewpoint of a few individuals... these beliefs have been accepted to the vast majority of these people. Many were educated, well dressed, well spoken men, but yet, they still raped their own children, and kept chai boys (if you don't know what that means, google it.) During that deployment, we also captured the 3rd largest EFP cache that had ever been captured. There were hundreds of copper plates, homemade explosives, fake curbs to house the EFP's, hundreds of mortars and rockets and howitzer rounds, even an anti-aircraft gun. All of these things came from one place, Syria. Almost every single IED or EFP we found or hit could be traced back to Syria... A lot of the terrorists we captured were from SYRIA... Imagine that. Fast forward a couple years, and I find myself in Helmand Province, in Afghanistan... We had a group of Afghani's that were paid to help guard our little mud hut in the middle of an Afghan village (I wasn't on a fob) These guys also kept a "chai boy" A boy, about 11 years old, who was there to serve these guys sexually. We heard him being sexually assaulted many times, but there was nothing we could do about it. We asked the police, the Afghan Army, and we were told the same thing every time.... it's their culture, and accepted as the norm.... Once again, we captured Syrian made explosives, weapons, and other items... We found Syrian passports during raids... And people out there want us to let these people into the US, with our kids, and near our wives. Near our schools, near our churches, synogogues, malls. Places where we should never have to fear being blown up, shot, kidnapped and tortured... Don't forget what they did to the Egyptian Coptic Christians, or the Jordanian pilot... Don't forget about what they do to rape victims! They stone these women to death for being raped! They behead their own people. Do you think they will show mercy to you? Look at the rape statistics in Denmark, Sweden, Belgium. Facts don't lie... 97% of rapes committed in Sweden were committed by MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS... And you want 10,000 of these people here? Even if just 1% of these so called "refugees" were ISIS supporters or active ISIS terrorists, would that be acceptable to you? Chew on it... think about it. Take a good look at your kids or your wife and decide if the risk is worth taking. Feel free to share this if you want" Note: I prolly should just ignore this. But. |
5th February 2017, 03:07 PM | #2 |
Penultimate Amazing
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"Terrible things happen in war, so let these people stay there."
As justification for racism, I give it a 2/10. To be generous, I'll also say this: No, we shouldn't welcome known rapists or known ISIS members into the United States as refugees. Duh. |
5th February 2017, 03:10 PM | #3 |
Penultimate Amazing
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That's horrific. Sounds like a very good reason to want to leave and move to a saner country. It's an odd argument to list all those atrocities and then conclude we shouldn't do all we can to help these people escape.
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5th February 2017, 03:37 PM | #4 |
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Utterly lame propaganda. It's always kind of funny when people pretend that Syria is anything like Afghanistan.
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5th February 2017, 03:39 PM | #5 |
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My reasons for getting general immigration under control are mainly economic. Yes, I'm concerned about radical infiltrators, but for me they are two mostly separate concerns, and terrorism is the least of of the two for me.
This immediate refugee crisis will pale in comparison to what we will be facing in a few more decades, especially with sub-Saharan Africa. What are we and the rest of the world (including Africa) going to do about that? |
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5th February 2017, 03:41 PM | #6 |
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It takes SJW logic about Bowls of M&Ms, lived experiences etc. and turns it against Muslims. Still bigoted.
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5th February 2017, 04:20 PM | #7 |
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5th February 2017, 04:45 PM | #9 |
Penultimate Amazing
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It's easy for me with something like this because it doesn't matter if it's true or not. Whether it's true or false, it still doesn't reasonably explain why someone would want to abandon victims of war. Anyone who sees such horror and doesn't want something better for the victims - even with risk involved - needs mental health counseling.
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5th February 2017, 05:19 PM | #10 |
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"Here is an unbiased truthful view to the Syrian refugee situation."
(proceeds to describe a bunch of people who aren't Syrian refugees) Thanks. Next? |
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5th February 2017, 06:58 PM | #11 |
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It describes observations supporting the conclusion that Syria produces and exports terrorist insurgents. If the observations are accurate, then it suggests that people coming from Syria should probably be closely scrutinized, and not casually admitted into any other country, regardless of whether they claim to be refugees.
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5th February 2017, 07:28 PM | #12 |
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As cultural anthropologists have always said "human culture" = "human nature". You might as well put a fish on the moon to test how it "swims naturally" without the "influence of water". -Earthborn |
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5th February 2017, 08:07 PM | #13 |
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"¿WHAT KIND OF BIRD? ¿A PARANORMAL BIRD?" --- Carlos S., 2002 |
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5th February 2017, 08:31 PM | #14 |
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5th February 2017, 08:49 PM | #15 |
Penultimate Amazing
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No, it doesn't, not even a little bit.
If a French tourist spends some time in West Baltimore, seeing drug dealers and drug users on street corners, along with some accompanying violence, would it be reasonable for the French to assume that Americans are dangerous criminals if they went to France? |
5th February 2017, 08:59 PM | #16 |
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5th February 2017, 09:00 PM | #17 |
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Not at all.
It's inevitable that every single Syrian an American serviceman would encounter fighting in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban, would be a militant or terrorist type. It's*only the kind of Syrian you*can reasonably expect to be in that situation. But it says nothing about Syrians at large. It's silly to even draw such an inference when the Syrians who traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban didn't sneak into the country claiming to be refugees. |
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6th February 2017, 12:29 AM | #18 |
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That's one of the tragedies of Trumps' so-called "administration". It takes an action that appears to satisfy a concern but does nothing of the sort, but is also illegal, and then fumes about it being declared, well, illegal.
There are legitimate concerns about refugees from Syria, ISIS in particular has made a point to infiltrate its operatives among them. There are rational approaches to dealing with such issues - similar to what South Korea is doing with North Korean defectors or what West Germany did with East German defectors - but simply banning them for a few months and then playing the victim when the ban is struck down as illegal really just panders to the base, nothing more. McHrozni |
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6th February 2017, 12:33 AM | #19 |
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The problem is that about 999 out of 1000 or so are indeed refugees who seek a better country of refuge than Turkey (whether or not they're still refugees is a matter of debate). Some think we should ban all of them for that 1 who will likely do a small calamity some time down the line, others think that a small calamity from time to time is acceptable for the sake of the remaining 999, it's highly unlikely for any single individual to become a victim of that calamity anyway (but the chance of someone suffering from it approaches 100%). As far as I'm concerned both approaches are flawed to the point of being useless, and choosing between the two is a false dichotomy.
There is a third way, which is logistically difficult, but legal and doable. As I mentioned earlier, West Germany used it and South Korea is still using it, for much the same purpose and for similar issues as we have now. The answer is that every refugee (or whatever) needs to spend a few months in a special camp for people like him first, he is taught about the society he is moving to, he learns the language and learns what will be expected of him. He's also taught what behavior is acceptable and what behavior isn't acceptable, with examples (e.g. Cologne groping attacks). He's also screened for extremism in the meantime, which is communicated abundantly to the public. The problem with this is obviously that you need to provide all of that for thousands if not tens of thousands of people for months at a time. This isn't easy or cheap, Germans and Koreans have (or had) orders of magnitude fewer defectors to process. Still, given the circumstances that's probably the best way to go. McHrozni |
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6th February 2017, 08:28 AM | #20 |
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That's not current - it made the rounds as early as November 2015 (and I think I tracked it back to the original Facebook poster, but he's since removed the post). From a later post of his, the "burn clinic" was the Scania Burn Clinic, a small clinic run by military volunteers at a convoy resupply base south of Baghdad. As a click-through of the results found at that Google search shows, the clinic's patients were not at all the way the original poster described them.
The rest of his story is obviously wrong as well. In 2006 Iraq (and later Afghanistan), ALL the IEDs and EFPs (and the terrorists who used them) were from Syria? Five years before the start of the Syrian Civil War? Uh huh. Pretty much everywhere I could find mentions of weapons seized in Iraq that were described as coming from outside Iraq, they were described as coming from Iran, with Syria not even mentioned anywhere. For instance, I found this article from 2007 describing a cache seized by the US military, containing a list of weapons an awful lot like the one detailed in the rant, but sourced to Iran, not Syria. The practice of bacha bazi is a Central Asian (ie, Afghanistan) cultural practice, not an Iraqi (or, needless to say, Syrian) one. And the rape statistics mentioned in the rant are just pure fiction. |
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When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes - Desiderius Erasmus "Does [A'isha] want to end up in a gas chamber, I wonder? Because this is where the whole thing will end" - McHrozni |
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6th February 2017, 08:40 AM | #21 |
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6th February 2017, 09:01 AM | #22 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Social media arguments about any possible topic you might consider are almost always non-objective. This is no exception, and it isn't limited to one side either. For example, remember this famous photo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_...eless_body.jpg Well, here's another less famous angle. And position. http://thedeclination.com/wp-content...VOVMAAtXSN.jpg There's nothing objective about that famous photo. It was staged for emotional appeal. I do not say this in order to claim either side is right or wrong. But if you're looking to social media for objective arguments, you're tilting at windmills. The medium is the message, as they say, and the message of social media is all about appeals to emotion and group identification. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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6th February 2017, 09:12 AM | #23 |
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This reminds me quite strikingly of certain email-circulated "reports" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, claiming to have been written by volunteers who went to New Orleans to help, and describing the (black) victims and evacuees en masse of animalistic behavior, abusing and spitting at relief workers, doing things like throwing emergency food and water supplies on the ground and screaming invective-laden demands for "McDonald's cheeseburgers and Cokes" instead; other stories allegedly described busloads of evacuated arriving for instance at highway rest areas for short breaks and the crowds of unruly and ungrateful black people leaving those facilities utterly trashed and destroyed, and so forth. Absolutely none of these incidents was able to be independently corroborated; and named relief workers who could be verified to have actually been in New Orleans at the time have never described anything but polite and grateful, if heartbroken, victims of the hurricane.
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6th February 2017, 10:46 AM | #24 |
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6th February 2017, 01:50 PM | #25 |
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6th February 2017, 02:06 PM | #26 |
Penultimate Amazing
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6th February 2017, 03:16 PM | #27 |
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6th February 2017, 04:35 PM | #28 |
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We should be wary of immigrants from any country that has profound human rights abuses.
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7th February 2017, 04:08 AM | #29 |
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7th February 2017, 04:59 AM | #30 |
Penultimate Amazing
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They could well be both - originating in Iran, but coming to Iraq through Syria.
There are four significant road connections between Iraq and Syria, three of whom are near or in Sunni areas where rebellion was ongoing at the time. There are just three such connections with Iran, just one of whom is in or near Arab Sunni part of the state. One of the roads to Syria is actually a highway, or at least what goes for a highway in that part of the world. http://www.globalcitymap.com/iraq/im...q-road-map.gif Syrian government, being an Iranian ally if not an outright puppet regime, would have few qualms about aiding Iraqi rebels, especially against US forces. It could well be both are true. McHrozni |
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7th February 2017, 06:59 AM | #31 |
Miss Schoolteacher
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That's rather tenuous, since not only would that still mean the weapons are Iranian and not Syrian as the Facebook poster claimed, there's still no evidence that these weapon caches were traced back through Syria to Iran. The poster's argument was not that the Syrian government (that is incidentally also the target of these terrorists) helped Iran supply Iranian weapons to (Shia) Iraqi insurgents, but that these are specifically Syrian weapons used by specifically Syrian terrorists (Sunni terrorists, like ISIS) and that's why refugees from Syria should be banned.
In any case, though, the weapon cache described in my link above, that resembles the one depicted in the Facebook post to a remarkable degree, was uncovered in Diyala Province. And Diyala Province is not connected to Syria by the roads shown in your image, but it does share a rather long border (and road connections) directly with Iran. |
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When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes - Desiderius Erasmus "Does [A'isha] want to end up in a gas chamber, I wonder? Because this is where the whole thing will end" - McHrozni |
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7th February 2017, 12:53 PM | #32 |
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Hamilton 68: Tracking Russian internet propaganda |
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7th February 2017, 01:02 PM | #33 |
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Hello. |
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7th February 2017, 01:56 PM | #34 |
Penultimate Amazing
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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7th February 2017, 07:00 PM | #35 |
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7th February 2017, 09:07 PM | #36 |
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Well, we are. We get other countries to accept the despicable immigrants who come from those countries. The Shah. Marcos.
Why should we be more wary of the victims, which I assume is what you're saying? Are you saying that years of being a victim is going to make you prone to terrorism? Or are you saying that the repressive human-right abusing people in power are infiltrating the refugee camps? I think you've got a concept buried in there, somewhere but damned if I can figure it out. |
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9th February 2017, 01:08 AM | #37 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Maybe, but don't put too much on that. Syrian border is less than a day away, and given that weapons were sourced to Iran, that border was definitely watched for weapons smuggling. Syrian border might have been more pours.
Smugglers don't always choose the most obvious or the most convenient route for reasons that should be readily apparent, I would say. If a cache of Iranian weapons were uncovered at the border with Iran and with George W. Bush at the helm and with US forces all over Iraq ... things could well go south for Iran, fast. If I was smuggling weapons from Iran to Iraq under those circumstances, I'd strongly consider Syrian route, especially for provinces bordering Iran. That doesn't mean that's definitely what happened, but I would be surprised if at least some - possibly but not likely all - Iranian weapons didn't flow to Iraq through Syria. McHrozni |
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9th February 2017, 01:22 AM | #38 |
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9th February 2017, 03:51 AM | #39 |
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...in the era of "fake news" you would need to provide more evidence that "the body was moved and then posed" than a couple of random photographs.
From reading the wikipedia and from the translated cite: the picture shows two different boys. http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/nei-...bedre/60490490 If you have evidence to show otherwise, please present it here. 1) There is no evidence the body was moved. 2) I am a published editorial photographer. I don't shoot art. But composition is important. 3) Photography is not and has never been objective. The image will always be from the point of view of the photographer. |
9th February 2017, 04:06 AM | #40 |
Miss Schoolteacher
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It wouldn't surprise me either. Though if that were the case for the Dabiya cache, it obviously didn't work out as Iran intended since the origin was determined to be the source country of Iran and not the intermediary country of Syria without much apparent difficulty.
However, it will take a lot more than that kind of speculation in order to make the specific assertions in the Facebook post quoted in the OP anything more than fiction. |
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When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes - Desiderius Erasmus "Does [A'isha] want to end up in a gas chamber, I wonder? Because this is where the whole thing will end" - McHrozni |
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