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RYUKICHI YAMAMOTO WAS JUST ONE of 26 Japanese men captured during the entire Aleutian’s Campaign; a wounded survivor of Attu, a Japanese Alamo on American soil where thousands of his comrades were annihilated or committed suicide. (Below: the last of the charging Japanese lay scattered together on Engineer Hill)Why couldn’t he have been one of the luckier ones posted to Kiska he wondered. One of those lucky thousands of Japanese soldiers who miraculously slipped away under cover of thick fog and the diversion of mysterious phantom radar pips - - God-sent ghost ships that never were - - to return home and fight again?Why couldn’t he have stayed in the fight on Attu long enough to catch up with Colonel Yamazaki and the rest of his comrades in their defiant banzai charge and those last plunging adrenal moments of glorious combat? Though found unconscious, he was deeply ashamed that his wounds were not debilitating.Well… At least he wasn’t his comrade Kitakoshi-san, who had been discovered cautiously entering a mess tent in U.S. fatigues. A hapless cook waved him inside and served up some dehydrated sweet potatoes. The cook assumed the half-starved Asian man was American, one of the Nisei, a translator maybe, and had no idea actual fighting was so close by. Hungry as he was, Kitakoshi couldn’t help staring at the dish; he couldn’t tell what it was. Starving as he was, it looked too disgusting to even try. That confused moment of hesitation and his lack of English suddenly gave him away. Seconds later both men were fighting for their lives. Minutes later the cook was credited with taking one of the very few Japanese prisoners of the entire campaign, and one of the first of the entire war.It pained Yamamoto just imagining Kitikoshi’s utter double-disgrace; being taken prisoner… And by an unarmed cook. But that’s where starvation takes us, doesn’t it?(Below: American cooks, medics, supply specialists after being taken by surprise and overrun… Some fought with shovels, or their bare hands.)Surprisingly, suspiciously, the Americans gave Yamamoto a warm cot and tended his wounds right next to their own wounded soldiers in a heated hospital tent. They fed him more and better food than he had ever been fed as an Imperial soldier. Once stabilized and rested, he was screened, photographed, and finger-printed. Then several days later - - just enough time for him to recover and relax, and to realize he probably wouldn’t be tortured or executed after all, contrary to everything he had ever been taught - - his first interrogation took place.How strange it was, being treated with compassion.That first interrogation was a surprisingly brief session. The Nisei intelligence officer seemed tired and disinterested. It ended with the offhanded mention that Japan had completely abandoned the Aleutians. “Petty lucky”, the interrogator grinned.THE DEAD, THE LUCKY, AND THE IN-BETWEEN…There was the dead, and the lucky, and then there was Sergeant Ryukichi Yamamoto; wounded, left for dead, and captured. Perhaps he was unwittingly lucky because his surviving Aleutian comrades would only rejoin an unwinnable fight.But he was also UN-lucky in that he couldn’t and wouldn’t appreciate that historical fact for years to come.Either way his shameful fate as a prisoner would be a deep dishonor to his family. It felt to him like an un-commutable life sentence of self-disgust. There could never be a return to what he had left behind.But then it comforted him a little bit guessing his family back in Hiroshima would probably decide he died an honorable death after all because the Japanese government never notified families about ‘missing’ or captured men. Then again, much later, he’d learn his family and most of his childhood friends were completely vaporized in an atomic flash, so nothing really mattered anyways.All that self-loathing and Bushido bullshit; such shameful waste of emotions…(Hiroshima…)(Hiroshima in 1948… still a wasteland)He’d also learn by war’s end that many Japanese soldiers never even had his chance to fight. Instead they starved to death, bypassed by the U.S. Navy and stranded on Pacific islands that couldn’t be re-supplied. Other soldiers wouldn’t know, or couldn’t believe, that the war had ever ended. They held out and fought on for years - - decades even - - as long-suffering ghosts of the war.(Below, see Hiroo Onoda who held out in the Philippines for 29 years… How often men build their own prisons, fight their own private wars; cling to lost causes. Why were the Japanese holdouts, men who lived in suspended states of anarchy, pointlessly murdering innocent people years after the war, celebrated back home in Japan as tenacious survivors? )On balance, Yamamoto should have felt lucky, but he didn’t.And later after hearing the actual voice of his dear emperor actually surrendering in a radio broadcast, he couldn’t.[ Above: No longer isolated from the crowds or riding a white horse in uniform, Hirohito is seen by commoners touring the ruins of Yokohama as just a mortal man in February 1946… Albeit one with an Imperial palace and a get-out-of-jail-free-forever card. (TIME Magazine) ]Early on in Yamamoto’s captivity he asked for a knife and was denied.Again and again, contrary to all his training and the words of men he had so deeply trusted and admired, the Americans seemed to kill him with kindnesses. Everything that happened in his prisoner life was just so completely unexpected. Everything he knew seemed wrong. Most of his rules for living no longer applied. Then Japan would lose the war and change almost beyond recognition.Time crawled while he was held on Attu...But then one morning after the usual surprisingly-delicious coffee, and a hot breakfast, Yamamoto and the other two-dozen captives were assembled on Massacre Beach. It was by now some day or another in September 1943, and thoughts inside their jail - - a dark cave actually - - had already and metaphorically been turning to winter. But standing there at water’s edge without any possessions and without warning, they were suddenly and unceremoniously transferred aboard a transport ship, bound some 3,200 miles south for Angel Island off the coast of California.California. Angel Island. The names conjured daydreams of soft warm weather; champagne sunlight and perfumed air. More self-loathing.As the ship pulled out of Massacre Bay, the prisoners were allowed out on the steel deck to smoke cigarettes in the harsh cold wind and take one last ruminating look at Attu from the rail, that most unforgettable and strangely glorious of all once-in-a-lifetime places. The island melted away, slowly receding into the familiar mists as the low overcast merged with the flat grey horizon. The seas built and swelled, and the winds grew to moan and whistle, until the island disappeared, completely and forever. Gone. And it’s history would soon be forgotten. Everyone felt it. So many lost brothers.(The old dock at Massacre Beach…)Up until July 1943, a total of just 10 Japanese prisoners of war had been held in the lower 48 states. In regards to handling them, everything was new, and theoretical. Camp Angel Island, a small mountainous sanctuary in San Francisco Bay, had been an immigration quarantine station before the war. Now it was a temporary military transit center. Upon arrival prisoners were de-loused, thoroughly examined by doctors, treated as necessary, and finally given numbers for processing into the American POW camp system.Throughout Yamamoto’s experience, pains were taken to adhere to the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war. The U.S. government insisted on showing Japan their prisoners were treated humanely and with dignity. But it could only be hoped that Americans held by Japan might receive similar treatment; Japan never ratified accords of the 1929 Geneva Convention. In due course, Yamamoto was presented with post cards to inform his family he was all right, and to register his name with the International Red Cross. He refused them though; better to be thought dead than dishonored by captivity. There was at least a little dignity from refusing, and in steadfastly hating the Americans. Why not? He assumed they hated him too.CAMP TRACYNext Yamamoto was forwarded to Camp Tracy just outside of Byron California, yet another step deeper into the strangeness of his war journey. Camp Tracy, once a Victorian-era resort enjoyed by famous athletes and movie stars, and now officially known as “P.O. Box 651” was noted on Army blueprints as an “Officer’s School”, but in reality was actually a top-secret, highly specialized intelligence-gathering facility. The depression had closed the last of the area’s hotels by 1938. Then ironically enough, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Byron’s Japanese-American residents were soon shipped out to distant internment camps, only to make room for incoming Japanese POW’s. The derelict resorts discreetly came back to life again behind tall fences and heavy gates.After arriving at Camp Tracy, prisoners were roomed in pairs and continuously monitored, frequently interrogated, and their conversations covertly recorded and meticulously analyzed. Walls were heavily insulated and microphones were hidden in light fixtures, wall outlets, and air vents intentionally situated between rooms to invite seemingly private conversations between prison cells. Listening devices were also placed in many trees outside the buildings.The camp was experimental. Here it was firmly hoped that courtesy and kindness would overcome reticence far more productively than deprivation, abuse and terror. Here amidst stately red brick buildings, manicured lawns and palm trees, the strategy was to use patience, friendliness, and cultural understanding. Gramophones, playing cards, mahjong sets, natural hot springs, mud baths, and home-cooked meals prepared by Japanese chefs were used to help relax prisoners into divulging important clues for piecing together bigger pictures of enemy morale, weapons, installations, and planning. Intelligence reports referred to all prisoners as “guests”.Though Germans and Italians also passed through the camp, Japanese prisoners were treated especially well because they had been indoctrinated that capture made them irredeemable and that their families would disown them. Techniques could always get heavier later on - - with threats to notify relatives in Japan of their POW status - - but it was believed that if interrogators started with abusive techniques it would have been all but impossible to win back any trust or goodwill later on. And so it was proven: compassionately-gained intelligence yielded more extensive and confirmable information, that was also of higher quality. This was especially the case with the profoundly hopeless and demoralized Japanese who had nothing left to lose.Camp Tracy turned out to be outstandingly productive; a secret weapon.Consequently, nearly half of Camp Tracy’s 45 interrogators were Japanese-American specialists from the Army’s Military Intelligence Service Language School. These ‘Nisei’ worked for their country even while their own families languished in the internment camps. Each interrogator dedicated himself to one prisoner until it was deemed that no further useful information could be obtained. Interviews were relaxed and generally held over the course of an hour or so, taking place 3 or 4 times a day, then those notes were combined with observational data, recordings, and other gathered intelligence. As the returns diminished, room had to be made for the next wave of fresh prisoners.And so eventually, after three weeks of virtual resort life in California, our good friend Yamamoto-san found himself shipped out again, this time to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin.Secret world of Camp Tracy revealedFORT McCOYHe was sent to McCoy along with some German POW’s in luxurious Pullman cars attended by porters and served by waiters in the dining car - - surreal and absurd to say the least. And the African-American soldiers of America’s segregated military had to give up their seats for the white and even Asian prisoners of war.Moreover, throughout their captivity in America the Axis POW’s would receive the same rations as any regular American soldier, including two packs of American cigarettes every day. Many hoarded cigarettes to trade for other goods, making their surprisingly comfortable lives even more comfortable. The Germans laughed about it. The Japanese only felt deeper shame, but they were touched with wonder too. Watching the picturesque countryside and small towns slide by, America was experienced as surprisingly vast and rich and strangely, like the only place left on earth untouched by war. It was beautiful and exciting; something unknown back home; and it somehow suggested a wider, brighter future for the world.Fort McCoy sprawled across 60,000 acres; almost 100 square miles. It served as a major U.S. Army training camp, but also as a “Detention Center” for interned Americans - - and “enemy aliens” - - and also as one of the largest POW camps in America. In fact, it held nearly half of all stateside Japanese POW’s, which meant 2,749 Japanese enlisted soldiers and sailors, 3 Japanese officers, and 10 NCO’s. Yamamoto discovered his fellow Japanese prisoners were relatively happy here. There would be only 14 Japanese escape attempts from Fort McCoy during the entire war. According to the Provost Marshal General’s Office, of the 5,424 total Japanese prisoners of war held in the United States, only 24 would die in captivity; 2 were suicides, 3 were shot trying to escape, 1 died in a farming accident, and the remaining 18 died of causes either natural or related to their earlier war injuries. Fears of widespread suicides, not even after the Emperor’s broadcasted surrender over the camp public address systems, simply never materialized.(In all, it’s estimated about 425,000 Axis prisoners were sent to 700 different prisoner-of-war camps scattered across the United States. The vast majority of these prisoners were German. )The Japanese found themselves in Compounds 1 and 2, the Germans in 3 and 4, and the Koreans in Compound 5. The wooden barracks were lined with rows of comfortable double bunks. Everyone received fresh cotton sheets, heavy woolen army blankets, and soft pillows. Other POW buildings were fitted out as mess halls and recreation centers.Prisoners were actually paid $.80 a day in scrip - - considerably more than most had made as soldiers - - which could then be spent at the camp’s canteen where sandwiches, pens, toothpaste, soft drinks, extra cigarettes, cards, and even beer were always available. Most evenings Hollywood movies and propaganda films were shown (films like “Gone with the Wind”, “Lost Horizon”, and Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight”).Officer POWs were not required to work, but everyone else did, and they largely enjoyed it. Many engaged in camp clerical or maintenance work, or were contracted out as farm hands; work much like many prisoners had been doing back home before the war. Additionally, the War Prisoners Aid of the YMCA provided still further comforts, such as mahjong sets, board games, musical instruments, library books, sports equipment, hobby materials, phonograph records, and much more.The prison camps were so comfortable and promising that many Germans and Italians actually refused to be repatriated back home after the war. Instead some managed to meet and marry local girls during their imprisonment so that they could stay. Many others returned to America after their repatriations as immigrants.Paradoxically, interned Japanese-Americans couldn’t say the same thing about America’s internment camps.( The internment camps had just 1 doctor for every 1,000 internees… Almost 2,000 would die from dysentery, childbirths without anesthesia, and general neglect… Life in Manzanar … Internment of Japanese Americans - Wikipedia Below: Manzanar “Relocation Center”, 1942…)The sad truth was, America treated prisoners of war better than its own 120,000 Japanese-American internees; its own lawful residents and citizens; men, women and children who were suspected just because of their race, rather than respected.Hunted down by the FBI and U.S. Census Bureau, Japanese-Americans were interned against the Constitution and without the protections of the Geneva Convention. They lived surrounded by armed guard towers. German shepherd’s patrolled the multiple perimeters of tall, barbed wire fences. Their own government had summarily sold their farms, businesses, and homes; disposed of all their personal property. They were told it was for the nations’ security, and more ominously, their own safety, and that they’d be interned indefinitely, or at least for as long as the war takes.And some were also transferred to U.S. Army prison camps to live and work, side by side, with German and Italian prisoners of war. Despite that added humiliation, they were the lucky ones because the POW camps were far more comfortable, entertaining, and better medically equipped than the internment camps.In a 1943 nationwide Gallup Poll, 48% of Americans believed the detainees should not be allowed to return to the Pacific Coast after the war; only 35% felt they should be allowed to go back. Answers to the follow-up question - - “What should be done with them?” - - indicated 50% wanted them sent “back to Japan”, and 13% said, “Put them out of this country”, while an additional 10% said the U.S. government should “Leave them where they are - - under control”.This was the same country in which pollsters found in 1939 that 53% of Americans agreed that “Jews are different and should be restricted”; the same country that between 1933 and 1945 took in only 132,000 Jewish refugees, just 10% of its own legally-set quota; the same country that doomed 20,000 Jewish children fleeing the Nazi’s in 1939 by not admitting them. The wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration remarked at a cocktail party: “20, 000 children would all too soon grow up to be 20,000 ugly adults”.Instead of harboring them, the U.S. pressed Britain and Latin American countries to admit the Jewish refugees, but they all refused them too. By June of 1942 the U.S. government and the Allies had hard irrefutable evidence of Hitler’s actions to annihilate the Jews, yet ships full of refugees would continue to be turned away for the rest of the war, and even afterwards during the chaos and deprivations of Europe’s recovery.Meanwhile back in Hawaii, and paradoxically, where America’s security risk remained especially high, just 1,800 Japanese-Americans were sent off to the internment camps. This was because over one-third of Hawaii’s total population (423,000) was made up of Japanese-Americans (158,000).Many asked, what about the threat of 1.2 million ‘Germans’ and the 700,000 ‘Italians’ living in America - - lawful immigrant residents and naturalized U.S. citizens born overseas? Well… They were noted in the “Custodial Detention Index” too, but mostly just watched. Though sometimes brought in for interrogation, they were rarely arrested. The U.S. government temporarily detained as many as 13,000 Germans and Italians, but very few people of these nationalities were actually sent to internment camps for the duration of the war like the Japanese-Americans.Roosevelt’s internment (Executive Order 9066) proved itself far-reaching and contagious; just six days later Canada followed suit with their own racist government order, authorizing the detention and forced relocation of 8,000 Japanese-Canadians from British Columbia. Japanese people were arrested and interned in Latin America too, and thousands of them were sent up to the U.S. camps. Some 1,000 native Alaskans were swept up too, against fears they might collaborate with the Japanese. They were sent to “duration camps”; cold, wet abandoned canneries scattered across southwestern Alaska. Many of them would die in these harsh, forlorn places so far from home.Although the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corp wouldn’t accept Japanese-Americans into their ranks, by war’s end some 33,000 Nisei served with exceptional distinction in the United States Army, earning 8 Presidential Unit Citations, 21 Medals of Honor (20 of which were announced in 2000 after ‘further review’), 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 559 Silver Stars, and 9,486 Purple Hearts, among many other decorations. 800 Nisei sacrificed their lives.Ironically, a Nisei unit would be one of the groups which liberated the concentration camp of Dachau.Here again, as historian Stephen Ambrose said, we had “the world’s greatest democracy fighting the world’s worst racist, Hitler, with a segregated army”.The injustice of internment finally ended in late 1944 though, when the Supreme Court ruled that the incarceration of Japanese-Americans was unconstitutional and illegal. Then this is how the internees of 1945 were welcomed back home in places like Seattle:Why is the self-destructiveness, the utter wastefulness, and ugliness of racism - - cutting off a nose to spite the face - - still so hard for so many to see?Why in God’s perfect world does humanity continue to ignore the tragic costs of hating?SAKAMAKI… “Mr. POW No. 1”(Why is this man smiling?)Killing time at Fort McCoy, Yamamoto came to know America’s first Japanese prisoner, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki. Sakamaki had been the sole survivor from a crew of 10 on a mini-submarine during the attack on Pearl Harbor. In an attempt to dive back down to his disabled sub to see why a bomb he had set didn’t go off, he passed out and woke up under guard in a U.S. Army hospital. Consequently, he was stricken from Japanese records and officially ceased to exist in his homeland. Meanwhile his captured sub made a highly publicized tour of the United States pitching war bonds. His survival during the otherwise successful attack at Pearl Harbor was felt as an epic failure and disgrace. Like Yamamoto, he too requested a knife for killing himself only to be denied.But in time, by combination of his POW seniority, rank, and charisma, Sakamaki became a camp leader for the Japanese prisoners at Fort McCoy. And after the war, rather than returning to an expected life of humiliation and being despised, he emerged as somewhat of a minor celebrity back in Japan. Then he quietly rose through the ranks at Toyota to become a high-ranking executive posted in South America.Sakamaki’s post-war reality in a defeated Japan was a mixed bag, but mostly not nearly as shameful as he had been indoctrinated to expect. Mostly, he simply refused to be personally defeated.After returning to Japan, he was surprised to receive so many letters. They reflected a Japan that has changed since 1941; it was now a liberated country in transformation. Here are just a couple examples (from Sakamaki’s book, Pearl Harbor, pgs 108-109):“Your past is not wrong at all. You need not feel ashamed. On the contrary, we owe you thanks. With a new heart, please work for a reconstruction of our beloved country.”“No wonder we lost the war, Mr. POW No. 1. Although I am a mere merchant, I know how to commit Hara-kiri. A man who does not know what shame is, is a beast. If you want to die now, I will gladly come and show you how it’s done. Which is the manlier life - - live long and cheap, or live short but glorious? Shame on you.”“I cannot understand how you could return alive. The souls of the brave comrades who fought with you and died must be crying now over what you have done. If you are not ashamed of yourself now, please explain how come. If you are ashamed of yourself now, you should commit suicide at once and apologize to the spirits of the heroes who died honorably.”The latter examples, however, were admittedly extreme and in the minority. They were the vestiges of a rapidly fading, fanatical wartime Japan, and not what Sakamaki normally experienced in his new work or walking down the street or living with his neighbors.He recounts his transformation during his American captivity (Pearl Harbor, pgs. 129 and 133):“My steps were these:All-out attack, failure, capture;a sense of dilemma, mental struggles,attempts at suicide, failure again;self-contempt, deep disillusionment,despair and melancholy;reflections,desire to learn and yearning for truth,meditation;rediscovering myself, self-encouragement,discovery of a new duty,freedom through love;and finally, a desire for reconstruction”.“… I claim no credit for this transformation. I wish to preach to no one. I only hope that this will show to all… that man is capable of being made anew. I learned it as a prisoner. It was the best education of my life.”In the end, ‘surrender’ turned out to be a spectacular new beginning for the Japanese…By surrendering, they won their “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” after all. America benevolently occupied japan for just 7 years as they rebuilt it. With U.S. protection and $28 billion of aid (2018 dollars), their nation would ultimately accomplish even greater power, security, and prosperity in peace than the militarists had dreamed of from war. They would thrive as an island nation, still limited in resources, and without territorial expansion, by growing through development and trade, and by sharing wealth and renouncing slavery. And they helped the world prevail over an enemy they shared with democracies even before the war: communism.They allied with the U.S. closely, and Japan went on to miraculously become the world’s second largest economy by the 1960’s.If the POW Camps in America weren’t convincing enough, Japanese inmates and their common fellow citizens would soon live to see their country finally freed from feudal oppression; they’d live freer, better lives than anyone ever imagined.(See: Tony Purtell's answer to Who won World War 2, the USA or Japan? )The American POW camps cleared out and shut down with amazing speed. Yamamoto was sent home much faster than expected; much faster than the vast majority of overseas American soldiers who were impatiently waiting for their de-mobilizations back to the States. But unlike many of his compatriots, Yamamoto arrived home only to disappear. He went missing in the peace.Yamamoto however, might have smiled to learn that after the war Camp Tracy was transformed into a Greek Orthodox monastery… And then back into a resort again… Which in turn later became an exclusive country club, and then finally a sprawling private residence before falling into disrepair. Today it’s yet another developer’s pipedream of future escapes.* * * * *THE POW’s of WORLD WAR IIFor all the soldiers who survived combat to see a prison camp, over 5,000,000 would die in captivity during the Second World War. It was a ‘Second Holocaust’ few recognize or ever talk about.The experience of Allied prisoners held by the Japanese was starkly and tragically different than Yamamoto’s.POW DEATH RATES in Captivity were as follows:Soviet POW’s held by Germans: 57.50% (Below)American POW’s held by Japanese: 40.40% (See General Jonathan Wainwright, Commander U.S. Army Philippines and highest ranking American POW survived virtually the entire war in Japanese hands)German POW’s held by Yugoslavia: 41.20%German POW’s held by Soviets: 35.80%German POW’s held by Eastern Europeans: 32.90%British POW’s held by Japanese: 24.80%German POW’s held by Czechoslovakia: 5.00%British POW’s held by Germans: 3.50%German POW’s held by French: 2.58%German POW’s held by Americans: .15%German POW’s held by British: .03% (See below… Like family!)Although Japanese representatives had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, their military-controlled government never ratified it because they viewed surrender as dishonorable. Consequently, the Japanese authorities neither recognized the existence of captured Japanese military personnel, nor did they treat prisoners in accordance with international agreements, including provisions of the Hague Conventions. The International Red Cross was never allowed direct access to Japanese-held POW’s. In fact, Emperor Hirohito himself ratified a directive on August 5th, 1937, explicitly removing the constraints of the Hague Conventions in regards to Chinese prisoners - - virtually none would survive.Thus the Japanese performed horrific medical experiments on prisoners, referring to them as numbered “logs”. They routinely subjected their prisoners to summary beheadings, practice bayonetting’s, torture, death marches, starvation rations, withholdings of medical treatment, forced hard labor unto death, and even cannibalism (the Japanese ate some of their prisoners, sometimes even while still alive, simply to show that they could). They transported Allied prisoners on “Hell Ships” - - inhumanely crowded, unsanitary, and unmarked transport ships - - which were then often attacked by submarines of the prisoners’ own countries. Over 20,000 allied prisoners died this way. After March 20th, 1943, the Imperial Japanese Navy was given standing orders to execute all prisoners taken at sea. Then near the end of the war, the War Ministry in Tokyo issued an order to kill all surviving POW’s. Although many thousands of Allied prisoners were eventually released after the surrender of Japan on September 2nd, 1945, just 56 Chinese prisoners survived the standing order.Successful escapes from Japanese camps were rare. The Japanese issued bounties for recapturing prisoners, along with outrageously disproportionate and harsh reprisals against any community even suspected of sheltering escapees. After the Doolittle Raid in April of 1942, some 250,000 Chinese people were massacred over several months in such reprisals. Entire villages were wiped out and biological weapons were used. Consequently, it was extremely difficult for Caucasian prisoners to cross through Asiatic societies without being widely noticed and feared.In any theater, though, securing, transporting, housing, feeding, and caring for prisoners of war cost valuable resources and presented significant liabilities. Many who surrendered themselves never lived to see a POW camp. For perspective, here is a comparison of estimated capture rates between the major countries over the course of the war:Number Served / Number Captured / Percentage CapturedGermany: 18,200,000 11,100,000 61%Italy: 3,430,000 1,300,000 38%Soviet Union: 34,476,700 5,750,000 16%Britain: 17,843,000 318,000 1.7%United States: 16,353,639 130,201 .79%Japan 8,400,000 40,000 .47%Regarding the low Japanese POW figures above, it should be noted that they do not include an estimated 500,000 -650,000 soldiers of the Japanese Kwantung Army who were seized by the Soviets en masse in Manchuria and northern Korea in August of 1945. Nightmarish weeks of uncontrolled raping and pillaging followed Hirohito’s famous surrender broadcast in Manchuria; civilian and Japanese soldier suicides were widespread. Then, finally, rather than taking on the costly and arduous process of repatriating the vast, exhausted and demoralized remnants of the Kwantung Army, the Soviets simply shipped them off in cattle cars to the labor camps of Siberia. Most never returned to Japan.The seizure of Manchuria aside, it is extraordinary that only an estimated 40,000 Japanese combatants out of the 8,400,000 Japanese who fought during the war, allowed themselves to become POW’s. The Japanese code of Bushido demanded every warrior fight to the death, insisting that any surrender would be a betrayal of their ancestors and their Emperor. A 1944 U.S. Military Intelligence Bulletin excerpted the following from a captured Japanese treatise:“… Do not allow yourself to be captured, even if the alternative is death. Bear in mind that capture disgraces not only the Army but also your parents and family, who will never be able to hold up their heads again. Always save the last round for yourself.”When Japanese soldiers did surrender, they often did so believing it meant breaking all ties with Japan. As a result, many of those men provided exceptionally valuable intelligence.On the other hand, the surprisingly low number of Japanese prisoners can also be explained by the fact that the Allies were often not willing to take Japanese prisoners due to the savagery of the fighting, reports and evidence of Japanese atrocities, booby-trapped casualties, and a frequently-stoked racial hatred. Additionally, throughout the entire war many Japanese feigned surrender or injuries only to attack.In general, Japanese soldiers assumed the Allies treated prisoners the same way they did, and so the belief became self-fulfilling to a varying extent on both sides.It’s no wonder that over 40% of American POW’s and 25% of British POW’s died in Japanese hands. In sharp sickening contrast, the mortality rate for Japanese prisoners held by the British and Americans was statistically insignificant; a tiny fraction of 1%.INTELLIGENCE BULLETIN, Volume II, No. 10, June 1944Military Intelligence Division, War Department, Washington, D.C.“JAPANESE VIEWS ON HANDLING PRISONERSThe views of a Japanese naval ensign on handling prisoners of war are presented below. While these views are not necessarily enemy doctrine, it is believed that they are pretty well in line with Japanese thought on the subject. The ensigns’ views tend to verify that the enemy is very much interested in prisoner-of-war information, and that he is aware of the talkative tendencies of some United Nations soldiers. The ensign’s views:“Insofar as possible, prisoners should be picked up separately.Conversation and communication between prisoners should be restricted.Captured documents, messages, and other items of intelligence value should be used in connection with the interrogation of prisoners. These should be studied and arranged in a manner for reference. The main idea is to get the prisoners to interpret these documents as completely as possible.In interrogating, force should be the guiding principle. Because the prisoner’s native language is different from ours, it is difficult to take advantage of any slip of his tongue, to give a detailed examination, or to use indirect-questioning methods (especially when the interrogator lacks confidence in his vocabulary). Therefore, it is easier (for the interrogator) to conduct a formal interview. The feeling that the victor is superior and the loser inferior should pervade the interrogation. If necessary, you should demand that questions and answers be made in writing.Until the object of the interrogation has been attained, the prisoner should be made to feel anxious about his fate, should become physically exhausted, and consideration of such should be given to his quarters, food, and drink, surveillance and so forth.”Not exactly Camp Tracy…FROM YAMAMOTO’S US ARMY INTERROGATION FILE:- - CONFIDENTIAL - -Date of interrogation: June 10, 1943.PW’s Name: YAMAMOTO, RyukichiPW’s Serial No.: 2145 Sgt.Int. Name: Capt. L. E. JonesUnit or Vessel: 25 Div. 22 Inf. Rgt.Date and Place of Capture:ATTU, ALEUTIAN IS., 25 May 1943.PREAMBLE:Prisoner of War (PW) was born, Jan. 7, 1918, in NAGANO-KEN, KARUIZAWA- MACHI.Legal Domicile:NAGANO-KEN, KARUIZAWA-MACHI, 1608He graduated from FUKUOKA-SHI Middle School and later attended the HIROSHIMA HIGH SCHOOL (Koto-Gakko) from which he graduated.He was employed in the Hiroshima City Hall as a clerk from graduation until induction into the Army in 1940.A former report has been checked and agrees substantially with PW’s present statements. He is evasive, and somewhat security conscious. He maintains an attitude of ignorance and a lapse of memory in relation to places he has visited. Because of this attitude, no additional information has been obtained. He is considered unreliable.CHRONOLOGY:7 Jan 1918Born in NAGANO-KEN KARUIZAWA-MACHI.Apr 1924 – Mar 1930 Primary School.Apr 1932 – Mar 1936 Middle School.Apr 1936 – Mar 1939 High School.May 1939 – June 1939 Worked as clerk in Hiroshima City Office.17 Aug 1940 Inducted into Army atHIROSHIMA.20 Nov 1940 Left for MUKDEN, MANCHURIA.27 Feb 1941 Transferred to KALGAN,INNER MONGOLIA.10 Aug 1941 Transferred to KASHIWABARA,KURILE IS.20 Oct 1942 Left for ATTU, ALEUTIAN IS.25 May 1943 Wounded, and capturedMASACRE BAY, ATTU.CAPTURE:PW was captured near MASSACRE BAY 25 May 1943 after having been wounded in the shoulder and right hand by machine gun bullets.He was the only man who survived from his platoon.When found by LT. BROWN he was nearly dead from loss of blood.UNIT OF FORCE:He trained for three months in the 10thInf. Regt. in HIROSHIMA.After arriving in MUKDEN he was transferred to the 25thRailroad Guards and for three months saw duty between MUKDEN and ANTUNG (33 46’ – 119 18’).He transferred from the 25thRailroad Guards to the 22ndInfantry Regiment In KALGAN (41 51’ – 114 54’) and remained in this unit until captured on ATTU ISLAND.IDENTIFICATION:His convoy to ATTU of 5 ships, Asama Maru, Kokura Maru, Ise Maru, and Kobe Maru, and the 5thship’s name unknown, was escorted by three destroyers; UME, SAKURA, and TAKE.These were old destroyers and somewhat slow.The transports were all about 3,500 tons.All had one funnel, and painted grey.PERSONALITIES:Lt. Col. YAMAMOTO, TEICHI was in command of the 22ndInfantry Regiment and about 40 years old. He committed suicide when he saw the battle was being lost.Major ISHIKAMA, RYUKICHIMajor NAGATA, SEIICHICapt. HONDA, HACHIRO22ndInfantry RegimentEQUIPMENT:PW’s unit was equipped with the following weapons:One half used Sampachi 6.5mm rifles, the other half99 Shiki or 7.7mm.He stated that the new 7.7mm is far superior to the Sampachi and that there will be no more 6.5mm sent to the Manchurian or northern garrisons.Nambu Light Machine Guns 6.5mmHeavy Machine Guns 6.5mmModel 3 (1914) Air cooledWith tripod 60.3 LbsGrenade Launcher 50mm comes in twomodels. The old has a smooth bore andthe new is rifled. Overall length 20inches. Tube 10 inches.Ammunition: Model 89 shell (handgrenade), time fuse grenade, signalgrenade, and smoke grenade.Rate of fire: 10 – 20 rounds perminute. Effective use of burst, 5 – 25yards radius.Mountain Gun 75mmModel 41 (1908)Rate of fire: 10 per minute.RADAR:A radar set was being installed by an expert from KISKA when the battle began.He heard that the radar expert was captured and should be able to give much information.COMMUNICATIONS:Communication with the Kurile’s was maintained by submarines which surfaced daily. These subs brought in supplies and news.DEFENSES:Because of the peculiar terrain of ATTU, caves were constructed throughout the island. The hospital was also in a cave.ENEMY SUPPLIES:Oil and gasoline was stored in drums. There was a plentiful supply cached at points throughout the island.Ammunition was sealed in water-tight boxes and buried.Because of poor planning, ammunition was scarce in times of need. PW blamed his superiors for this poor planning.MORALE AND PROPAGANDA:He stated emphatically that Japan would eventually win the present war. But, should she lose, this is the beginning of a one-hundred-year war.PW believes the TOJO regime is honest and has the support of Japan as a whole.The Emperor is the divine head of the nation.Home front morale is very high.Allied raids will unite the people in a new spirit of determination.Japan hates Russia and he believes the Manchurian Army can hold Russia in check.Allied leaflets cannot influence the populace or the Japanese soldier.Loudspeaker broadcasts to the front lines will be useless.If Japan loses the war the Empire will be lost. The nation will be as in 1895.Mail came to ATTU about once a month.Officers and men are distantly separated in the Japanese Army. Discipline is very rigid. Face-slapping’s still continue. This is to harden the privates and is part of their training. However, PW hates it and the men do likewise.LOCALITIES:The wharf at KASHIWABARA (50 41’ – 156 08’) is made of wood and about 100 meters long.Troops were quartered in wooden barracks near the wharf. These barracks were constructed by the NICHIRYO Gyogyo Fishing Company of Tokyo for their fishermen who were there during the summer. He stated that these barracks were flimsy structures and unsuitable for the severe KURILE winters. Men complained much about them.Ten thousand ton naval ships were anchored about a mile from the wharf at KASHIWABARA.Three large fuel tanks were located near the wharf. They contained oil and gasoline.Ten-thousand-ton cruisers passed through the strait between PARAMUSHIRO and SHIMUSHU Islands.The airfield on the plateau above KASHIWABARA was seldom used.The field near KATAOKA [ on Shimushu Island] across the strait from KASHIWABARA was being used constantly.SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE:Shortages in equipment must be felt, as PW was often admonished by the various commanders to be very careful, as the present equipment was all they would get.He stated that when he received letters from home, he could sense shortages being experienced by the populace in Japan.He heard from men newly arriving in KASHIWABARA from Japan, that millions of women were working in the many war plants. Shifts were long. Pay was good, but commodities very scarce.THE ENDATTITUDES OF PWS:1.Antagonistic.2.Average intelligence.3.Above average intelligence.4.Co-operative.5.Evasive.6.Extremely security conscious.7.Friendly.8.Feigned ignorance.9.Fresh.10.Highly co-operative.11.Impolite.12.Lapse of memory.13.Liar.14.Polite.15.Reserved.16.Security conscious.17.Sullen.18.Talkative.19.Trustworthy.20.Un-trustworthy.21.Un-intelligent.22.Un-observant.23.Un-friendly.24.Vague.25.Very forgetful.

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.Let’s explore a few things first and see if it can be a little clearer from the viewpoint of people who have been asking for this since before Donald Trump ever announced his bid for candidacy, some of which, were actually leaders in the Obama administration.I’ve already written extensively on the Islamic State and the European Refugee Crisis, of which this is still very much a part of, which you can read those answers here European Refugee Crisis by Jon Davis, but the summary is that the crisis didn’t end in 2015, it only stopped receiving major coverage once the radical consequences to it became realized abroad. Since that point, any opposition to immigration from majority Muslim countries for security issues has been rebranded as something racist and the work of right wing nationalism, even as numerous acts of terror, criminal activity, and general hostilities between immigrants and native populations have continued to happen, both in Europe and even the United States.That said, what this conversation is deeply missing is some context as to why so many Americans, in particular, feel that the refugee crisis simply isn’t our responsibility to solve when so many more obvious solutions exist, nor is that even a logical solution.To begin with, do you know what makes a refugee a refugee?Many are questioning the legitimacy of whether the people we are talking about actually should be treated as refugees, or if they legally are migrants. The two are very different, and those seeking asylum rate a very different set of rights and privileges that migrants do not. This is better explained in Why is it that Syrian refugees can afford high-end smart-phones to take selfies and are refugees migrants?The difference is that refugees and those seeking asylum are a protected class of individuals according to international treaties. They are extended certain rights by host countries that border on citizenship, and in certain countries under certain treaties, even more rights and privileges than the average citizen, as persons in need and wards of the state. The distinction here is that there is a difference between being a refugee and a migrant, as a migrant is not operating under duress and more or less under their own free will. They chose to come to wherever they ended up to gain opportunity or social advancement, rather than to escape persecution. For that reason, they don’t get the same rights and privileges that a real refugee has.Due to at least two major agreements on refugee rights, we can see how the two classes are to be treated very differently.First, the most widely used definition of what a refugee is, as it is worded in Article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, as amended by the 1967 Protocol:"A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.."[1][1][1][1]Continuing on, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees , which almost all modern nations are a part of, does not allow refugees who are under threat in their own country to be repatriated:"No Contracting State shall expel or return ('refouler') a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social or political opinion" (Article 33(1)).The significance of that is that once a refugee is here, there is no sending them back. They are here for good, with all their past and whatever choices or crimes they may intend to make.Furthermore, article 9 tells us that no state must take in an alleged refugee in which it determines that that individual represents a threat to national security. This is where we have our ability to “vet” a potential refugee, but does not provide the freedom to otherwise discriminate. In this case, there is perfect legality in not admitting whole groups, but groups of well vetted individuals, each of whom, through thorough investigation, would be deemed not to be a significant potential risk to our national security.Nothing in this Convention shall prevent a Contracting State, in time of war or other grave and exceptional circumstances, from taking provisionally measures which it considers to be essential to the national security in the case of a particular person, pending a determination by the Contracting State that that person is in fact a refugee and that the continuance of such measures is necessary in his case in the interests of national security.The second major agreement needing to be mentioned is the Dublin Regulation, which is an EU convention that determines who is responsible for taking on refugees. We look to EU because, as will be made clear, the United States actually doesn’t have the possibility of receiving real refugees, barring a few specific cases.The Dublin Regulation... is a European Union (EU) law that determines the EU Member State responsible for examining an application for asylum seekers seeking international protection under the Geneva Convention and the EU Qualification Directive, within the European Union. It is the cornerstone of the Dublin System, which consists of the Dublin Regulation and the EURODAC Regulation, which establishes a Europe-wide fingerprinting database for unauthorised entrants to the EU. The Dublin Regulation aims to “determine rapidly the Member State responsible [for an asylum claim]”[1] and provides for the transfer of an asylum seeker to that Member State. Usually, the responsible Member State will be the state through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU.Because of these and other agreements, refugees become, in effect, wards of the first state they physically enter in which their security is reasonably assured, with that state taking on full responsibility for their welfare, security, and the maintenance of their basic human rights, as they would their own citizens, with little to no means to send them home if they should become a problem for state welfare or security. In 2015, this focus on the law caused many of the those fleeing Syria to create major headaches for railway workers when they refused to disembark trains bound for Germany, needing to make routine stops in the Balkans. Many were attempting to refuse asylum unless they were within German borders. Given, however, that they were already in Turkey when they boarded the trains, the legal responsibility for the Syrian refugees lay there.The United States, in this case, is unique. There is literally no way that a person seeking refuge can physically walk into the country barring Canadians and Mexicans. Neither of these has faced a legitimate period of national catastrophe in over a century, so never have their people qualified as “seeking asylum”, (though I would be very willing to accept arguments that the Mexican Drug War could be a qualifying event, but that is a discussion for another day.) The only other possible cases may the Cuban “boat people” who attempt to cross the strait between Cuba and the United States. It is also doubtful that a person could claim legitimate refugee status if they are capable of securing passage on an outgoing plane from an affected country, which just so happens to make absolutely no layovers. That said, the US has no tradition of taking in actual “refugees”, as it is determined to be in the European legal tradition.According to the Dublin agreement, a refugee, operating under good faith, is someone fleeing for their lives or from severe persecution to the nearest place of safety. That would be a neighboring country, not one halfway around the world. For that reason, all “refugees” entering the United States are really some form migrant. Granted, many may come from incredibly disparate situations prior to entering the United States, but to become part of the refugee process, they were first vetted from areas where they had reasonable safety first, such as refugee camps in Jordan or Lebanon. For that reason, we can say that all refugees in those situations have escaped the immediate danger and are, honestly, at this point competing with other refugees for the best possible outcome afterward.This makes them migrants, who aren't afforded the same hospitality. Because they became expatriates to a nation under more or less peaceful circumstances and of their own accord, there is no binding obligation of a host nation to provide for a person's well-being, other than the basic rights of security afforded to anyone.That said, a person “fleeing” from oppression in the Middle East, and doing so by buying a ticket from a Cairo airport, stopped being a refugee a long time ago. They weren’t a refugee when they left Egypt, a safe country by most accounts. They then weren’t a refugee again when their plane landed in a layover in Berlin, and then again when they had another layover in Shannon, Ireland. Why, according to the precedence of the Dublin Regulation, these people were still refugees in New York where they landed, I have no idea. The truth was they weren’t. Words mean things and these people weren’t refugees. They were migrants, as was everyone who migrated from these regions, as there is no possible way to walk to the United States from the Middle East. Turkey, Lebanon, even Israel, yes they are experiencing real refugees. Not New York, so we need to start getting that straight.That isn’t to say the United States should be unsympathetic to the plight of the real refugees. We are the nation best suited in the world to bring about real change to help them, but immigration into the United States, nor even the rest of Europe won’t be how we help them. We have to really think about this, does allowing immigration, even from asylum seekers, really solve the problem, or does it just open a faucet further to a problem that’s source lies very far elsewhere. A better summary of this idea can be seen here.While I am for a strong immigration policy that brings in the best minds to the United States with the fewest risks to Americans, I have to say that the rationale of the preceding video should lead us to the conclusion that our responsibility shouldn’t be giving every person having less fortune than we do a share of our own good fortune. That is the type of socialistic thinking that just creates equality through everyone being exactly as destitute. What makes far, far more sense, is that we should attempt through whatever means are available to solve the problems where they are before taking on risks ourselves.With that point made, let’s look at “over there”.Can anyone tell me what it is we are looking at here?Not sure? Here’s a better image.Or perhaps this one,or this.Still confused? They’re tents - over one hundred thousand tents which have the ability to house over three million people. What’s more, they come complete with access to healthcare, food, clean running water for drinking, hygiene, and toilet. Oh, and if you look closely, yes, they’re air conditioned, as well.To understand the gravity of how massive this complex is, you have to view it from space.What’s best is that this tent city, which one would presume perfect for housing and caring for the hundreds of thousands of displaced and brutalized individuals victimized by wars, civil insurrection, and the rise of ISIS, is miraculously in the center of where these conflicts are occurring. One would think, then, that this place would be overflowing with charitable aid and support for the displaced refugees? What else could it be for?Well, one would think.This is the tent city of Mina, in Saudi Arabia. It is a gathering place for millions of Muslims every year as they hold the mandatory observance of the Hajj. The Hajj is an obligatory pilgrimage commanded of all able bodied Muslims who have the means to go, where they travel to the holy city of Islam, Mecca to visit key points to Islamic History and the founding of the religion. The intent of the Hajj is to reinforce one’s belief in the faith while bringing people from all over the world together to shed the comforts of civilisation and dissolve class and cultural distinctions.The tent city serves as a housing facility for the millions of Muslims who attend each and every year, and one which isn’t free. According to Al Jazeera:The majority of pilgrims stay in the tent city, where more than 100,000 white tents are built side-by-side in the low-lying valley. The majority of these tents can accommodate about 50 people, and the average price for each pilgrim is $500.For the exceptionally wealthy, there are other options, such as the plain, two-by-two-metre room in a portacabin dug into the sand and fitted with two beds and a small cabinet - with a price tag of $3,500 for each person a night.[2][2][2][2]Unironically, the Saudi Arabian Kingdom is also constructing the nation’s tallest and most luxurious hotel complex to provide wealthy Muslim hajis ease of access to the the kaaba stone and other pilgrimage sites, in this holy pilgrimage to celebrate the oneness and classless observance of unity under Allah.At this point, we need to understand who is charging these crazy prices for what should be a mandatory pilgrimage, and who decided that they couldn’t use it to shelter the millions of savaged people struggling to survive only a few hundred miles away. Well, quite obviously and disappointingly, it is the people who run the holy city, the theocratic branch of Saudi Arabian government responsible for overseeing religious operations, such as maintenance of holy sites, organizing the pilgrimages, and overseeing the construction of foreign Mosques.Saudi Arabia is feudal, meaning that the nation is still ruled by major families. The first, the House of Saud, rules in a semi-secular monarchy. The second most powerful family, the house of Wahhab, are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) with an extended family numbering around 1500 and highly intermarried to the Saudi Royal Family. Muhammad al-Wahhab was a radical Islamic cleric of the time who allied with the founder of the house of Saud, and together the secular warlord and the fundamentalist Imam were able to create a regime to challenge the then rulers of the Islamic world, the Turks. Skip forward to today, and the House of Wahhab holds extreme power over not just the religion in Mecca and Saudi Arabia, but given the universal nature of the Hajj and other Islamic practices, hold exceptional influence over the entire Islamic world, not to mention in control of the vast wealth generated by the pilgrimage industry.[3][3][3][3]Continuing on, this branch of religious leaders is among the chain that philosophically led directly to the radical brand of Islam that we are seeing today by way of the Islamic State. That isn’t to say the two are synonymous, but they are very closely related. Much of the Islamic State’s ideology is traced directly to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. For that reason, many of the leading and influential leaders in Saudi Arabia, particularly powerful Imams within the Wahhab line, have been key supporters to the Islamic State faction and the two are linked far more than the Saudi Arabian government would like to admit. Given their influence, we’ve seen millions in charity of Islamic organizations go towards radicalized institutions, from the Islamic State directly, to radicalized mosques in Europe. However, since a state isn’t the individuals within it, the United States is relatively powerless to do much in the way of eliminating the threat posed by these radical adherents to their brand of the faith.The last major point that must be discussed before I move on is the international intervention from outside Europe on behalf of the refugees by way of Islamic religious interference. By this, I am referring to Saudi Arabia's 2015 offer to build over 200 Sunni mosques throughout Germany to help serve the needs of the migrants in transition. This offer was not well received by many, who felt it a disingenuous.[4][4][4][4]Rather, it was viewed for what it was, an attempt by the Saudi Arabian government, a strict monarchy with close ties to the ruling religious Imams over the most religiously significant region in Islam, to spread their collective influence throughout the European continent. By building mosques in Europe, the Imams of Mecca gain access to millions Muslims outside the reach of the holy city of Islam.In this way, there is a direct channel from the billions raised through fees and services offered during religious rites of passage like the Hajj, being reinvested to create mosques throughout Europe for the displaced refugees, mosques which report directly to the leadership in Mecca. It doesn't help that within Europe, a number of these same affiliated mosques are where several of the known terrorists originated already.Having said all that, I’d like to place the question in your head if it wasn’t already there…How many refugees has Saudi Arabia taken in with all those tents?The answer is rather horrifying. Absolutely none. No Arabian country has taken in a single refugee since the conflict began.And this is confirmed: According to Amnesty International:Gulf countries including Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.And according to the fact checking site Snopes[5][5][5][5]:For their part, Saudi Arabia says they have taken in thousands of Syrians, but as a September story from BBC points out, it has taken them in as visitors or temporary workers, not on refugee visas, and indeed, it is incredibly difficult for Syrians to obtain any type of visa for most Gulf states. Without a visa, they can only enter Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen.I’m not saying that Saudi Arabia is abundantly flowing with open fields that are livable, but those tents could fully house every refugee that went to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt through the first half of 2015, and could have immeasurably increased the world communities ability to aide the rest. But when so many countries throughout the world are being pressured to take in refugees because it is the humane thing to do, currently the focus is on the United States, I feel remiss not to remind the world of the complete lack of empathy toward the Syrians by their fellow Arab Muslims with the already existing infrastructure that, for all intents and purposes, seems built to house the millions of people suffering from the effects of Islamic jihadist violence.Frankly, I feel that this simply isn’t our problem to fix, at least not when others far, far more involved and tied to the conflict feel no sense of responsibility themselves. To the shame of some of some of these places, the nation which took in the most refugees wasn’t even an Islamic one, but the nation with the largest Christian population in the region - Lebanon, a fact especially telling of the Lebanese people when considering that the 2.3 million refugees are being supported by a nation which in 2010, had a population of only 4 million people.Contrast the previous images of Mina to that of the Lebanese. Below, you see one of seven major campsites housing refugees.I just wish people would consider how much help could have been given if the first 3 million people who fled the conflict could have been cared for in Saudi Arabia, rather than dispersed to the winds where tens’s of thousands have died in the process. Literally each and every refugee to Lebanon could have lived in a single tent complex in Saudi Arabia that goes useless most of the year. Why didn’t they? Because the tents were for the Hajj, where (paying) pilgrims need them. The problem is that the Hajj only lasts 2 weeks, so the other 50 weeks of the year, there is absolutely no excuse, except that there is no money in that.To be brutally honest, this image below was used to convince millions of Europeans that it was their responsibility to end the Syrian Refugee Crisis, that they were somehow immoral or acting against human decency for not making the way easier for refugees, or often, migrants to make their way into and be embraced by Europe.I look at this image and see something very different. I see the result of what happens when people who have a natural responsibility to the conflict, to the people, also being Arab Muslims, and given their vast wealth and resources perfectly suited to solving, or at least greatly alleviating this problem, have done nothing. Actually, they’ve done far worse than nothing. They’ve forced decent God fearing Muslims to pay unGodly amounts of money to perform the very rites which their religion demands, and instead of using that money to help alleviate the suffering they are at least in part responsible for causing, they’ve used it, and the refugees themselves, to extend their influence throughout the regions where the Syrian diaspora has been flung to. All the while, they have helped push an agenda that this tragedy was somehow the responsibility of Europe, and now America, to solve. The West has been drug through a never ending guilt trip over what we apparently owe to this little boy who died before he ever even reached Europe. I want to stress that word, unGodly, because I feel that this level of inhuman manipulation, shirking one’s natural responsibilities, and callousness indicates an ideology that is truly without God.Now, I know I can already hear it, “Islamophobia”. It isn’t my problem that you think that, I’ve provided my evidence and you can check the links at the bottom yourself. Neither this answer, nor the so called “Muslim Ban” is about prejudice towards Muslim people. You are saying that you know Muslims where you live and they aren’t all bad, so stereotyping them with this information is wrong. The problem here is that I didn’t do that, nor has Donald Trump. I’ve specifically named the key groups and people I find the most repulsive and at the most fault. For that reason, the good Muslims you know aren’t relevant here. We aren’t talking about individual Muslim people, nor the whole of Islam, but specific groups with overwhelming influence in Islam today who chose to do nothing.It’s important to remember that I have lived in these places I write about. I learned the language and spoke face to face with them in their native tongue. I learned about Islamic history and culture less than an hour from Baghdad, one of the most historically important centers of Islamic culture, and I have known more good Muslims than most western readers will ever meet. To that end, the people I detest the most are the people who kill two good Muslims for every one non-Muslim they butcher through their fanatical worldview of what True Islam is, and those who can’t be bothered enough to help their fellow Muslims with charity they are so prepared to give. To me, people who say it is wrong for me to speak ill of any Muslim for fear of creating more prejudice in the world are unwitting apologetics for those types of criminal mindsets, while I myself, who seek to enlighten others of the differences between good and bad Muslims, have nothing to apologize for. To say that this is a criticism of Muslims is wrong, but it is a criticism of the people who have the most power to aid good Muslims.So why can’t we make the Saudis do anything to help?As I have already mentioned, Saudi Arabia has many reasons, none of them good, to not help the refugees of their region. In part, the ideology with which much of the Islamic fundamentalists draw their roots from, are the same as that of the ruling faction of the theocratic arm of the Saudi Arabian government. Second, the nation has extremely high per capita wealth that it doesn’t want to dilute and aiding the refugees in the most obvious way would radically upset one of the most profitable sources of the nation’s income (besides oil) being the pilgrimage industry centered in Mecca. Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that it doesn’t have to.The zero number ultimately comes from the United Nations High Commission of Refugees, or the 1951 UN Convention/1967 Protocol, mentioned earlier.The refugee count by the UNHCR is determined by counting those “persons recognized as refugees under the 1951 UN Convention/1967 Protocol, the 1969 OAU Convention, in accordance with the UNHCR Statute, persons granted a complementary form of protection and those granted temporary protection.”As you can see, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Yemen (which is undergoing its own refugee crisis) are not signatories to the 1951 Convention[6][6][6][6] and do not grant the full rights guaranteed by the Convention to refugees within their borders. Specifically, they are in violation of Article 34 of the Convention, the possibility of assimilation and naturalization since a path to citizenship is not granted , and possibly Article 23, the requirement to be treated like nationals with respect to public relief and assistance. Because of these violations, the UNHCR reports these countries as sheltering 0 refugees as they lack full rights.According to sources friendly to the Arab states, the numbers of “refugees” they have taken on varies wildly between 30,00 and, according to the Saudis themselves, 2.5 million. [7][7][7][7]You’ll get 1 million from Newsweek[8][8][8][8], 2.5 from the Huffington Post[9][9][9][9] and Al Jazeera[10][10][10][10], though most reasonable estimates place the actual number much closer to between 100,000 and 500,000, favoring the low end[11][11][11][11].Having said that, it’s important to understand that Saudi Arabia simply doesn’t “do” refugees… so what status are these people? [12][12][12][12]Saudi Arabia instead issues working visas, which allow the refugees to work in Saudi Arabia, but never to become Saudis. According the the BBC as many as 100,000 were never refugees, but are merely enjoying the visas they previously had before the Syrian crisis extended[13][13][13][13]. Whatever their origin story, they are temporary labor, rather, cheap servants, which the country (actually countries since the practice is common throughout the region) has the right to dismiss when the crisis is over, whether there is a Syria to return to or not, or simply at their leisure. The refugees themselves have absolutely no rights traditionally given to those in flight from persecution.[14][14][14][14] To the Arab states, they are simply commodity assets.That said, there many who are actual signatories to the 1967 Protocol who are also not doing their “fair share” of the refugee lifting, that is, if the United States is to be held accountable at all. The US took in around 85,000 refugees in 2015, of which at least 10,000 were Syrian, and around 39,000 Muslim[15][15][15][15]. Compare this to other signatories such as Japan, which has taken in only 27, rejecting over 99% of its applicants.[16][16][16][16] According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Beijing, by the end of August 2015, there were nine refugees and 26 asylum seekers from Syria in China. [17][17][17][17]Even Canada, whose Liberal Prime Minister recently rebuked the United States for being discriminatory, would have to double the number of refugees they take every year to even equal what the United States has taken in on average since 2004.[18][18][18][18] The new proposed limit on refugees into the United States is still 20,000 more than Canada is taking now, and if the United States never took on another refugee, Canada would not surpass the United States in total refugees taking asylum within their borders until the 2020s. [19][19][19][19]Now, the United States is being compared to Germany, who took in more than any other European nation as a show of their desire for openness and humanitarian virtue. What we aren’t dealing with, though, is that they are also an aging country. In 2012, Germany had 1.38 births per woman. For a nation to maintain itself, it needs a minimum of 2.1 live births per woman if it expects to sustain a population. Given the huge margin between the 2.1 and 1.38 (it actually fell below 2.1 in 1970) the German workforce has been placing more of the economic burden on fewer and fewer young people with each passing dead. By 2010, the nation, though still economically strong due to its tradition of engineering and reliance on automation, was teetering on the edge of an economic collapse if it could not manage to replace the workers it was losing with new ones. Alarmingly, this trend is common for most of the post-industrialized West. So the collapse of the Middle East, to be cynical, couldn’t have come at a better time for Germany. That said, the international guilt trip is ill-deserved. Germany made its choices not for some great sense of humanitarian altruism, but to prevent a future collapse of it’s geopolitical balance of power within the Euro zone. It’s also paying the price for the compromises it made in welcoming so many, so quickly.That said, we are done with the international guilt trip. Nations which are critical of the United States aren’t and haven’t done as much as the United States, even though little responsibility resides with us. That is to say, that no refugee from any affected country could reasonably hold the United States as the first nation which could afford it protection before the slew of others they had to cross to get to it. Secondly, proclaiming the injustice of the ban only forces those who support it to remind others of the numerous nations who have done little besides treat the refugees as assets and servants, or those who hold exactly the same obligations as the United States, but have done nothing to follow through on those obligations. In doing so, the events of the 2010’s made evident that the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees signed first in 1951, then ratified in 1967 is a failed piece of legislature as it is completely unenforceable, and leaves open too many nations to abuse what other nations are forced to endure.I would say this, perhaps the 2010’s have taught us what a frail world we actually have, and have made clear the need for yet more humanitarian work to be done. For that reason, I think one of the greatest achievements that President Trump should hope to achieve is working with the world community to create a new convention on the treatment and settlement of refugees displaced in an era of uncertainty that is to come. He needs to lead the world in holding all nations accountable for the obligations they set forth besides only the United States and Western European countries, and first and foremost, to force cooperation and humane treatment from the people closest to the center of this crisis and with the most means to help, the Arabian Muslim nations.With that said, we need to stop calling this a “Muslim Ban”This, to objective readers, obviously isn’t a ban on Muslims, as it doesn’t even target the majority of Muslim countries.The green area is the “Muslim world,” the nations in which Muslims constitute either a majority, or as in India and China, the regions in those nations where they represent a sizable minority. The red nations are those which were placed on the temporary ban on immigration into the United States. Those nations are Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The executive order on immigration bars citizens of these countries from entering the United States for the next 90 days and suspends the admission of all refugees for 120 days with an indefinite hold on Syria. Given the temporary nature of this order, it seems obvious that this isn’t a permanent ban on Muslims, but a stop gap measure while a new policy is created.Secondly, the reason these particular nations got on this list is because they are centers of radical Islamic terror.Syria and Iraq are obvious in that they are the center of Islamic State activity and have created online rhetoric used to radicalize moderate Muslims in the United States already into the “lone wolf” shooters we’ve seen in California, Texas, and Florida. Worse, citizens returning to Europe from after fighting with the Islamic state, some hiding among the real refugees fleeing from there have been the source of the massive terror attacks of the last two years.Libya is a known fallback point for Islamic State insurgents. It has long served as a recruitment center, channelling many unemployed Libyans and being the first stop off point for many Europeans on the way to join the Islamic State fighters. It is also the location of the Benghazi attack which was made infamous during the elections.Iran is next on the list, as it is the nation most responsible for contributing to terror in the region. Yes, far more than the Islamic State, Iran has been intricately involved with Shia militia groups throughout the region, arming them, training them, and aiding them supplanting Sunni ruling governments. To understand this, you need to understand the Quds Force. The Quds (or Qods) Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is responsible for extra-territorial operations, including terrorist operations. They exist as a special forces unit of the Iranian military with skill sets that marry the American Green Beret and CIA. They have been a key contributor to Hezbollah in their campaign against Israel, and the primary supporter of terror activities and rebels in Yemen, which is also why Yemen is on the list. It should also be noted that just this weekend, Yemen was also the site of a US Navy SEAL raid on a key Al Qaeda leader. [20][20][20][20]Sudan has been a source of recent turmoil and Islamic repression of non-Muslims. Funded by sources in the al Qaeda network, warlords have been held responsible for numerous war crimes in the conduct of that conflict. The war in Sudan eventually led to the break-up of that country forming the breakaway state of South Sudan.Somalia has been a region vastly impoverished by the disruption of their native way of life, fishing off the gulf of Aden. Massive Arabian fishing industries have destroyed the fishing markets and forced many Somalis to lives of piracy and joining with regional and tribal warlords. Chief among these is the group Al-Shabab, an Al-Qaeda linked terror group.Given the nature of these countries, one can see why it is in the best interests of the United States to at least ensure the immigration policies adequately prevent with reasonable certainty that that no radical terrorists are able to come in through American hospitality and naivety. Furthermore, it can’t go without mentioning that this list was not even created by the Trump administration, but by the Department of Homeland Security in February of 2016 under the Obama administration, which dealt specifically with the subject of limiting visas from these same countries. [21][21][21][21]Now, I will go a few steps further and say that his list is incomplete. I would add a few nations to the list including Afghanistan, though it may be under other legislation already. I simply don’t know, but I don’t know why it would be off a list like this otherwise. I would also add Nigeria, the home of Boko Haram, another Al Qaeda and Islamic State linked terror organization made famous when they kidnapped and murdered several young girls from Nigerian towns and villages. I would also think that this event would put Pakistan on notice for their, at the very least, passive support of the Taliban by turning a blind eye to their activities along the nation’s northern border with Afghanistan. As you can guess, I’m also not a huge fan of Saudi Arabia, but to their credit, they do not actually have active terrorism inside their national borders, nor are they a major conflict zone, in spite of the numerous supporters agents of these that live there and have ties to the country. We also have that nasty business of them having most of (on?) the planet by the balls with regards to that black stuff the sands are floating on. So just so we're clear, I’m not happy about that whole geopolitically untouchable Saudi Arabia. Seriously, scientists, get the lead out on that whole renewable energy and power storage issue. Once you do, the world will become a vastly improved place for reasons you haven’t even thought about.What is also important to note are the Muslim nations not mentioned in the temporary immigration ban. The most populous Muslim nation - Indonesia, is not banned. In fact, of the eight most heavily populated Muslim countries; Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, only one is one of those is under the travel ban, and only one other even appears on my ban. This is clearly not a ban on the Islamic religion or the Muslim diaspora. It is clearly a restriction on Muslims coming from extremely volatile areas where terror is likely to occur and where a large number of immigrants would hold the very real and plausible threat of containing at least one or more people linked to regional terror.What President Trump is doing is also in no way unprecedented. Every President since Jimmy Carter, including Barack Obama, have used the power vested in the executive office to ban or restrict immigration or visa privileges to groups or even whole countries. This power is granted by the Nationality Act of 1952, specifically the limitations set forth in section 212(f) on whom can enter the country. [22][22][22][22]"Whenever the president finds that the entry of aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, the president may, by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrant's or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."Barack Obama has actually used this power six times, first by issuing blanket bans to match previous US bans on travel and visas, then again five other times, one more in 2011, twice in 2012 and twice in 2014. In those, he targeted people aiding Iran, Syria, Crimea, and those involved in war crimes. This, of course, was before his Department of Homeland Security created the now notorious list of countries which should be considered potential threats where immigrants are concerned. In 2011 President Obama suspended refugees from Iraq for six months when it was discovered that an Iraqi suspected terrorist, who was previously detained in Iraq, linked to an IED attack, and with fingerprints in the US government system, slipped through the US vetting system in 2009.[23][23][23][23]In 2015 Congress passed, and Obama signed, a law restricting visas from states listed in the current ban. In 2016 President Obama’s Head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, expanded the 2015 restrictions[24][24][24][24]into a system that seems remarkably similar to the current restrictions being placed by President Trump, current act which President Obama is somehow saying goes against the “American way”[25][25][25][25].President Obama was not unique in doing this either. His six matches former President George W. Bush who used the executive powers six times, as well. Bill Clinton did twice, and George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter instituted bans using their executive powers a combined seven times.[26][26][26][26]Jimmy Carter, it needs to be mentioned was the first to use it on an entire country, banning immigration from Iran, deporting Iranian students, as well as issuing a series of sanctions against the nation.On Nov. 27, 1979, - Executive Order 12172,By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States, including the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended, 8 USC 1185 and 3 USC 301, it is hereby ordered as follows:SECTION 1-101. Delegation of Authority. The Secretary of State and the Attorney General are hereby designated and empowered to exercise in respect of Iranians holding nonimmigrant visas, the authority conferred upon the President by section 215(a) (1) of the Act of June 27, 1952 (8 USC 1185), to prescribe limitations and exceptions on the rules and regulations governing the entry of aliens into the United States.SEC. 1—102. Effective Date. This order is effective immediately.JIMMY CARTERThe White House,November 26, 1979.In spite of this, many are still holding to the idea that what we have is a “Muslim ban” because of remarks made early in the campaign trail or those by former Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani where such a ban was planned and Giuliani was asked to create a commission on how such a ban would work. In Giuliani’s own words, what the commission did was focus on security instead of religion, exactly why the they chose the nations they did in the first place. That said, since so many feel that this one news interview invalidates everything else I have said, I have to speak on the nature of criticism. It is right to be critical or, to use a different word skeptical, to seek out other information to validate key leaders or key decisions. All of you reading this far are at least skeptical that what you are hearing isn’t the whole story, but many aren’t skeptical. They are cynical. They are not critical of the policies themselves or the people who made them, communicated them, or implement them. Their work centers only on trying to validate their biases with any possible piece of data, every misspoken word, every third-party opinion which may be taken as far out of context with which to serve as evidence that, “Nevermind all that other evidence… this, this here! This 12 seconds of a 45 minute interview is all you need to know to know that my preconceived notions are validated!” We need skepticism and to hold those to power accountable, but cynicism is it’s own type of evil, that we need to recognize in ourselves before doing harm to others. What we have now, is by no means a “ban on Muslims”.Given that this act by Donald Trump has been labelled by even major news media sources, I have to hope that many people at this time are at least questioning the validity of their sources, but I feel I have made my point clear that “Trump’s Muslim Ban” is neither a ban on Muslims nor something unprecedented to Donald Trump. Simply put, retweeting celebrities brandishing the #Muslimban is counter-factual, hyperbolic, hypocritical, and feeding the mass hysteria surrounding what in reality amounts to little more than a temporary assessment of procedures in the immigration process.Okay, so why do we need the ban in the first place?Again, it’s important to remember that this is a temporary ban, emphasis on temporary, barring citizens of these countries from entering the United States for the next 90 days and suspends the admission of all refugees for 120 days with an indefinite hold on Syria, and it is done with a purpose.The purpose is to ascertain the status of how we vet and clear refugees and potential migrants from dangerous areas, to clear any porous failures in the system, and reopen the program once the American people can be sure that the system is reasonably secure from the types of threats we saw during the previous administration.And yes, we saw numerous failures in the vetting process over that time period, most notably, the one that saw 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino, California.Jack Snyder reminds us that the system for vetting these refugees fails, we currently do not have a vetting system that these countries on the have the ability to comply with, as theirs and our criminal justice systems store and track criminals in radically different ways, if at all. Essentially, unless the refugee’s personal identification has been entered into some criminal database for some reason after entering the United States or an FBI watch list then there isn’t much to go on.Among the agencies involved are the State Department, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS officer conducts in-person interviews with every applicant. Biometric information such as fingerprints are collected and matched against criminal databases. Biographical information such as past visa applications are scrutinized to ensure the applicant's story coheres.Through this system of “vetting”, or lack thereof, the San Bernardino shooters, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik passed through and were able to enter the United States. Farook, an American born Sunni Muslim, should have triggered watch lists during his repeated visits to Saudi Arabia, but more importantly his wife Malik, a Pakistani born women who spent most of her life in Saudi Arabia, whose family maintained significant land holdings in cities linked with jihadist activities. The two met online and married in Saudi Arabia during a visit in 2014. At this point Malik was able to enter the United States. Farook then broke off contact from his mosque and months later, the two carried out an attack against members of Farook’s office[27][27][27][27] (called “workplace violence” at the time). The San Bernardino Terror Attack killed 12 people and injured 22, but it could have been much worse had the explosives planted for the first responders didn’t fail to detonate.Numerous accounts have said that even the ban we have today wouldn’t have stopped these two, to which I would agree. To say that, however, is to not understand the purpose of the temporary ban at all. To give planners time to assess where the gaps in our system are and what needs to be fixed. Obviously a system that allows Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik to not even register as possible risks should be considered something that should have triggered something. The current system can’t catch people like them, nor can the ban. The ban on immigration, however, wasn’t meant to do that; the system of vetting is. That’s why what the three months are for, to give planners time to find holes in the system like what the San Bernardino shooters slipped through, as well as those of all the others below:Another failed case dates back to Little Rock in June of 2009.Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot and murdered one soldier, Army Pvt. William Andrew Long, and injured another, Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, at a military recruiting station in Little Rock. Muhammad reportedly converted to Islam in college and was on the FBI's radar after being arrested in Yemen–a hotbed of radical Islamic terrorism–for using a Somali passport, even though he was a U.S. citizen. In a note to an Arkansas judge, Muhammad claimed to be a member of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the terror group's Yemen chapter.[28][28][28][28]The FBI had already been alerted to Muhammad after being arrested in Yemen for using a fake passport. Though a US citizen, he should never have been allowed back in when he was able to kill one soldier and injure another.Another case involves two other refugees from Iraq who made it through the system and lived in Kentucky for several years before being indicted on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals abroad, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals abroad, distributing information on the manufacture and use of IEDs, attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as conspiracy to transfer, possess and export Stinger missiles.An intelligence tip initially led the FBI to Waad Ramadan Alwan, 32, in 2009. The Iraqi had claimed to be a refugee who faced persecution back home -- a story that shattered when the FBI found his fingerprints on a cordless phone base that U.S. soldiers dug up in a gravel pile south of Bayji, Iraq on Sept. 1, 2005. The phone base had been wired to unexploded bombs buried in a nearby road.An ABC News investigation of the flawed U.S. refugee screening system, which was overhauled two years ago, showed that Alwan was mistakenly allowed into the U.S. and resettled in the leafy southern town of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city of 60,000 which is home to Western Kentucky University and near the Army's Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. Alwan and another Iraqi refugee, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 26, were resettled in Bowling Green even though both had been detained during the war by Iraqi authorities, according to federal prosecutors.… the FBI discovered that Alwan had been arrested in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006 and confessed on video made of his interrogation then that he was an insurgent, according to the U.S. military and FBI, which obtained the tape a year into their Kentucky probe. In 2007, Alwan went through a border crossing to Syria and his fingerprints were entered into a biometric database maintained by U.S. military intelligence in Iraq, a Directorate of National Intelligence official said. Another U.S. official insisted that fingerprints of Iraqis were routinely collected and that Alwan's fingerprint file was not associated with the insurgency.In 2009 Alwan applied as a refugee and was allowed to move to Bowling Green, where he quit a job he briefly held and moved into public housing on Gordon Ave., across the street from a school bus stop, and collected public assistance payouts, federal officials told ABC News.Perhaps more alarming is that this isn’t an isolated event as that at the time of this report (2013) FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center "We are currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that," in an ABC News interview to broadcast for ABC News' "World News with Diane Sawyer" and "Nightline".I just want to break for a moment and ask what to me seems like a much more serious question. “How the hell did they get stinger missiles in the middle of the United States?” I’m serious. How in the hell did a man whose fingerprints were known to have been found on an IED, who openly confessed to attacking US soldiers in Iraq in 2006, show up with stinger missiles in the middle of the United States in 2013?Furthermore, Sebastian Gorka, as national security professional specializing in irregular warfare has gone on record to state that the US has prosecuted about 500 people for terrorism since 9/11 and that half of them were not born in the United States, many of those on visas that had expired or were actually asylum seekers.[29][29][29][29]Perhaps most disturbing, is that these aren’t such fringe cases representative of an extreme minority of fanaticized Muslims. They are representative of something else going on in large segments of the population. The world “radical” in the term radical Islamic terrorism means something. It means transformative. The radical in this case is meant to describe the nature of the ideology of groups like the Islamic state. They view all other forms of Islam to be apostates, or not real Muslims, and earning special condemnation. In this way, Jihad, or an Islamic holy war, is declared not only on non-Muslims, but the whole of the Islamic population. Jihad translates “struggle” and can take many forms; from physical aggression which we are all painfully aware of, to ideological struggle in the form of Sharia Law reforms and forced conversion, or even just an internal struggle to be a better Muslim (who determines what better is matters, in this case.)Why this matters is that 100 years ago, the ideology that fed into the creation of ISIS, was almost nonexistent. Now the Salafi movement is one of the largest growing segments of Islam and is literally transforming the religion through rhetoric, violence, and control of the major sites of Islam.[30][30][30][30]Why that matters is that it is in this minority of Muslims within Islam are responsible for the vast majority of the last half century of Islamic based terror has originated, as they continue, the proportion of Muslims who don’t identify with the Salifists dwindles to nothing. We see evidence for this in some surprising places.One would expect that the people who would be most adamantly opposed to the radical jihadism of people like ISIS would be the refugees themselves. What the evidence showed, was very different. The Doha, Qatar based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies did a major opinion poll in 2014 of people from around the Middle East, including those who were currently Syrian Refugees. While a majority of the refugees expressed “negative” feelings as much as 23%, nearly a quarter, were not totally against what they stood for. More alarming, was that 13% of those in the refugee camps were supportive of the ideals of the Islamic State, answering that they harbored feelings either “positive”, or “positive to some extent” toward the Islamic State.[31][31][31][31]While I would like to see an updated study and one with a larger sample size, the implications of the study from just over two years ago tell us that the number of people within the refugee population sympathetic to a group antithetical to the safety of the American people is not a marginal amount. It shows that a sizable minority of them are exactly the type of Muslims people are concerned about, those who may not be violent, may not have ever committed a crime, those who will appear on no government registry, but who will be the ones who visit jihadist propaganda sites, be influenced by fanatical leaders, and it is among them that future, “lone wolf shooters” will arise to endanger Americans.This is exactly what happened with the Fort Hood Shooting, the Boston Marathon Terrorist Attacks, the Attempted Terrorist Attack in Garland, Texas, and the Pulse Massacre in Orlando. Individuals within the United States who already embraced some degree of ideology shared with violent fundamentalist Muslims, made their way into falling deeper into that rhetoric and “self-radicalized”. Sometimes they were coordinated and coaxed into their actions by others within the Islamic State on social media. Other times, they acted purely on their own. Perhaps even more unnerving was the story of the Chattanooga Military Base Shootings (July 2015), where the son of a Palestinian refugee (the group most likely to be sympathetic to ISIS rhetoric) hunted down and killed four Marine Corps recruiters.The thing is, I don’t think there is anyone left who honestly thinks all of Islam is bad. We’ve had the phrase “you can’t treat them as a monolith” beaten into us for years, to the point that we’re not the ones still doing it. We know that the majority of Muslims are good. In fact, by many studies, American Muslims are the best, the least radicalized of any population. When we look at the refugees, 13% is not a small number. We need to at least have an honest gut check that if this report is true, then of the 85,000 refugees the United States admitted last year under the vetting process which I’ve already addressed at length, 11,050 of the new entrants into the United States likely hold positive views of the ideals of the Islamic State, of which a few will surely turn radical as all the other examples I’ve already provided.What Trump supporters on Immigration Reform believe is that there is no reason to put American lives at risk for these 11,050 people. There is absolutely nothing that America has to gain by admitting these 11,050 people, so Trump supporters say, “no.”Who's hurt the most in this? Clearly the other 74,000. They deserve the chance to be contributing members of the United States. They really do. I want everyone to be an American, but we wouldn’t be America if we did that. People want to feel like they are the altruistic humanitarian who sees the good in every person, but when there is a murder, or a mass killing, all they can say is that “we can’t treat Islam as monolith”, “not all Muslims are bad”, and throwing around words like “racist”, “xenophobic”, and “Islamophobic.” Look, we understand not everyone is bad, but accepting the reality of the 11,050 ISIS sympathizers already in the United States solves even less, particularly for rectifying the 74,000 who even we know will never do anything wrong. The thing is, to many of us, one American life is worth more to us than 74,000 strangers, and if we believe there is risk of even one American, then there is no reason that we should be where they find a final place to resettle.According to the new policy, the cap for new refugees will be set to 50,000. If nothing in the current system is changed, that will still allow in 6,500 people who hold beliefs antithetical to American culture into the country. Currently, assuming there is no system to know if these people are criminals in their own country, and if the systems we already have to test who is and is not already an insurgent fighter are so flawed, then there is no way to know who those 6,500 people could be. This is why “extreme vetting” in necessary, and like so many other things radically taken out of context, tests to know which schools of Islamic theology an applicant descends from. A trained interviewer can know the difference between someone sympathetic to Salifi Jihadism from a Shia Twelver. They can recognize one who follows the Hanafi school of thought from one of the Maliki. They can tell if someone is of the Oveyssi Tariqah of Sufi or if they are Ahmadiyya. Most of these, are not a threat to anyone. Most of these, we can be sure will never harm anyone. We can even say that, if America can filter those which would want to harm the United States and its people out of the vetting process, then America would create what would be the least violent, most tolerant, and most peaceful population of Muslims on Earth, which, by the way… we already have. Given time and the protection of America, this population will be free to speak out against the injustices of those schools of Islam which do inspire hate, and will able to take a better version of it back to the old world. They will be free to reverse the reformation of Islam we are seeing today and which is causing so much pain in the world. But this cannot happen if we do not have the intestinal fortitude to accept that some ideologies cannot be tolerable to Americans, and must not be allowed to threaten the American way of life, or its people, including the Muslims already among us.The point is, given these insurgents in Tennessee, the Little Rock Attack of June 2009, the Boston Marathon Terrorist Attacks (April 2013), the Garland Texas Attempted Terror Attack, the Chattanooga Military Base Shootings, the San Bernardino Terror Attack, the Fort Hood Shooting, the Boston Marathon Terrorist Attacks, and the Pulse Massacre in Orlando we do not have a system which inspires confidence or security in our ability or willingness to see wrongness in even a part of those who wish to enter our country. Our system clearly has holes that need to be fixed. Many of these weren’t related to refugees, but enough of them had links which the FBI, CIA, and intelligence community should have been able to apprehend. The numerous failures in the system that was said to be safe, left people afraid. They had no idea how the system was supposed to work, and were left with the evidence that there simply was none.Okay, but why are Christians getting special treatment?This is a good question and it goes much deeper than a desire to assuage one of Donald Trump’s cohorts, the Religious Right. The need for it is explained by both the long term and very recent history of the region in regard to Christian safety and security. It can perhaps be best explained first by explaining the existence of Israel.Israel would not exist if not for the holocaust of Europe. What that event showed the world was that Jews throughout the world suffered because they had no national homeland with which to lobby support internationally nor to serve as a place of refuge to flee persecution. For that reason, a Jewish Nationalist movement lobbied the ruling powers after WWII for a homeland of their own, which was later granted in the historic homeland of the Jewish diaspora, the present day Israel.Christians in the Middle East face similar risks. Most of their traditional homelands have been eroded away by Islamic rule or their democracies outnumbered by foreign immigration. Syria itself serves as a prime example, once being the epicenter of the Christian scholastic tradition. It was conquered by Islamic armies in the 7th Century, dealing a detrimental blow to Christian culture from that day forward. From then on, Islamic Law code (Sharia) has forbid the practice of converting a Muslim by punishment of death, forbid leaving Islam (apostasy) by similarly harsh, forbid the maintenance or building of Christian churches and religious sights, and even the imposed special taxes on Christians and Jews (Jizra.) Many of these laws still exist in one form or another, either written into the national constitutions of several nations, or practiced locally by culture. [32][32][32][32]Over the centuries, this has eroded the Christian populations of the Middle East to points where it is almost nonexistent today.This has been documented in the more recent history of Turkey. Most would not look to Turkey today as being a key Christian nation, but that is only if one is looking at Turkey through a current frame of reference. While the region has been home to large Muslim populations even before the Ottoman Empire, its history is marked as a key center of influence for Christians. The region was responsible for much of the growth and evolution of the Christian faith which has caused it to maintain a large Christian population throughout its history of Muslim rule. Even stretching into the 1900's, Turkey had a Christian population of at least 22%. Today, however, in spite of the religion’s incredible history there and eons of Christian populations which used to exist in the state, Christian Turks number only .21% of the overall population, less than 1% of their total number not 100 years ago. Today, the major Christian churches and temples there exist only as ruins and the Christian population has been all but completely extinguished. To help explain this, we need to research events such as those that took place in 1915 where over half a million Armenians were pushed out of modern Turkey into Syria and modern day Armenia, or the over 800,000 Greek Christians pushed out of their homes and resettled in Greece from 1915 to 1923. These two events do not explain the whole of the hollowing out of Christian Turkey, but begin to explain its phenomenal decline. This argument was recently brought back to the table by Pope Francis when he made this point."Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,"For reference, this population map of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) serves to illustrate the eviction of the Christian Turkish population.Some data points include the closure and forced conversion of many of the major Christian Churches in the region. Fully 23 of the largest and most historical churches were converted to mosques while hundreds of others lay in ruins. A full list of those churches can be found here. Some of these were the largest religious centers in Europe, not the least of which being world cultural heritage sites like the Hagia Sophia, the center-point of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.Much of this happened under the rule of various Islamic Empires, most notoriously, the Ottomans who attempted to supplement the power of the royal state with that of their definition of a religious Caliphate, not unlike the Islamic State today. That said, purging of Christians from the country has endured long after the fall of the Ottoman Empires. Following the collapse of the empire, a group known as the Young Turks, progressive secular Turkish students, gained power over Turkey and instituted a series of reforms with the attempt to “modernize” Turkey. What the reforms actually did was to force millions of Christians into exile into Greece, the Balkans, and the Levant while millions more Muslims colonized their former homes from failed Islamic nations. It also opened the door to hundreds of thousands more being killed and resulting in over 1.5 millions deaths, in what history has recorded as the first confirmed genocide of the 21st century.[33][33][33][33]The last century has had the effect of seeing the nation's entire faith utterly wiped out. Advocates for Turkey's progress towards embracing of modern Western values fail to fully appreciate the modern crisis of Christians there to what amounts to cultural genocide. This is true to the point that even our current sitting president, and no champion of Christian international rights, spoke to the failure of Turkey in allowing and supporting the removal and desolation of the Christian population there.Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has criticized Turkey for its shrinking Christian population. "While your population is growing, why is your Christian Orthodox community shrinking?" he asked. He specifically cited the forced closing, in 1971, of Halki International Seminary, an important school of theology for the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the continuing failure to reopen it. Located on the island of Heybeliada, the seminary is particularly important to the Greek Orthodox. Both the U.S. Congress and the European Union have suggested that Turkey's entry into the EU should be contingent upon the reopening of the seminary and greater respect for religious minorities such as Orthodox Christians. President Obama echoed this sentiment in his 2009 speech to the Turkish parliament.Why Are There So Few Christians in Turkey?Naturally, this trend isn’t confined to only a single nation. Religion Demographics specialists Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo have recently published a study in the Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policies that examines the situation of Christians in the Middle East in general and in some of its countries in specific. They noted that the overall Christian population of the Middle East stood at 13.6% in 1910. That 13.6% decreased over the course of the century to just 4.2% by 2010. Projection estimates for 2025 put the population at only 3.6%. Johnson and Zurlo attribute the shift to multiple reasons, including emigration due to wars, instability, and the rise of Islamic extremism, among other factors. [34][34][34][34]In particular, the study cited Lebanon. Lebanon, is a country in the heart of the Middle East and home to the region's largest Christian populations. The first official census in 1926 indicated 84% of the population were Christian. The most recent census in 2010 showed that the Lebanese Christian population, while still holding significant power in the country, now only numbers 34.3% of the population. What concerns many is that this doesn’t reflect a decline in the overall population of Christians, which has stayed relatively constant in that country, but reflective of massive immigration of Muslims into Lebanon with a first wave beginning around the 1960’s, followed by another larger wave in the late 1990’s, up to the point of explosive immigration following the rise of the Islamic State and breakdown of numerous regional states. [35][35][35][35]Remember from earlier that Lebanon has also taken on the most refugees during the continuing crisis. What many are fearing for the future of the Lebanese and the Christian population that lives there, is that these guests won’t return to Syria once the calamity is over… or can’t, instead resettling in Lebanon. Considering the nation’s 4 million population in 2010, the influx of another 2.3 million refugees represents a sudden increase in population of over one-third. [36][36][36][36]Such a burden on such a tiny nation (again, given that the option exists for Saudi Arabia to do anything, along with the numerous, much larger nations surrounding it) has had the effect of creating a crisis for that nation. After the crisis subsists, if the Lebanese are able to stay a working government, the fear is that the Christian population will be marginalized in the nation and lose control of the government as soon as the upcoming elections in June of 2017. Once that happens, many international Christians fear that the last true Christian refuge in the region will suffer the same slow withering of Christian rights through the steady implementation of Islamic laws as has happened in all other Muslim majority states.Finally, is the most recent rise of the Islamic State.Obviously antithetical to Christian security in the region, though little better to other Muslims who deviate only slightly from the narrow view of Islam that ISIS advocates, the Islamic State’s ideology, which continues to spread in spite of losses of territory and the deaths of many of their fighters, is creating an overwhelming environment of Christian persecution not seen since the Armenian Genocide. Numerous events in Syria and Iraq have featured Christians ritualistically murdered or simply massacred[37][37][37][37], ancient churches and religious sites destroyed[38][38][38][38], and even Christian women and girls enslaved for the carnal pleasure of Islamic State fighters[39][39][39][39].It is evident that Christians in the region no longer have a safe place of refuge with which will provide them lasting security. This was what happened to the Jews during the holocaust of World War II and for that reason, they will most likely be given some special preferential treatment in the refugee selection process for the United States. This again, because regional Muslims have so many options, not yet being open to them.The second reason why Christians would receive preferential treatment of Western immigration from these countries is obvious - Middle Eastern Christians are not a source of Islamic based terrorism, and particularly not in the United States. If we are being honest, if there is even a risk of one in a thousand refugees becoming a killer of Americans, it is infinitely less that it will come from this particular population.So is there anything that Conservatives don’t like about it?Sure. For one, it feels like overkill. While I’ve shown that the precedent has been set many times for similar bans on whole countries, we’ve never seen quite so public a ban on so many all at once. Secondly, politicians are politicians, and publicly, many are forced to respond according to their temperature reading on popular sentiment of the time. Given the Blue Checkmark Revolt of #MuslimBan the hysteria that has surrounded this particular case has left many saying things that, when viewed against their previous statements might come off inconsistent, if not simply embarrassing.Chuck Schumer’s humiliating display, bringing up a poor little girl before delivering the worst performance crying on queue in front of a national audience about how “mean spirited” Trump’s initiative was, not even two years after protesting vehemently how necessary the very same thing was when Obama did it, is the sort of cringe-worthy stuff that makes all of us loathe professional politicians.That said, many of those Conservative politicians are going to express that this sends a bad message that solidifies the beliefs of many that we are going to enter the next decade a very aggressive and intolerant nation. I really can’t argue with that. Of course, the counter to that argument is twofold. First, President Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing but making the world feel better about having a “nice guy” in the White House. During his tenure, however, he dropped more bombs in more countries (like the ones listed in the ban), while simultaneously seeing the world become much, much more violent and radicalized. It’s important to understand that when the world’s most powerful and influential leader was celebrated for making the world feel safer, one of the most important graphs of the 21st century… changed direction.That is to say that President Obama’s desire to be well liked by everyone in the world did not help the world. Iraq descended into chaos and many other nations began pushing to challenge the United States internationally. They simply didn’t respect him. Nor did many of the radical terrorists that are subject of this essay.I doubt anyone will love Donald Trump, but he is getting respect. There is an argument to be made by someone who has studied his business practices. He has a history of making outrageous demands to bring his adversary to a point of negotiation where he actually wanted to be in the first place. We can say that is drunken kung fu for international politics, but…There is something to be said that the very next day after the supposed “Muslim Ban”, the Saudi King called President Trump to agree to a major agenda piece Trump demanded during his campaign.Saudi Arabia's King Salman, in a telephone call on Sunday with U.S. President Donald Trump, agreed to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, a White House statement said.Trump, during his presidential campaign last year, had called for Gulf states to pay for establishing safe zones to protect Syrian refugees.A statement after the phone call said the two leaders agreed on the importance of strengthening joint efforts to fight the spread of Islamic State militants."The president requested, and the King agreed, to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, as well as supporting other ideas to help the many refugees who are displaced by the ongoing conflicts," the statement said.[40][40][40][40]That said, where I have seen a legitimate argument against it comes from an alleged leak of an interdepartmental memo of Foreign Service officers expressing discontent with the plan.Their main argument is that the plan won’t be able to work and will be counterproductive for foreign intelligence officers.[41][41][41][41] Why they say this is that the ban is only temporary so long as a plan can be made where refugees and immigrants can properly be vetted before being allowed in. What Foreign Service agents are afraid of is that these nations will never be able to create satisfactory systems which will meet the new requirements and result in permanent bans to US immigrations. Why this is important is that using such immigration processes is one of the carrots used to entice people to give up vital information which eventually helps lead to the capture or death of key terrorist leaders around the world. The process to let people in to the United States is to offer protection and a new life. That is an extremely fair argument, but I would offer a counter.What we are concerned with is losing one of our carrots to enticing in people with information, but are we really thinking about who these people are. By definition, they are traitors to traitors. While we could make the argument that many are simply reformed or have seen the error of their ways, many others are simply people with no loyalty to anyone. These people concern me, because what we are offering can be amnesty for many things and more importantly, a ticket to that which is most precious to the American people, our very security. I understand the need for political expediency, but we have to think about the carrot costs when we start dangling it around.That isn’t to say that, of course, there aren’t good people who we should let in. Obviously. Hameed Khalid Darweesh, the Iraqi man detained at JFK is example of that. Darweesh was a former translator for the US Army in Iraq and spent many years as a contractor and contact to help US forces first against the insurgency, and then against the Islamic State. That man deserves to be an American. Hell, we owe it to him… and that is precisely why we let him in under exceptions for cases specifically like his. [42][42][42][42]Thank you for reading. If you liked this answer, please upvote and follow The War Elephant. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Support Page to learn how. All donations greatly appreciated!Footnotes[1] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees[1] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees[1] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees[1] Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees[2] Mecca's $7,000-per-night makeshift room[2] Mecca's $7,000-per-night makeshift room[2] Mecca's $7,000-per-night makeshift room[2] Mecca's $7,000-per-night makeshift room[3] Wahhabism - Wikipedia[3] Wahhabism - Wikipedia[3] Wahhabism - Wikipedia[3] Wahhabism - Wikipedia[4] Not all German politicians are bowled over by Saudi Arabia's 200 mosque offer[4] Not all German politicians are bowled over by Saudi Arabia's 200 mosque offer[4] Not all German politicians are bowled over by Saudi Arabia's 200 mosque offer[4] Not all German politicians are bowled over by Saudi Arabia's 200 mosque offer[5] Saudi Arabia Denies Syrian Refugees?[5] Saudi Arabia Denies Syrian Refugees?[5] Saudi Arabia Denies Syrian Refugees?[5] Saudi Arabia Denies Syrian Refugees?[6] Non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention[6] Non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention[6] Non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention[6] Non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention[7] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[7] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[7] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[7] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[8] The Gulf States Are Taking Syrian Refugees[8] The Gulf States Are Taking Syrian Refugees[8] The Gulf States Are Taking Syrian Refugees[8] The Gulf States Are Taking Syrian Refugees[9] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[9] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[9] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[9] Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees[10] Saudi Arabia denies not giving Syrians sanctuary[10] Saudi Arabia denies not giving Syrians sanctuary[10] Saudi Arabia denies not giving Syrians sanctuary[10] Saudi Arabia denies not giving Syrians sanctuary[11] The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees[11] The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees[11] The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees[11] The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees[12] Saudi Arabia doesn’t ‘do’ refugees – it’s time to change that[12] Saudi Arabia doesn’t ‘do’ refugees – it’s time to change that[12] Saudi Arabia doesn’t ‘do’ refugees – it’s time to change that[12] Saudi Arabia doesn’t ‘do’ refugees – it’s time to change that[13] Migrant crisis: Why Syrians do not flee to Gulf states - BBC News[13] Migrant crisis: Why Syrians do not flee to Gulf states - BBC News[13] Migrant crisis: Why Syrians do not flee to Gulf states - BBC News[13] Migrant crisis: Why Syrians do not flee to Gulf states - BBC News[14] The Problem with the 1951 Refugee Convention[14] The Problem with the 1951 Refugee Convention[14] The Problem with the 1951 Refugee Convention[14] The Problem with the 1951 Refugee Convention[15] How Many Refugees the U.S. Takes In and Where They Go[15] How Many Refugees the U.S. Takes In and Where They Go[15] How Many Refugees the U.S. Takes In and Where They Go[15] How Many Refugees the U.S. Takes In and Where They Go[16] Japan recognizes only 27 refugees, despite rising numbers of applications | The Japan Times[16] Japan recognizes only 27 refugees, despite rising numbers of applications | The Japan Times[16] Japan recognizes only 27 refugees, despite rising numbers of applications | The Japan Times[16] Japan recognizes only 27 refugees, despite rising numbers of applications | The Japan Times[17] Why China Isn’t Hosting Syrian Refugees[17] Why China Isn’t Hosting Syrian Refugees[17] Why China Isn’t Hosting Syrian Refugees[17] Why China Isn’t Hosting Syrian Refugees[18] These 14 countries have taken more refugees than Canada[18] These 14 countries have taken more refugees than Canada[18] These 14 countries have taken more refugees than Canada[18] These 14 countries have taken more refugees than Canada[19] List of countries by refugee population - Wikipedia[19] List of countries by refugee population - Wikipedia[19] List of countries by refugee population - Wikipedia[19] List of countries by refugee population - Wikipedia[20] Qods (Jerusalem) Force[20] Qods (Jerusalem) Force[20] Qods (Jerusalem) Force[20] Qods (Jerusalem) Force[21] Most claims about Trump's visa Executive Order are false or misleading[21] Most claims about Trump's visa Executive Order are false or misleading[21] Most claims about Trump's visa Executive Order are false or misleading[21] Most claims about Trump's visa Executive Order are false or misleading[22] American History Documents II[22] American History Documents II[22] American History Documents II[22] American History Documents II[23] FLASHBACK: Obama Suspended Iraq Refugee Program for Six Months Over Terrorism Fears in 2011 - Breitbart[23] FLASHBACK: Obama Suspended Iraq Refugee Program for Six Months Over Terrorism Fears in 2011 - Breitbart[23] FLASHBACK: Obama Suspended Iraq Refugee Program for Six Months Over Terrorism Fears in 2011 - Breitbart[23] FLASHBACK: Obama Suspended Iraq Refugee Program for Six Months Over Terrorism Fears in 2011 - Breitbart[24] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program (https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program)xpanded)[24] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program (https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program)xpanded)[24] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program (https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program)xpanded)[24] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program (https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program)xpanded)[25] Obama goes on tirade against Trump [25] Obama goes on tirade against Trump [25] Obama goes on tirade against Trump [25] Obama goes on tirade against Trump [26] Obama, 5 Predecessors Have Banned Some Immigrants, Including Muslims[26] Obama, 5 Predecessors Have Banned Some Immigrants, Including Muslims[26] Obama, 5 Predecessors Have Banned Some Immigrants, Including Muslims[26] Obama, 5 Predecessors Have Banned Some Immigrants, Including Muslims[27] Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik - Wikipedia[27] Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik - Wikipedia[27] Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik - Wikipedia[27] Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik - Wikipedia[28] A Complete List of Radical Islamic Terror Attacks on U.S. Soil Under Obama[28] A Complete List of Radical Islamic Terror Attacks on U.S. Soil Under Obama[28] A Complete List of Radical Islamic Terror Attacks on U.S. Soil Under Obama[28] A Complete List of Radical Islamic Terror Attacks on U.S. Soil Under Obama[29] Sebastian Gorka: Political Correctness Has To Stop To Save American Lives[29] Sebastian Gorka: Political Correctness Has To Stop To Save American Lives[29] Sebastian Gorka: Political Correctness Has To Stop To Save American Lives[29] Sebastian Gorka: Political Correctness Has To Stop To Save American Lives[30] Salafi movement - Wikipedia[30] Salafi movement - Wikipedia[30] Salafi movement - Wikipedia[30] Salafi movement - Wikipedia[31] A Majority of Arabs Oppose ISIL, Support Air strikes on the Group[31] A Majority of Arabs Oppose ISIL, Support Air strikes on the Group[31] A Majority of Arabs Oppose ISIL, Support Air strikes on the Group[31] A Majority of Arabs Oppose ISIL, Support Air strikes on the Group[32] Where in the world is the worst place to be a Christian?[32] Where in the world is the worst place to be a Christian?[32] Where in the world is the worst place to be a Christian?[32] Where in the world is the worst place to be a Christian?[33] Armenian Genocide - Wikipedia[33] Armenian Genocide - Wikipedia[33] Armenian Genocide - Wikipedia[33] Armenian Genocide - Wikipedia[34] http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/JMEPP-JohnsonaandZurlo.pdf[34] http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/JMEPP-JohnsonaandZurlo.pdf[34] http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/JMEPP-JohnsonaandZurlo.pdf[34] http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/JMEPP-JohnsonaandZurlo.pdf[35] Christians Are Disappearing From Lebanon[35] Christians Are Disappearing From Lebanon[35] Christians Are Disappearing From Lebanon[35] Christians Are Disappearing From Lebanon[36] Log In - New York Times[36] Log In - New York Times[36] Log In - New York Times[36] Log In - New York Times[37] Genocide of Christians by ISIL - Wikipedia[37] Genocide of Christians by ISIL - Wikipedia[37] Genocide of Christians by ISIL - Wikipedia[37] Genocide of Christians by ISIL - Wikipedia[38] ISIS destroys a 1400-year-old monastery in Iraq[38] ISIS destroys a 1400-year-old monastery in Iraq[38] ISIS destroys a 1400-year-old monastery in Iraq[38] ISIS destroys a 1400-year-old monastery in Iraq[39] Why has the world forgotten Islamic State's female sex slaves?[39] Why has the world forgotten Islamic State's female sex slaves?[39] Why has the world forgotten Islamic State's female sex slaves?[39] Why has the world forgotten Islamic State's female sex slaves?[40] Saudi king agrees in call with Trump to support Syria, Yemen safe zones: White House[40] Saudi king agrees in call with Trump to support Syria, Yemen safe zones: White House[40] Saudi king agrees in call with Trump to support Syria, Yemen safe zones: White House[40] Saudi king agrees in call with Trump to support Syria, Yemen safe zones: White House[41] BREAKING NEWS: Full Text of Draft Dissent Channel Memo on Trump Refugee and Visa Order[41] BREAKING NEWS: Full Text of Draft Dissent Channel Memo on Trump Refugee and Visa Order[41] BREAKING NEWS: Full Text of Draft Dissent Channel Memo on Trump Refugee and Visa Order[41] BREAKING NEWS: Full Text of Draft Dissent Channel Memo on Trump Refugee and Visa Order[42] Iraqi man, Hameed Darweesh, free after detainment at JFK Airport [42] Iraqi man, Hameed Darweesh, free after detainment at JFK Airport [42] Iraqi man, Hameed Darweesh, free after detainment at JFK Airport [42] Iraqi man, Hameed Darweesh, free after detainment at JFK Airport

That’s a fairly interesting question. I can’t really make a choice between two Nordic fighters, so I’ll talk about them both.The first fighter I would think of is the Swedish FFVS (Kungliga Flygförvaltningens Flygverkstad i Stockholm - Royal Air Administration Aircraft Factory in Stockholm; unlike most Swedish aircrafts of the era, it wasn’t a Saab) J22.The J22 was designed exclusively in Sweden, after most of the Scandinavian nation’s sources of aircraft suddenly became unavailable: While Sweden had ordered a large number of fighter aircrafts from the United States (120 Seversky P-35 and 144 P-66 Vanguard) to replace its old Gladiator biplanes, the US decided on an embargo on all arms exports to European countries outside of Great-Britain after the fall of France and Norway to Germany. This left Sweden in an awkward situation, with just 60 Severskys (designated J9 in the Swedish nomenclature) having been delivered. A temporary alternative was found thanks to Italy, which delivered 72 Fiat CR.42 Falco (J11) and 60 Reggiane Re.2000 (J12). However, Italian aircraft were only a temporary solution; the CR.42 was already an obsolete design, only sightly better than the Gladiator, and the Reggiane Re.2000, while superior, was also on its way to get outclassed, with its limited maximum speed of 530 km/h, low armament (two Breda-SAFAT 12.7mm machine-guns) and mediocre climb rate. Sweden’s own aircraft manufacturers, SAAB, was already fully occupied by the manfacture of its B17 and B18 bombers.Therefore, a new, state-owned corporation was created with the sole objective of designing and producing a new fighter for Sweden’s Flygvapnet; that firm was FFVS, created in late 1940. FFVS designed a small, light and nimble fighter using the technologies that were available to Sweden, a neutral exception in an Europe torn by war. The lead engineer of the new project was Bo Lundberg, who had already worked with the Swedish commission that acquired American fighters in the first place.The fighter Lundberg and his team designed was powered by a STWC-3 engine, a license-built version of the American Pratt & Whitney R-1830 radial engine. This 14-cylinders air-cooled radial engine gave 1,065hp, and had the advantage of being quite compact for a radial engine. The airframe designed around the American engine was small and light, designed to be simple and easy to produce and be light enough to allow the engine to not be underpowered. The wingspan of the fighter was of 10 meters, and the wing were a rather classic, trapezoid-shaped cantilever wings, that housed fuel tanks aswell as the armament; the engine’s air intakes were located near those wing’s roots. The aircraft had a two-legs retractable landing gear, and also featured a retractable tailwheel (The landing gear could also be quickly modified to fit skies, a feature much needed in the harsh Scandinavian winters). The fighter was, in its first series, to be armed with two 8 (technically 7.87) M/22 browning machine-guns, and two 13.2mm akan M/39A 13.2mm machine-guns, based on an FN Herstal design and with 250 rounds per gun.A J22 retracting its landing gear in flight.The first prototype of the J22 was flown in September of 1942; it was a light (2,835kg at loaded weight; the J22 actually included a lot of plywood, to lighten the aircraft’s weight), manoeuvrable fighter, which was most efficient at low altitudes. Its maximum speed, with 575 km/h, was far from the best, but was still sufficient, especially as the design had manoeuvrability on its side. The range was fairly respectable, with 1,270km, which was a blessing considering the rather large size of Sweden’s territories in comparison to its population and infrastructures. But as the J22 was optimized for lower altitudes, its ceilling was low, with just 9,300 meters. The two prototypes of the J22 would actually both crash - one because of engine failures, and the other because of malfunctions in the pilot’s oxygen devices. Mass-production was, however, pursued, with the first J22 delivered to the Flygvapnet in October of 1943. That decision ended up being right; while the prototypes had a tragic fate, the J22 would actually end up being very well-liked by its pilots. While it was not without flaws (the quite high cokpit meant forward ground visibility was fairly mediocre, notably), the pilots usually loved it because of its good manoeuvrability and very responsive controls; and when flown against P-51 Mustangs, which became Sweden’s standard fighters in 1945, the J22 could actually hold their own and outurn the famous American fighter under 5,000 meters, though the Mustang would gain the advantage against the J22 over 6,000 meters. 198 mass-production J22 were made; 141, the J22A, were fitted with the original 2x7.8mm and 2x13.2mm armament; the 41 last ones, designated J22B, repalced the 7.8mm machine-guns by two more 13.2mm. The J22 would serve in the Swedish air force until 1952; it was overall a sucessful and reliable design, that had served Sweden well when no foreign options were available.A J22B; from some angles, the Swedish fighter looks quite similar to the German Fw 190, though it was a much lighter design, that was mainly focused on low-altitude operations.The other design I’d like to mention comes from the country just across Sweden’s eastern border, Finland. Unlike Sweden, Finland did not have the luck to be able to remain neutral, as it was invaded by the Soviet Union on the 30th of November 1939, and, despite three months of heroic resistance against an overwhelming enemy, was forced to cede its Karelian territories to the Soviets, albeilt at the cost of massive human and material losses for them. Finland would enter the war once again in June of 1941, when they launched an offensive against the Soviet Union alongside Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, to try and recover their lost lands.The VL Myrsky’s development had started as early as the first months of 1939, when the Finnish air force requested preliminary fighter designs from Valtion lentokonetehdas (VL, the State Aircraft Factory), Finland’s state-owned aircraft company, that had, until that date, only produced training or recon aircrafts. Five preliminary designs were submitted by March of 1939; the design of engineer Arvo Ylinen was picked in June of 1939, however work would soon be delayed by both the Winter War (actually, the fighter programm was officially cancelled in December of 1939, but that order was not entirely complied to, as work on the VL Myrsky continued) and the difficulty to find components and notably duraluminium.The VL Myrsky, despite being the first Finnish-designed fighter, already was a low, cantilever, semi-elliptical wing monoplane fitted with a retractable landing gear. The plane made vast use of plywood, as Finland lacked duraluminium or more advanced metallic materials to produce its fighters with. It was originally meant to be fitted with a British Bristol Taurus engine; however, that became unavailable after the United Kingdom went to war against Germany in September of 1939. Finland finally had to turn to the same Pratt & Whitney R-1830 engine that powered the Swedish J22. The armament consisted of four VKT Lkk/42 12.7mm machine-guns with 215 rounds each; those were located on the sides of the engine, and were synchronised with the propellers. One hardpoint was fitted under each wing, and could receive either a 100kg bomb or a detachable fuel tank. After the Winter War stopped, the programm was restarted, and the Finnish air force requested an emphasis on speed, which required a new, more powerful engine; however, none were available, bringing further delays to the project. A prototype was finally ordered in December of 1940, after more then 60,000 hours of work on the design had been achieved.The MY-1 prototype; note that the Swastikas have no link with the NSDAP: They became the emblem of Finland’s air force as early as it got its independence from Russia, before the Nazi Party was even created.The VL Myrsky prototype would only be finished in December of 1941, and was first flown on the 23rd of that month. It notably featured a new tailplane directly based on the Brewster Buffalo’s. Designated MY-1, that prototype was plagued with issues; its high wing loading of 194kg/m2 hampered the aircraft’s manoeuvrability and climb rate, and engine difficulties were numerous. That MY-1 prototype would then be re-designed, incorporating a new, adjustable propeller and better exhaust pipes to improve the reliability and thrust, while the weight of the fighter was reduced as much as possible, reducing the wing load to a more reasonable but still fairly high 1765 kg/m2. In that configuration, the prototype reached a maximum speed of 520 km/h at 3,250 meters, and could climb at 5,000m in 6.5 minutes; while not groundbreaking, those performances were judged sufficient, and a preseries of three aircrafts was ordered in May of 1942; designated MY-2, MY-3 and MY-4, those were used to test a number of different solutions; the MY-2 had thinner wings, pneumatic brakes and an Hamilton standard propeller, and weighed 2,150kg empty MY-3 was almost identical but a litle bit heavier,with 2,210kg empty; the MY-4 was the heaviest, with 2,240kg, but incorporated an easier engine removal procedure, a thicker wing, new hydraulic brakes and cowling, and a VLS adjustable propeller; Those three pre-series aircrafts are often designated “Myrsky I”.A serial-produced Myrsky in flight; the cockpit was pretty far from the engine, which meant the forward visibility was fairly mediocre. The side visiblity was reported to be excellent, however.The “Myrsky II” would be the serial-produced model of the Finnish fighter. 50 VL Myrskys were ordered in August of 1942; the three pre-series aircrafts, and 47 serial-produced ones. The first of those serial-produced Myrskys, MY-5, would be delivered to the Finnish air force in December of 1943. The Myrsky II notably used a modified variant of the original American engine, which used local parts to raise the horsepower to 1,150hp. The serial-produced Myrskys were able to reach 535 km/h at 3,300m. Their maximum take-off weight was fairly light, with about 3,200kg.By the time the Myrsky started to leave the production lines though, the aircraft was outclassed by foreign models in terms of performances, and Finland’s fighters squadrons, which, for some, had already received German BF 109G, refused to operate the Finnish-designed fighter. It was, however, gladly taken by recon groups, which appreciated its 535 km/h top speed, which was a lot compared to the old aircrafts those had used earlier. While not without flaws (the use of sub-quality, ersatz Lukko glue notably meant a lot of maintenance had to be performed, and that glue would not stand up to the cold or humid environnements that were commonplace in Finland), the aircraft’s pilot overall liked their planes, despite the high number of accidents (seven of the forty-seven serial-produced aircrafts were lost during their service-life that lasted from 1944 to 1947; all crashed, and none were shot down by the enemy). A more advanced Myrsky III was ordered in March of 1944, but the 10 fighters that were comprised in the order were cancelled in September of the same year.Several Myrsky undertaking maintenance.An abandonned Myrsky with a post-war camouflage (Finland was forced to drop the Swastika, as many linked it with the Nazi Regime). As of now, a Myrsky is being restored to flying conditions in Finland; the final assembly is planned for this year, and public display shall start in 2019. Learn more here: VL Myrsky II Restoration ProjectVL would also design another fighter, the Pyörremyrsky, which was a lot more advanced than the Myrsky; designed to be operated in the harshest environnements Finland could offer, it was fitted with Germany’s DB605 1,475hp in-line engine. The Pyörremyrsky featured a MG 151/20 20mm autocannon that fired through the propeller’s axe, aswell as two synchronized 12.7mm machine-guns on top of the engine.The PM-1 prototype; while clearly a lot more modern-looking than the Myrsky, the Pyörremyrsky still used a lot of wood, as Finland lacked more advanced materials.The Pyörremyrsky programm started in November of 1942, but was initially stopped after the armistice between Finland and the USSR in September of 1944. Work on a prototype resumed in early 1945, and the first and only prototype would have its first flight in November of 1945. The Pyörremyrsky ended up being a lot better than the Myrsky in terms of performances, with a maximum speed of 620 km/h , a climb rate of 18.5 m/s, a ceilling of 11,250m instead of 9,500, and a superior armament. Serial-production would, however, never be pursued: The engines would be too hard to acquire and maintain, VL lacked funs, and despite being a lot better than the Myrsky, the Pyörremyrsky would still be outclassed by new jet fighters; the Finnish air force, instead of acquiring that native design, would instead buy foreign fighters such as the British Vampire.The Pyörremyrsky, still preserved to this day alongside a BF 109G in the Aviation Museum of Central Finland.