Sinking, but battered on every side.
Let's rewind 4-5 years, and sometimes look back a decade or two before that.
The Holocaust was horrible. The worst thing imaginable. All the Jews that were killed.
Oh, wait. Don't forget about the Roma. And the gays and lesbians (etc.). It wasn't *just* the Jews. To just focus on Jews is wrong.
Let's pretend that a common estimate last I checked was that around 6 million Slavs not falling in the other categories also died.
Now it's wrong to not just focus on the Jews. Immoral. Ahistorical. But actually comply with this? Wrong! (Gotcha!)
And it's easy to forget that Stalin killed more in his purges and in his camps than Hitler killed in his purges and camps.
No, strike that. It's *rude* and counterfactual for many to point out this fact. It's a fact to be ignored. Hitler bad. Uncle Joe?
In Iraq, Christians were being persecuted in ..., well, from 2004 to the present (before that, to be honest, but we don't admit that bit of discomfort into our beautiful minds). There were calls to help them, since they were singled out. This didn't go over so well among all quarters. For many, it was better for Christians to die in Iraq at Muslim hands so we could blame Bush II than tinker with the idea of helping a persecuted religious minority with some sort of immigrational affirmative action.
But 3-4 years ago it was precisely that kind of affirmative action being called for on behalf of the Yazidi. They weren't Xians, so it was safe to call for some sort of religious test, because the discrimination and persecution they were encountering was precisely religious. Kurds, Kurdish speaking, Iraqi, those categories would let in the economically disadvantaged by not specially oppressed, or maybe let in people that had no refugee status apart from the fact that they upped and left everything. Sort of like many of us are refugees for a week or two in Hawaii, or seek refuge in another city to enjoy a pay raise or better job. (As we define "refugee" down to "somebody's who's moved house." Heck, there was a homicide a couple of miles from where I live. Maybe I can claim I'm fleeing violence or economic conditions as I move from a mostly minority neighborhood to a mostly majority neighborhood.)
And, of course, there's the whole "disparate impact" view of racial/ethnic discrimination. If the US population were 10% X but only 0.5% of those helped by a program were X, there'd be outrage and calls for reforming the process for an equal outcome, with fixing the outcome by fiat necessary until the process is "correct." Esp. if those disproportionately advantaged were in the oppressor's group. Put in "black" for X and "white" for the remainder, and there's outrage. Put in "Christian" for X and "Muslim" for the remainder, and there's white fury at being presented with the question in such a biased, unfair way. Until, of course, reduce both sets of numbers to zero, then we can do a Putinesque jujitsu maneuver and advocate for the 0.5% that we previously ignored.
So there's a block on immigrants from Iran. Now, originally everybody was up in arms because of religious exemptions. What's wanted is open immigration, unrestricted, mostly because the idea that some have is diversity is good, so more diversity must be better. Please, tell that to Jugoslavija, Sudan, Rwanda. It's an premise we like, so we find "random" evidence based on our conclusion and then reach the conclusion we started with. Even Bible-thumpers play this game: Help the stranger, they say; but when there's the edict, "One law for both native and stranger", and it's referring precisely to religious and cultural law, they go, "Well, we can't take the OT seriously." Their conclusion drives their choice of data to support their conclusion, and they call their analysis "comprehensive" and "complete" to squelch objection. IMHO, diversity is. At times it's good, at times it's a weakness. Look at the Senate. It's diverse. People want it less diverse, but only if the majority favors them. If it were more diverse it would be as dysfunctional as, say, Italy's legislature often is. Russia in 1918 was diverse, and that allowed a hard-core, small, non-representative faction to take power. The populace couldn't overcome its diversity to achieve unity, and sometimes we need one, sometimes the other. But we start with the conclusion, even if it means we have to shift definitions mid-phrase: "diversity" is racial = culture = ideological, but the KKK's central premise was that culture and value systems were race-based. When I'm told I shouldn't have studied Russian because I'm not Russian by heritage, and that somebody's studying Korean and trying to comport themselves according to Korean culture because their grandparents were from Korea and that's their "real" culture and language, I hear the KKK's ideology echoing down the halls of history, all gussied up in a suit, tie, with an MA in social work from Berkeley.
In Iran there are from 17-25k Jews, according to US numbers. Official Iranian census is 1/3 to 1/4 the unofficial numbers, so maybe 10k Jews. Few have been emigrating in the last decade or so. Most are elderly. They get their token legislative representative, they have their token media outlets, their paper-protected rights. But most don't leave, even if they've had multiple opportunities and financial bonuses for leaving. Moreover, if they emigrate there are many places other than the US to go to. The bold underlined statement should be amended to, "The White House is temporarily blocking an unknown-yet-very-small number of Jewish refugees to the United States, pending any waivers or religious exceptions." Otherwise the news is a half-truth, which I consider "fake" because it's not just true, but false-true. Notice that adding the missing information takes all the sting out of the charge--and, in fact, many object to those facts that neuter that particular claim. In fact, it may even be the case that the sentence is actually completely false, if there are no current Iranian Jews seeking immigration from Iran and therefore nothing to block. (Oddly, the holders of this kind of view, that refugees from an oppressive ideologically or religiously oppressive country should be given immediate sanctuary or inconsistent when it comes to what they think the Cuban immigrant policy should be. They like Cuba in principle, avoid the parts of reality they don't like, and base their conclusion on the facts their premise allows. O! Yes, that's intended to be a circle, not a letter.)
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