RUTHFULLY YOURS

Admitting Syrian refugees into the United States presents two concerns — one over security, and one over identity. The first is urgent and concrete, and failure will be measured in bodies; the second is long-term and, though more difficult to assess, no less consequential. If we want to aid the persecuted, without granting sanctuary to people who threaten our security and who are in tension with American ways, putting Syrian Christians and certain persecuted religious minorities, such as Yazidis, at the front of the refugee line is an obvious, common-sense proposal.

Predictably, it has not been treated as such. When Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush made the suggestion recently, they were roundly excoriated, the president of the United States going so far as to call any such proposal “shameful,” and that we ought “not to feed that dark impulse inside of us.” President Obama has since suggested: “When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land — that feeds the ISIL narrative.”

The president’s fondness for strawmen is among his better-known traits. But the reduction of Cruz’s and Bush’s proposal, whatever one may think of it, to “xenophobia” is an insult not only to them, but to millions of Americans who espy legitimate concerns in our refugee-resettlement program. After all, Cruz’s statement in South Carolina over the weekend, “There is no meaningful risk of [Syrian] Christians committing acts of terror,” is, of course, correct. There is no significant minority of Syrian Christians engaged in slaughtering Yazidis in the Syrian hinterlands, or in murdering civilians in French cafés. Responsible for those abominations is an organization that, however much it might pervert or distort doctrine, finds its inspiration in a different religious tradition, Islam.

‘You’re all suckers.”That has to be what Barack Obama is thinking as the country falls for his head-fake.Let’s recap.

George W. Bush’s surge reduced the Islamic State’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, to a paltry 700 members, according to CIA director John Brennan. Its membership has grown by something close to 4,000 percent. As it metastasized, Obama yawned, calling it the “JV team.” When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad violated Obama’s “red line,” Obama yawned again, and the refugee crisis was born.

By August 2014, Obama was grudgingly conceding he needed a new counterterrorism strategy. One tactic he ruled out: building up pro-American Syrian forces. He told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that was an unworkable “fantasy.”

Then, within weeks, the Islamic State beheaded American journalist James Foley. On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama denounced the murder. Within eight minutes of that statement, he was on the golf course. He later conceded that was a mistake.

President Obama reiterated his determination to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay despite the attorney general’s affirmation to Congress that the administration would be breaking the law by moving detainees to U.S. soil.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged that “as the administration has stated, the closure of Guantanamo Bay is something that is part of the administration’s policy and the Department Of Justice supports that as well.”

“At this point in time I believe the current state of the law is that individuals are not transferred from Guantanamo to U.S. shores,” Lynch said. “…And certainly it’s the position of the Department of Justice that we would follow the law of the land in regard to that issue.”

“I believe that it is the view of the department that we would certainly observe the laws as passed by Congress and signed by the president. Only very rarely would we take the step of finding that an unconstitutional provision was something that we could not manage.”