All refugees are not equal

Our likes and dislikes of various people and groups are often formed early in life. I grew up with a great fondness for street preachers, the fish delivery man, electricians, the Salvation Army band, North Carolina football players and so on. I met one little boy from Europe who loved the chimney sweepers.

But my greatest love of all was for refugees.

My earliest recollections go back to the few Jewish refugees admitted into America in the mid-1930s, when things in Germany were ugly but not yet murderous. Those refugees had me completely fascinated. They spoke with such a strange accent, quite unlike Mommy and Daddy's friends from High Point, Wilmington and Rocky Mount. The most fascinating ones didn't speak English at all. I could sit there, in short pants, for hours, just silently looking at those refugees and thinking to myself, "These people come from across the ocean!"

When the war was won and the new refugees came from countries that had become Communist, I was a little older and less vulnerable to childish infatuations, but I never gave up on refugees. When thousands of Hungarian refugees were welcomed into America in 1956-1957, I volunteered to help Catholic Charities resettle them in North Carolina. I took deep personal pride in belonging to a country that could offer rescue and refuge. And did!

America's experience with refugees has been, by and large, a happy one with very few setbacks or negatives. Cuban-born writer Humberto Fontova never tires of retelling how his "redneck" neighbors in Louisiana – after he, his mother and siblings escaped Castro's clutches – kept up a constant parade to his family's front door with baskets of chicken, pot roast, salads and vegetables. The cheerful givers and the grateful receivers couldn't even talk to each other yet. But that wasn't really necessary.

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Refugees are not all equal. The mushrooming hordes of refugees from the Mideast are – contrary to all of America's prior experience – the most ill-behaved thugs, bullies, bigots and murderers ever to be welcomed by so many hoodwinked and good-hearted Americans. Do you know about Cologne, Germany, where right around New Year's, mobs of Mideast refugee males raped or molested every German woman in sight, in full view of the helpless police? That's what started the movement against Angela Merkel, whose "Y'all come!" attitude toward the refugees triggered the crisis. Sweden is the next do-gooder nation to have its good converted into evil and thrust back into its face. The liberal parliament was ordered by the fed-up population to reduce Sweden's aid to the refugees back to what the law allowed and not continue to shower the newcomers with the far larger amount of aid dictated by the legislators' more liberal hearts. At the press conference where the government reluctantly agreed to scale back its largesse, the foreign minister began to cry. When the press asked her why, she replied, "How can I live in a country that turns its back on needy people?"

Help yourself to a few headlines. "Muslim migrants riot at Swedish refugee center after being denied candy." "Mindless savagery is rampant now in Europe." "Authorities blocking reports of refugee misbehavior with help of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg." "Tensions rise in Sweden as teen migrants go on rampage with makeshift weapons at child refugee center, just days after female worker brutally murdered." "Those caring for refugees forced to barricade themselves in a room for self-protection." The Swedish newspaper Expressen, reporting on a violent riot in Kalmar, quoted police that "a total of 19 people banded together and did this, smashing windows and doing what they pleased."

Did you ever hear of Hungarian, Cuban, Jewish or any other kind of refugees behaving like this?

Some laws are not written. The refugee has a definite status in his accepting country. The refugee is not a slave, and the host is not a master. The refugee is an institutional, situational supplicant, and he is entitled to have his needs provided with dignity. He owes his host country a payload of gratitude and common decency. He is in no way permitted to "celebrate" New Year's by raping the host nation's women! An attendant misfortune is the backlash. A mob of Swedes in ski-masks descended on a group of child refugees and beat them up severely. No one can justify that. But who can fail to understand it? Germany will be worse. The Swedish military is now on alert, after having not participated in a war for 200 years.

It's getting harder and harder to live by the wonderful words of Armenian refugee George Mardikian (the restaurateur, philanthropist, author and chef who did America the monumental favor of making military food taste so much better), who came to the U.S. in 1922. After World War II, Mardikian reminded us that the refugees from Europe were not "DPs" – the acronym for "Displaced Persons."

They're not "Displaced Persons" insisted Mardikian.

"Not at all," Mardikian said. "They're Delayed Pilgrims!"

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