Following the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel and the ensuing outbreak of another war in the Middle East, influential people in Washington, D.C., are already calling for the U.S. to take in Palestinian refugees.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

While the war is still in its early days, it is expected that up to one million Palestinians living in Gaza could soon become refugees. Progressive members of Congress and anti-borders groups are already claiming the U.S. has a responsibility to take in some of these refugees, but fail to mention that importing migrants from an area that glorifies and idolizes terrorists could put the national security of the U.S. at grave risk. It is well-known that a large majority of the Palestinian people have been brainwashed by their government to hate the U.S. and Israel. Children in Gaza are taught from a young age about the glories of martyrdom and violent Jihad.

Palestinians voted in 2006 to elect Hamas as their government, the same terrorist organization that just led the greatest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Even the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority (PA) has a martyrs’ fund that pays stipends to families of terrorists who commit attacks against Israelis. This led Congress in 2018 to pass the Taylor Force Act, which cut some foreign aid to the PA following the murder of U.S. citizen and veteran Taylor Force at the hands of a Palestinian radical.

Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the genocide of the Jewish people and the destruction of the state of Israel. As of 2021, 53 percent of Palestinians still supported the Hamas government. And, of course, no American can forget the widespread celebration among Palestinians in Jerusalem following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed roughly 3,000 Americans and others, including Arabs. Some progressives will argue that the U.S. has the capability to distinguish between terrorists and civilians, but can anybody argue that it is responsible to resettle people into the country who think the September 11 attacks were a good thing, or who support a government that calls for the extermination of the Jewish people?

This is not to suggest that all Palestinians are terrorists or that decent people shouldn’t sympathize with the plight of innocent men, women, and children in the region, but it is true that the majority of Palestinians harbor deep-seated anti-American and anti-Semitic beliefs. Nor can we trust Hamas to “vet” refugees for us to weed out the terrorists. Faced with a similar lack of vetting capabilities in a number of countries, the Trump administration prudently issued a travel ban on their citizens, and the soundness of that reasoning applies even more starkly here.

If any Americans are on the fence about whether or not the country should accept Palestinian refugees, they should only look to Europe for guidance. In the 2010s, millions of people migrated to Europe from the Islamic world and the assimilation process has not gone well. This mass migration has correlated with a rise in sexual assaults and incidents of vandalism against churches and synagogues. In 2019, a survey by the European Commission found that 89 percent of Jewish people in Europe said anti-Semitism had “significantly increased” over the previous five years as influxes of Middle Eastern refugees flooded the continent. The U.S. and Europe simply cannot bear the burden of another refugee crisis from the Islamic world.

There are wealthy Arab countries in the region, however, which could step up to the plate but are choosing not to. King Abdullah of Jordan has stated that Jordan and Egypt, which both border Gaza, will refuse to accept any of their Palestinian neighbors and fellow Muslims as refugees. Whatever the reason for these decisions, why is it fair to ask the U.S. and Europe to shoulder the burden of another refugee crisis while Middle Eastern oligarchs close their doors? For that matter, why should Palestinian refugees have to move to far-away Western countries whose culture, customs, and traditions have nothing in common with their own? Do Jordan and Egypt know something we do not?

We do know this: if the U.S. were to take in a large number of Palestinian refugees, it would put women, religious minorities, and sexual minorities—not to mention the American people in general—at increased risk of violence. Europe’s experiment in mass migration is definitive proof of this. With the U.S. already dealing with high rates of crime and illegal migration, importing Palestinian refugees with our eyes wide open is simply not a risk the country can afford to take.

William Davis is a communications associate at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.

Image: Screen shot from Fox 2 video, via YouTube