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Refugees offer America a do-over and a chance to live up to its brand

Ruben Navarrette Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- Sometimes the Gods offer human beings a mulligan, a chance to right a past wrong.

When a 19-year-old white male shot up a synagogue in Poway, California, the attack got me thinking.

Jews have been terrorized for 5,000 years. And, when they've sought refuge, they've been turned away.

Just think what Jews experienced as refugees during World War II. You can see that story on display in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. Visitors can see an enormous map of the globe -- plastered on an entire wall -- where, country by country, they can see who took in Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler's reign of terror and who refused to take them in, usually because of fear, prejudice and hatred. The message comes through loud and clear: Jewish people are keeping score.

Good for the Jews. We ought to remember who served humanity and who failed it.

Americans failed. Ours is a remarkable country, but I'd count at least five great sins: the conquest of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, the invasion of Mexico that created the Southwest, the internment of the Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and turning away Jews seeking refuge during World War II.

 

One of the most notorious episodes occurred in June 1939, when the German ocean liner SS St. Louis -- and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish refugees -- were turned away from a port in Miami, where the ship had tried to dock after being rejected by Cuba. The SS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. Historians say more than a quarter of the passengers died in the Holocaust.

And we can live with that?

It's a sad but familiar tale. Regardless of U.S. policy, everyday Americans did not put out welcome mats for Armenians fleeing genocidal Turks, Cubans seeking liberation from Castro, or the Hmong who escaped the North Vietnamese intent on killing them for aiding U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.

These are the stories that bring tears to my eyes. That's because I expect more of America. The country I love is better than that.

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