Americans are suckers for children. Even if many of them might come wrapped in suicide vests.

On September 2, 2015, the body of a three-year old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi washed ashore on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey.     

He and his family had boarded a small rubber boat to reach Europe amid the carnage of the Syrian civil war. The boat capsized. 

The resulting photo flashed around the world and triggered international demands by humanitarian organizations that the West “do something.”

 Drowned Alan Kurdi lies on a Turkish beach

Only eight days later, on September 10, 2015, the administration of President Barack Obama announced that it would take in at least 10,000 displaced Syrian refugees over the next year. That was in addition to the 2,000 Islamic refugees the United States had already accepted.

Almost one year later—on August 17, 2016—another photo captured the world’s attention.

It depicted a five-year-old Syrian boy named Omran Daqneesh sitting in an ambulance. Covered head to toe in dust, his face bloodied, he seemed dazed. He had been pulled out of a building hit by an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria.  

Once again, demands arose among liberal interventionists, especially in the United States: “We must do something.”

All of which overlooks the increasing threat posed to the United States by Islamic terrorism.

According to U.S. Census data, America legally welcomes about 100,000 Muslim immigrants each year. This represents the fastest growing segment of immigrants coming to the United States.

The Pew Research Center estimates there are at least 3.45 million Islamics in the United States. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) puts the figure at seven million.

Meanwhile, the FBI is being overwhelmed by the demands of countering Islamic terrorism against the United States.

On July 8, 2015, then-FBI director James Comey testified before Congress about the increasing burdens his agency faced in combating terrorism.

“We are stopping these things [Islamic terror plots] so far through tremendous hard work, the use of sources, the use of online undercovers. But it is incredibly difficult. I cannot see [the FBI’s] stopping these [plots] indefinitely.”

The FBI has only 35,000 agents and analysts—against seven million potential suspects. And only a portion of those agents and analysts are charged with investigating terrorism.  

And even children, for all their supposed innocence, are not to be ignored as potential weapons of Islamic terrorist organizations.

On August 20, 2016, a suicide bomber aged between 12 and 14 attacked a Kurdish wedding party in Gaziantep, Turkey, killing at least 51 people. Preliminary evidence indicated that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was behind the attack. 

 Palestinian child suicide bomber

America may well become a similar target for child suicide bombers.

How did all of this come to be?    

On March 15, 2011, protests broke out in Syria, with demonstrators demanding political reforms and the ouster of dictator Bashar al-Assad.

These protests, met with government repression, continued to grow into a wholesale civil war. By December, 2022, it was estimated that 580,000 Syrians had so far died in the conflict.

Put in a positive way:

• More than 580,000 potential or actual Islamic terrorists will never again pose a threat to the United States or Western Europe. 
• Additional thousands are certain to follow their example.
• And the United States cannot be held in any way responsible for it.

But Americans and Europeans have chosen to see these positives as negatives.

The United Nations refugee Agency, UNHCR, estimates that, in 2021, 123,300 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean to Europe. .

And while the West has thrown open its doors to fleeing Syrians, the reaction of neighboring Islamic nations has been entirely different.

This was brutally but accurately depicted in a cartoon of wealthy Arab rulers looking on indifferently at the body of Alan Kurdi.

While European nations are being swamped by hundreds of thousands of these uninvited “guests,” the Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing almost nothing for their Islamic brethren.

According to Amnesty International, the “six Gulf countries—Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain—have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.”

These nations are far closer to Syria than are Europe and the United States. And they contain some of the Arab world’s largest military budgets and its highest standards of living.

Meanwhile, democratic, non-Islamic countries are exposing themselves to increasing numbers of potential—if not actual—Islamic terrorists.   

* * * * *

On February 6, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing more than 40,000 people to date in both countries.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Turkey—long a staunch NATO ally—has tilted increasingly toward Russia. Syria, meanwhile, remains an international pariah owing to the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and his support of anti-Western terrorism.

Yet that hasn’t prevented both countries from pleading with the “infidel” West to sacrifice money and resources on their behalf. And, once again, the West is responding with unearned generosity.

As always, the type of aid most sought is money. In response, Doctors Without Borders, for example, is running full-page ads soliciting donations from $5 to $1,000.

As Karl Marx once famously said—but in another context: “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”