RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Barack Obama has seen the enemy, and it is the refusal to accept more Syrian refugees.

From the tone of his post-Paris remarks, you’d think that a sophisticated terrorist assault on a major Western city is a setback; sentiment in the U.S. against taking more Syrian refugees is an atrocity.

Obama warned this week against “that dark impulse inside of us,” as if we were debating whether Syrian refugees should be drawn and quartered. He said that “slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values.” He was joined by liberal commentators who scoffed and guffawed at worries over Syrian refugees after — ho-hum, nothing to see here — one of the Paris terrorists apparently posed as a refugee.

It’s remarkable that the president feels justified in lecturing anyone on humanitarianism. He has stood by while Syria has descended into a hellish chaos, and hasn’t betrayed any guilty conscience. There are roughly 10 million Syrians who are refugees (4.2 million) or internally displaced (6.5 million). At 10,000 over the next year, we are offering to take .1 percent of them.

One wonders when Obama begin caring so much about Syrians. If you put those 10,000 Syrian refugees back in their native country and let them get gassed, barrel-bombed, shelled, or shot, would he bat an eye, or would they just be part of the ever-growing casualty count?

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.