The Obama administration is reportedly considering exacerbating a crisis largely of its own making. Following the immigration onslaught in Europe that has generated graphic images, including a 3-year-old Syrian boy washing up dead on a Turkish beach, thousands of migrants trapped in a Budapest train station, and 71 dead discovered in a truck abandoned on an Austrian roadway, Obama administration officials are considering the possibility of allowing more Syrian immigrants into the United States. “The administration is actively considering a range of approaches to be more responsive to the global refugee crisis, including with regard to refugee resettlement,” said Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council. “We are also in regular contact with countries in the Middle East and Europe who have been greatly impacted by the increased refugee flows.”

A video campaign entitled “Bring Them Here” has been launched by the St. Louis branch of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case that garnered several convictions for providing support to the terrorist group Hamas. CAIR spokesman Faizan Syed likens the effort to St. Louis’s acceptance of refugees from Bosnia back in the 90s and insists that Syrian refugees would provide the same economic uplift to the city their Bosnian counterparts did.

Back in the real world House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) is urging the kind of caution that ought to be applied to any group of people coming from one of the world’s foremost terror hotspots. “We’re a compassionate nation and this is a tragic situation, but I also have to be concerned as Chairman of Homeland Security about the safety of Americans in this country. And the concern that I have and that the FBI testified to is that we don’t really have the proper databases on these individuals to vet them passed and to assure we’re not allowing terrorists to come into this country,” he explained. “And until I have that assurance, I cannot support a program that could potentially bring jihadists into the United States.”

Unsurprisingly, Democrats take the opposite view. In May, 14 senators, led by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), urged the president to “significantly increase” the number of Syrians from the less than 1,000 the U.S. has accepted so far to a staggering level of 65,000 asylees. In a letter sent to Obama the senators wrote the United States “traditionally accepts at least 50 percent of resettlement cases from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). However, we have accepted only approximately 700 refugees since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, an unacceptably low number.” Yet they also admit the United States “is the largest donor of humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees.”

The American public would be wise to view the word “refugee” with precisely the level of suspicion it so richly merits. President Obama has already engendered an influx of hundreds of thousands of “refugees” from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, along with their subsequent dispersal though out the entire nation in order to facilitate his pro-amnesty agenda. It is not the least bit inconceivable he and his fellow travelers in the Democratic Party would countenance a calculated risk to national security in their continuing effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” It is also worth remembering that Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, along with the rest of their family, were granted asylum in the U.S. under a program similar to the one the Obama administration would like to apply to the Syrians.

Moreover the argument advanced by refugee advocates, who insist the extensive process involved in vetting Syrian immigrants would sufficiently address national security concerns, rings exceedingly hollow. That’s because the vetting process is no match for the combination of bureaucratic ineptitude and political correctness that makes an utter mockery of it. Six months after Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi flew planes into the World Trade Center, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) approved their student visas. Russia issued several warnings to U.S. officials regarding Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s associations with known terrorist groups, but the FBI found no credible evidence to that effect and the alert issued against Tsarnaev had already expired by the time he returned home from a six month visit to the terrorist haven of Dagestan. Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano actually insisted the “system worked” following the series of mistakes that allowed would be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear.

Does anyone seriously think ISIS, which has demonstrated a level of military and propaganda-disseminating sophistication far exceeding any other terrorist organization in the world, isn’t primed to exploit this crisis? A self-proclaimed Syrian operative working for ISIS has told Buzzfeed the effort to smuggle ISIS fighters hidden among “refugees” into Western nations is a “complete success,” with more than 4000 jihadist gunmen “ready” in the EU alone. “They are going like refugees,” he said. “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world and we will have it soon, God willing,” he added.

That operative spoke to Buzzfeed in January. The humanitarian crisis has increased dramatically since then, even as Obama’s “war” against ISIS remains as flaccid as it has ever been. In the meantime, the administration has already committed to accepting between 5,000 and 8,000 Syrian immigrants in 2016, with State Department spokesman John Kirby declaring the U.S. a “leader” in accepting refugees and making financial contributions to resettlement efforts. Yet he further insisted this effort was “not the metric of success here.” “And so, what we’re really committed to is helping to foster the kind of political transition inside Syria, so that it is a safe environment for Syrian people to return, including the millions that are seeking refuge in Turkey right now,” he explained.

That the Obama administration is fostering anything resembling a political transition in Syria is utter nonsense. Nothing highlights that nonsense better than two inconvenient realities. First, with regard to taking on ISIS, the Obama administration has trained a total of 60 Syrian opposition fighters to fight the terror organization in Syria more than a year after the administration began developing its “train and equip” strategy in May of 2014.

Second, anything resembling a regime change removing Bashar Assad from power has just hit a major snag. As the Wall Street Journal reveals, “Russian forces have moved new personnel, planes and equipment into Syria in recent days, raising new concerns that Moscow is moving to establish a new military base to aid embattled President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. military officials said Tuesday.” Secretary of State John Kerry contacted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express his concern, but one might be inclined to think it will be taken as seriously as the president’s completely toothless red line “ultimatum.”

Hence a Syrian crisis precipitated largely by Obama’s arrogant impotence, brilliantly described by former State Department adviser for transition in Syria Frederic C. Hof as a “pantomime of outrage,” will now be “fixed” on the other end of the equation. And the very same Muslim immigrants that have precipitated riots in Greece, as well as violence in Italy and Austria, will be invited here, as the same Obama administration that abandoned those Syrians, as well as Libyans and Iraqis to the butchers of Bahsar Assad and ISIS, demands the American public abide its latest “humanitarian” solution. And since time is critical, expect some sort of streamlining in the vetting process, similar to administration’s decision to bypass CDC guidelines and allow normally inadmissible, unvaccinated illegals to enter the nation during last year’s “surge” at our Southwest border.

“We’ve arrested over 60 ISIS followers in the last year, more than one per week [and there are] 200,000 ISIS tweets per day,” McCaul reminds us. The FBI is conducting hundreds of terror-related investigations in all 50 states, many of which involve suspected ISIS recruits. Syrian American Council president Shiyam Galyon insists any resistance to Syrian resettlement “is part of an Islamophobic anti-immigration stance adopted by right-wing politicians in several Western countries.” Yet five of the wealthiest Muslim countries refuse to take any Syrian refugees at all, citing threats to their safety because terrorists could be hiding among them. No doubt they are far better acquainted with jihad than Americans are. It may not remain that way much longer.

Originally published at FrontPage Magazine.