LAS CHINGANDAS NARANJAS, CALIFORNIA — Kamar Haddad and his family came to the United States from Syria more than a decade ago, nearly five years before the bloody civil war in that country broke out. Haddad recently told followers of his Facebook page dedicated to the life of immigrants in the country that he was “shocked and saddened” by Donald Trump, Jr.’s now infamous Skittles meme, and that he thinks its message is “quite ironic” as well as being “as mathematically true as his father’s rhetoric about immigrants” is.
Kamar took the junior Trump’s analogy of a bowl full of Skittles with just a few poisoned ones and turned it around on the entire family.
“Let me ask you this,” Kamar posted, “if you saw a boat full of Trumps capsize, and you knew that only one of them wasn’t a complete racst, would you save any of them? How could you willingly let any of them in if you don’t have time to give them an ideological test? You have to know how these people think before you rescue them from drowning, don’t you”
Mr. Haddad then posted statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and put them into the context of a terror attack.
“I’ll tell you why Trump Junior is a moron,” Haddad wrote, “the odds of being killed in a terror attack are ridiculously small, and even more so for an attack perpetrated by a refugee. Refugees are vetted even more thoroughly than my family was when we emigrated before the war broke out. Did you know you are more than thirty-five THOUSAND times more likely to be killed by heart disease than in a terror attack?”
The math on the actual bowl of Skittles was also incorrect, Kamar said.
“It’s a stupid analogy because unlike a bowl of Skittles at a party,” Haddad chided, “refugees are actually vetted. No one vets Skittles. But even if they did, that moron’s meme is still not really accurate. Because if you take into account how rare terror attacks actually are, his meme would have been a lot of more accurate if they said you had sixty bowls of skittles and only three were poisoned.”
Fear mongering over immigrants is nothing new in America, Haddad said, but what makes him particularly angry is that just fifteen years ago, a Republican president was careful not to generalize about and insult every Muslim on Earth. Even as he and his administration were preparing to go to war after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Haddad said, former President George W. Bush was careful to still be inclusive to all Americans and even with Muslims throughout the world.
“Dubya did a lot of bad stuff,” Haddad said, “and he did it stupidly. But one thing he did right was not castigating all Muslims after 9/11. My family decided to move to America after seeing that even with a neocon president, the citizens could be helped to be less xenophobic. I am blown away by how different the GOP is now, just more than a decade later. They’ve given over fully to the paranoia and delusions over how safe their streets are anyway.”
The irony of a country being afraid of exterior terrorist threats while having “more guns on the streets than people” is “ludicrous and insane” to Kamar.
“Since 1980 alone, there have been more firearm deaths in this country than people who have died in all U.S. wars combined,” Kamar said, “and the comparison gets even more absurd when you draw it between terror attacks and gun deaths. The simple truth is you have more a chance of being shot to death by a white, Christian, male in this country than you do by an Islamic terrorist. But one thing is for sure — the NRA is doing its level best to make sure both white Christians and radical Jihadists can get their hands on any gun they want, all under the naive cover of the Second Amendment.”
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.
