Fiorina statement meant to absolve US of Syrian crime: Analyst

Republican US presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s statement about Syrian refugees is meant to absolve the United States of crimes it has committed in Syria, an American peace activist and commentator says.

Mark Glenn, a writer and co-founder of the Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement, an interfaith forum dedicated to uniting Muslims and Christians against Zionists, made these remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday.

Fiorina said on Sunday that the US should not open its doors for Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, citing concerns about terrorism. She added that the US should be “very careful about who we let enter this country from these war torn regions to ensure that terrorists are not coming here.”

“Unfortunately, Fiorina’s comments are not out of the mainstream in terms of both the American political system and the American people as well,” Glenn said.

“What she’s doing here obviously is meant to satisfy certain political sentiments within the American population, especially those on the rightwing who are very agitated right now about the issue of immigration,” he added.

Syria has been gripped by deadly unrest since March 2011. The United States and its allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — are supporting the militants operating inside Syria.

According to the United Nations, more than 320,000 people have been killed and millions of others displaced due to the violence.

“I think what Fiorina’s comments really are more than anything else is a very, very clever form of deception, because by her making this statement that America should be very careful about taking these refugees from Syria, what she is implying by this is that somehow America is innocent of the causes of this refugee problem to begin with,” Glenn said. 

“None of these people would have been made refugees were it not for the direct – and I want to underscore that word direct –  involvement that the Americans have played in destabilizing Syria by funding and training and supporting all of these various terrorist groups that have made Syria inhabitable right now,” he noted.

“So her statement is meant to convey the notion that somehow America does not have dirty hands in all of this business, and therefore shouldn’t be expected to do something to make the situation better,” the analyst stated.

“What her statements also imply is that there is a general problem with ‘Islamic terrorism,’” he pointed out.

“What she said is that we have to be careful about letting potential terrorists into our country. And all the rest of that is as if terrorism and Islam are synonyms, which anybody who has spent even five second studying the tenets of Islam knows that there is absolutely no connection between terrorism and Islam,” he opined.