34 American governors had declared their states Syrian refugee free zones,

For the third day this week, President Obama finds himself waging a one-man battle against mass hysteria and misinformation in the wake of the Paris attack.

On Monday, the president battled a hostile American media at a G20 press conference in Turkey before delivering this powerful rebuke of his GOP critics who’ve used the attacks to scapegoat Syrian refugees:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are.

When you start seeing individuals in positions of responsibility suggesting that Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative … It’s counterproductive, and it needs to stop.


By Wednesday, at least two GOP lawmakers had called for Syrian refugees to be “segregated” into special “camps” and the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, seemingly positively invoked Japanese internment camps during WWII to defend his decision to ban war refugees from his city limits.

Of course, there are legal limitations to such proposals, but many elected officials, clearly unaware or unbothered by the legal constraints, have only increased their calls for extralegal action against Syrian refugees. Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul has even called for ending all U.S. aid to Syrian refugees as millions remain displaced.