Oh, wait — my bad, Andres Zamora is Cuban.

(Prosecutors) said he was ordered deported from the U.S. after he was convicted and sentenced to serve five years in state prison for trafficking cocaine in 1998. He was released but not deported because of the U.S. ban on returning Cuban citizens to the island nation.

This man is a perfect avatar of almost every hysterical anti-immigrant talking point ever, but never mind, because we’re too politically correct in this country to talk about the absurdity of giving special status to one group of refugees above others, or how that always facilitates the very threats that reactionary elements screech about the loudest.

No one is going to demand the Cuban community apologize for Zamora.

Fox News will not gleefully discuss the relative harshness of his detention and deportation.

Joe Scarborough will not spend Monday morning demonizing him, nor will Zamora be accused of fatherlessness, or of not pulling up his pants and lifting himself up by the bootstraps.

Mo Brooks will not declare that Andres Zamora came to America looking for a paid vacation.

Republicans will not display a knee-jerk reaction to send all the Cubans home again; Steve Israel’s capitulation chorus of pathetic Democrats are not going to join them in servile terror.

While such sentiments towards Cubans certainly exist in white supremacist and nativist circles, they are held universally objectionable in both major American political parties.

GOP presidential contender Ted Cruz, who wants to create a religious test for displaced Syrians, personifies the special status accorded to Cubans in the United States — and applies no test of any kind to fugitives from Havana.

Remember, at one point Fidel Castro emptied his prisons of criminals and sent them to the United States, which is essentially what republican frontrunner Donald Trump accuses Mexico of doing right now.

If Zamora gets mention at all in right wing blogs, it will be as ‘proof’ that their demonization of Social Security Disability Insurance recipients is warranted.

No refugee has ever committed an act of terrorism in the United States after being admitted as a refugee. Of the 750,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 2001, exactly two have ever been charged with a crime related to terrorism — and they were taken down by an FBI sting.

Entering the United States as a refugee would also be the slowest possible way for a terrorist to actually reach the country.

But as the current wave of anti-Syrian fearmongering demonstrates, logic seldom dictates American immigration laws, politicians do.

The term ‘political correctness’ is also never applied to guns. Zamora is a good example of the unregulated arms market that kills thousands of Americans every year, but any talk of a crackdown on straw purchasers, or closing loopholes, or the fact that guns in the home actually attract burglars like those with whom Zamora conspired, will be met with a chorus of objections from ammosexuals who demand we respect their lifestyle choices.

9 thoughts on “Syrian Man Cheated SSDI, Sold Stolen Guns, Drugs In FL Driveway”
  1. I was dubious about the fact checking on this article already, but when you said “..at one point Fidel Castro emptied his prisons of criminals and sent them to the United States..”.. that was way too obvious a lie. So I looked it up. Cuba holds approximately 100,000 prisoners in its jails.
    Castro sent just over 2700 to the US.. but those people weren’t all prisoners. Many were either mentally ill or spoke out against Cuba.
    So no, Castro did not empty his prisons into the US.
    I didn’t read the rest of your article because if I wanted obviously made up fiction, Stephen King is more my style.

    1. They say that memory is the first defense against tyranny, and I remember the debate surrounding the Mariel boatlift. Maybe you’re too young to remember that Castro actually did send over thousands of criminals *on purpose* in 1980, but it means you’ll need the prison figures on Castro’s Cuba for 35 years ago, not today.

      Also: that number of 100,000 is amazingly round, almost like you pulled it from your rectum instead of an encyclopedia or another authoritative source. Is there a citation?

          1. Instead of a single source for my numbers, I showed you multiple. The first of which is a Miami Herald article entitled “Cuba’s many prisons may hold 100,000”

            Also the event talked about in the article was part of, not the whole of the Mariel boatlift. That was a mass exodus of 125,000 Cubans. Castro, taking advantage of that mass exodus, sent 2746 criminals, mentally ill and unwanteds among those Cubans. 2746 people out of 10’s, if not 100’s of thousands of criminals in his jails (Hence the “not empty” point). Not all the people that came over during Mariel boatlift fit in those categories. Only 2746 out of 125000. But here are you acting as if all 125000 that came over were criminals and unwanteds, which isn’t even kinda true.

            Source: The link in the article – Like I said.. but in case you can’t figure it out.. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/cuba/mariel_port.htm

          2. Nice deflection. Instead of acknowledging you were wrong and I was right and that I had sourced everything the first time (but you apparently were either too lazy to look or just being difficult). You instead decided to pretend that there was a hint of comedy in this article rendering the last 5 comments pointless..
            “Sarcastic exaggeration” has no place in a news article even if that were the case (it was not). I realize the writer actually has their heart in the right place. I agree with them on most things. Just that “fact” grates on me because it is a MASSIVE exaggeration who’s purpose seems to be to mislead.
            I label myself a liberal. As such we (which I believe includes yourself) should use every means at our disposal to win against the conservatives. Correct?
            No. Not correct. “Sarcastic exaggeration” (also known as lying) is a bridge we shouldn’t cross. Conservatives have ONLY won because of the lies. Its all they have left. We need to win because we are right. Because we were honest. Because we didn’t exaggerate the truth. We need to drag the US kicking and screaming to the side of truth. Eyes need to be opened.

          3. Sooo you feel “misled” because you weren’t smart enough to get the joke, much less the point? OK, I’m glad we got that settled.

            And I’ve dragged you kicking and screaming into a Google-fu comment thread because page loads rule the blogging world, period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is also probably asking you for money.

  2. Another data point for the comparison: Elián González. Imagine a seven-year-old Syrian boy with a group of relatives who want him to stay in the US and another group of relatives who want him returned to Syria.

    The same sort of people—in some cases, the same individuals—who loudly denounced in 2000 the Clinton Administration for sending a child back to a country whose politics they didn’t like would in 2015 be loudly demanding the kid be immediately deported back to a war zone because he could be a radical jihadi terrorist. Or something. They wouldn’t be entirely clear on the details, but they’d be certain he was scary.

    I’m really getting tired of the politics of fear.

    –alopecia

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