Some Mainers including our governor, Paul LePage, want to forbid immigrants fleeing from the horrors of war torn Syria from entering Maine.

Syrian refugees began fleeing their country because their dictator, Bashar al-Assad, used tanks, high-powered weapons and chemical warfare against his own people. This started before ISIS took advantage of the chaos there.

LePage needs to be reminded that his own people, Franco-American Catholics, were victims of the same kind of fear and hatred that he is now expressing toward Syrians. In the 1920s, Ralph Owen Brewster became Republican governor of Maine thanks to backing from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1923, the first state convention of the Ku Klux Klan was held in Waterville, the very same city in which LePage served as mayor. That event attracted 15,000 people, much higher than Waterville’s current population.

Digging further back into Maine’s history, we learn that in 1851 Father John Bapst, who had left Bangor to be a priest in Ellsworth, was tarred and feathered and run out of town because white Anglo-Saxon Protestants didn’t want Catholics and immigrants in their midst.

Would LePage in 1940 have rejected my immigrant Jewish parents fleeing Nazi Germany for the United States and Maine? In fact, my father had been interned at Dachau concentration camp. Would LePage have endorsed discrimination against Jews at Maine lodging establishments as my parents experienced about 1947 in Wiscasset?

Of course, we cannot forget the frequent reminders in LePage’s hometown of Lewiston that Somali refugees who live there are not always welcome.

If these statistics and information are not enough as a reminder that our governor holds similar views as the Ku Klux Klan in opposing immigrants of cultures and faiths about which he knows little, let me offer another American statistic.

In 2011, nearly 32,000 people were killed in the United States by firearms. The number increases each year. Is our governor trying to suggest that there may be one Syrian refugee, who might plan or even carry out a terrorist attack, when all-too-many Americans seek vengeance with guns?

The kind fear-mongering that LePage and others reflect not only lacks understanding and compassion, it is xenophobic, cruel and un-American.

I would like to think we have matured since the days of the Ku Klux Klan. Just like France, which continues to accept Syrian refugees in spite of ISIS attacks on Paris, the United States, a land of immigrants, must accept with open hearts thousands of well-vetted Syrian immigrants.

Only as we demonstrate compassion to those in need, can we eventually help secure and stabilize conditions in such war-torn countries as Syria and Iraq to be able to provide developmental aid to their people.

David O. Solmitz, author, artist and veteran teacher at Madison High School, lives in Waterville.

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