(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) MSNBC Host Chris Hayes compared former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies with Hungary’s and Poland’s response to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, accusing the Eastern European nations of “racism” and “anti-Muslim bigotry.”
Poland and Hungary have agreed to care for Ukrainian refugees, but they refused to accept Syrian refugees during the height of the Syrian civil war, in which the United States fought Russia through proxies, Breitbart reported.
“For many reasons—including, frankly, racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, the paranoia of post-9/11 war on terror—many of those same countries which quite explicitly refused to accept refugees that Russia created in Syria are—to their credit—opening their borders and opening their arms to refugees Russia is creating in Ukraine,” Hayes said Tuesday on his show, All In.
Hayes called the difference between the two wars and refugee crises “an interesting contrast.”
He could not grasp how Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki could meet with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and, along with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, agree to accept “millions of people displaced from Ukraine.”
Hayes did not consider that Poland and Hungary share a border with Ukraine, and their citizens have shared Christian values, unlike the Syrians, who live hundreds of miles away in a different continent based on Islamic laws and customs.
Hayes then likened the refugee crisis to Trump’s “rise to power,” NewsBusters reported.
Much of Trump’s 2016 presidential platform was focused on restoring the enforcement of federal immigration law that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had illegally allowed to lapse by executive fiat.
“In many ways, the Russian involvement in Syria was the kind of butterfly wings flapping that led to this populist moment, this resentment, this buildup of nationalist-populist party and candidates and regimes and governments,” Hayes opined, without evidence.
“And perhaps [it] unintentionally created a new flood of right-wing politicians, either explicitly or implicitly aligned with Putin in the Kremlin themselves,” he continued. “From [Brexit leader Nigel] Farrage, to Orban, to Trump.”
Hayes concluded by calling America First conservatives, who want the United States to keep out of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, “bad-faith actors.”
