Via the Daily Caller, note that he’s talking specifically about refugees here, not migrants. Migrants seek a better job market in a wealthier economy; refugees seek safe haven from being persecuted or killed if they stay where they are. One of the headaches Germany and its EU partners are suffering right now is figuring out how many of the many thousands from the Middle East who are pounding on Europe’s door are true refugees and how many are merely migrants.

How will Beck distinguish between the two, and then distinguish the refugees from aspiring terrorists? He says he has a plan for that.

“I asked if my audience could raise $10 million before Christmas to bring the Christians in from Syria,” Beck explained. “We will vet them ourselves. We have former CIA people that are going over and they’re vetting everybody right now. We can save more people by Christmas than Oscar Schindler saved. Okay? Well, what are you going to do with them? What are you going to do with them? How are you going to get them in here? State Department won’t let them in. Really? Because I know some bridges over a river in Texas that doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem to matter. And if they want to say, ‘Now you can’t bring those people in, now you can’t, that’s somehow illegal, we’ll put you in jail’ – I will so gladly grace a jail for the justice cause of saving people’s lives. I don’t need your permission at all to do the right thing! That’s who we need to be now! Forget about Washington! You don’t need permission to do the right thing.”

He mentions Christians specifically there when asked whom he’s planning to smuggle but elsewhere he’s less clear. “When we can watch them and see a boy laying face down in the sand and we don’t accept them into our country,” he told the Caller, “we don’t have a light that we’re holding by that door anymore.” That’s a reference, I take it, to Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Syria who drowned off the coast of Turkey en route to Greece and washed up on the beach, where his body became the subject of a now famous news photo. If I’m not mistaken, Kurdi and his family are Muslim, not Christian; they also appear to be migrants, not refugees, as they had found safe haven in Turkey after leaving Syria. In fact, according to one passenger on the boat that carried Kurdi, the boy’s father was a smuggler who was bringing refugees to Greece for a payday. Point being, vetting people is much harder than it seems. Mark Krikorian:

[R]efugees from the Islamic world cannot be properly vetted. I don’t mean only that the Obama administration has a frivolous approach to “violent extremists,” or that the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shown itself especially competent in this regard. Rather, it is impossible to weed out jihadists from a refugee flow. Who are we going to check with, the Damascus police department? It’s not like any document claiming to be from Syria can be relied on; fake Syrian passports, for instance, are in great demand.

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, acknowledged the problem the other day, noting that “We don’t obviously put it past the likes of ISIL to infiltrate operatives among these refugees.” But even he was overly optimistic, claiming that the U.S. has a “pretty aggressive” system of background checks before admitting refugees. I have no doubt our people are doing their best, but James Bond and Superman could team up to do the background checks and they’d still fail, given the utter lack of any information to go on…

Of course, one way of addressing the security concerns would be to resettle only Christians from Syria, which some countries are considering. Even that would entail careful scrutiny to make sure they weren’t Muslims who studied “Christianity for Dummies” just to pass the test.

A question for Beck and a question for everyone else. For him: Would he exclude families with children Alan Kurdi’s age from his refugee operation if they’re Muslim? For everyone else: Isn’t his plan the correct Christian approach to this problem? I know one prominent Christian who’d be pretty excited about it, I think.