(2) We have a moral responsibility to help our fellow man,

I hate moral arguments like this. They are shallow, emotional attempts at getting someone to follow a cause simply because the way they were raised to see what is right and what is wrong. Do not simply say "we should do this because it is right". There is no such thing. Give an argument.

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Culture is the problem, the core issue of dealings with the middle east and the west. By our notions, the middle east is an ancient, backwards, highly negative culture that restricts freedom of speech, womens rights, and so on.

By their notions, the west is a group of nations engorged on wealth, not satisfied with remaining in their own borders, and bringing holy moral wars to places where they were once secure.

You can see the polls of opinions in the middle east, the thoughts of those through those groups of nations. You can see the way radicals come from that region/culture in such larger numbers. Yes, this is not an inherent problem with Islam. However, the middle east is not the way it is for no reason at all. For some reason, the average person in these nations want rule based on religion. To them, it is the way things should be.

Perhaps they aren't extremists, and perhaps their presence in the west will infuse our own culture into their own, killing off the views in their children and saving a generation. However, when we accept these people into our borders, we accept a group with a far heavier prevalence of those views.

We have people like this in the west. The super-right, the Christians, the people going about and shooting up abortion clinics because they are "killing babies". The reason an atheist hasn't ever been in office. The reason a red cup without snowflakes will start a shit-ton of drama about the oppression of Christianity in society.

They lost. They were a strong part of US culture, religion was, and that day is over. Secularism, the idea of freedom of speech, and so on, are very rapidly overcoming the idea that all that is great is God. In the middle east, in the culture these people are coming from, these ideas did not lose, they haven't had the time or stability to disappear.

These people coming into the west have the same view of insulting Mohammed as the strong-right in the US has the view of allowing abortion. A moral crime. A thing that, if you stand against it, you are a justified and righteous hero. These people will ignore the laws, and enforce what they feel, what they know is right.

This will come in the form of playing loud prayer songs six times a day across towns they are a majority in. It will come in the harassment of anyone who isn't wearing appropriate dress. It will come in the banning of alcohol. All things the west has been oh so slowly working to rub out of the minds of those who make it up, as church bells still gong in our cities and preachers pass out bibles outside of schools.

These people haven't been part of that process, and accepting them into society makes them part of our society, part of the massive network of emotions and ideas that decides what our society, as a whole, does.

The question on if we should allow these refugees in, then, falls to this question:

Can we prevent those ideas from gaining hold. Can we reduce the negative effects of allowing those with these ideals into our nation to a degree where the benefits of doing so outweigh the harms of not?

I think it is, with the appropriate checks, limits, and guards in place to assist that goal. We did it once, after all, and we can do it again.

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Security, in my opinion, is only a part of the above. A cohesive culture with a single, aligned set of ideals will have less violence, less terrorism, less hated, than one that does not.

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This all lines up to why I really think the west needs to shift gears in the middle east and propagandize the crap out of it. Enforce "re-education" of all it's citizens. Enforce that all children will go to school. Enforce and restrict the culture that feeds ISIS and similar groups, strangling the ideas that allow it to flourish.

We need to phrase it as the moral way, "the enlightened ones stand up for true capitalism, for wealth, for family. The true great young man fights with their dollars, fights with their education, with their country, not with their religion".

We need to be willing to allow some things to pass, to accept their religions and traditions just enough to twist them until they align with the views of the west. To turn their literal interpretations into figurative ones, just as we do to Christianity. "Do not lie with a man as one would with a woman" is the west's hot topic at the moment, and it's fading away as well, just another literal commandment of God that wasn't ever meant for us, no, it was just commanded as the moral thing to do a few thousand years ago. Blessings for the man who remembers to turn off their neighbors sprinklers.

If we can't do that, if we aren't willing to put up the resources, to put away the sense of morality we have held up for so long, we just need to leave.

We will never fix the problem with more and more war, not ones fought with guns at least. ISIS knows that, or they are powerful and successful because they incidentally create the environment that helps them by way of some other belief.