I was deeply disappointed by the fear-mongering political cartoon that ran on the Dec. 11 Op-Ed page. The cartoonist implies that helping Syrian refugees will result in brutal attacks on Washington residents, by explicitly lumping said refugees in with the recent San Bernardino shooters and describing them all as equally “dangerous.”

Unfortunately for the cartoonist’s intended point, the couple who committed those atrocities were not refugees seeking safety and security; neither were they from anywhere even close to Syria. The [man was] an American citizen (born in Illinois and raised in California) and his wife, a permanent US resident via marriage. Both were of Pakistani descent, a country nearly 2,000 miles from Syria.

“That’s different,” indeed. If you would rather not allow displaced Syrian families to enter our state, at least make your argument with hard facts, rather than wildly assuming that all people with foreign-sounding names are identical… and “dangerous.”

Arijan Clark, Kirkland