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But it’s also consistent with a troubling trend in her party, both here and nationally, that seeks to slam America’s doors to those who most need them opened. It’s difficult to imagine a more cruel, short-sighted, fundamentally un-American stance.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reported last week, Dinkins is asking her fellow Republican lawmakers to sign onto a letter demanding that Republican Gov. Mike Parson “proactively prohibit the resettlement of any Palestinian refugees from Gaza in Missouri.�

There are no such resettlement plans in the works, but what self-respecting demagogue would let a little detail like that stand in the way of a good, scary story for the base?

“I lack faith in the Biden Admin to properly vet refugees from Gaza to ensure we are not bringing a terrorist threat to American soil,� Dinkins explained in a tweet announcing the proposal.

Parson, to his enormous credit, quickly and publicly on Dinkins’ proposal by pointing out not only the constitutional problems with it, but its fundamental unfairness in labeling all Palestinians as Hamas terrorists.

“[T]here is a huge difference between Palestinian people and Hamas. We’ve just got to be careful of who we are targeting to say we don’t want here and who we do,� said Parson, adding: “I don’t think you want to take everybody that’s from Palestine to make them as bad people.�

Unless, of course, you’re a state representative running for a state Senate seat in Missouri’s conservative southeast region, as Dinkins is, and you need to get as far to the right as you possibly can.

The legal problem with Dinkins’ demand is undebatable: The U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause specifies that federal law supersedes state law when the two are in conflict. And the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that immigration policy is entirely a matter for federal law.

In short, states don’t get to decide which refugees are admitted to the U.S., or where they are settled once they get here, any more than they get to declare war or sign treaties with foreign governments.

The federal government sets immigration policy, period. And a state legislator’s predictable lack of “faith� in a president of the opposing party has nothing to do with anything.

Dinkins presumably knows this. But it was apparently difficult for her to resist this two-fer opportunity to preen for the base by declaring the Biden administration unqualified to handle immigration, while at the same time making unsubtle appeals to cultural intolerance.

Lest anyone thinks the argument here is strictly about a rational fear of terrorists infiltrating the ranks of Palestinian refugees, consider some of the culturally charged language in Dinkins’ letter.

She expresses concern about “welcoming individuals from regions whose belief systems are rooted in anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments.� She warns of the “dangerous and divisive ideologies that many individuals from the Gaza Strip would bring with them.�

Most disturbingly, she suggests that barring war refugees from settling here would “uphold the values that define us as Americans.�

In fact, this dog-whistling appeal to fear and religious bigotry is exactly the opposite of those values. And it isn’t legitimized by an unsupported, purely partisan assertion that the current presidential administration can’t be trusted to properly vet refugees.

This page has consistently argued that, while Israel isn’t blameless in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza both before and during this war, it’s a mistake for American progressives to equate Israel’s legitimate defense of its right to exist with Hamas’ terrorism. They are emphatically not the same thing.

That said, we’ve yet to hear even the most militant pro-Palestinian progressives suggest that Israelis should be barred from immigrating to the U.S. It is apparently only the political right that would instinctively slam the doors in defiance of America’s actual values.

That includes a putrid proposal from U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., to not only bar all Palestinians from entering the U.S., but to those already here — for no cause other than their place of origin.

A resolution condemning Zinke’s bill is spearheaded by two pro-Israel Jewish congressmen, Reps. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, and Dan Goldman, D-N.Y. Their resolution says Zinke’s bill “dangerously conflates Palestinians with Hamas� and “is un-American, bigoted, and is designed to inflame tensions which could result in violence.�

Rep. Dinkins’ proposal, too, unfairly conflates all Palestinians with Hamas terrorists. And it ignores the fact that Palestinian refugees — men, women and many, many children — are themselves victims of those same terrorists. Hamas has been brutal in its governance of Gaza’s Palestinian civilians and has used them as human shields in the current conflict with Israel.

All that, and now a self-serving Missouri politician rooting around for right-wing votes preemptively labels those civilians (children included) as terrorists and calls for every single one of them to be barred from settling in Missouri.

Anyone who thinks that level of unmitigated cruelty qualifies as an American value really needs to go back to social studies.

Post-Dispatch metro columnist Tony Messenger last week noted the disturbing historical analogy to all this, but it bears repeating here: In the run-up to World War II, more than 900 German Jewish refugees on a transatlantic ship called the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ were denied entry to the U.S. and turned back to Europe.

More than 250 of them later died in the Holocaust.

History has not been kind to the American politicians whose callousness enabled that tragedy. And it won’t be kind to Dinkins, Zinke and their ilk.