© Santi Palacios/Associated Press Syrian refugees wait near the border railway station of Idomeni, northern Greece, to cross into Macedonia.
Watching the horrific images of Syrian refugees struggling toward safety — or in
the case of Aylan Kurdi, 3, drowning on that journey — I think of other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama.
And
my dad.
In the aftermath of World War II, my father swam the Danube River to flee Romania and become part of a tide of refugees that nobody much cared about. Fortunately, a family in Portland, Ore., sponsored his way to the United States, making this column possible.
If you don't see yourself or your family members in those images of today's refugees, you need an empathy transplant.Aylan's death reflected a systematic failure of world leadership, from Arab capitals to European ones, from Moscow to Washington. This failure occurred at three levels:
■ The Syrian civil war has dragged on for four years now, taking
almost 200,000 lives, without serious efforts to stop the bombings.
Creating a safe zone would at least allow Syrians to remain in the country.
■ As millions of Syrian refugees swamped surrounding countries, the world shrugged. United Nations aid requests for Syrian refugees are only 41 percent funded, and the World Food Program was recently forced to slash its food allocation for refugees in Lebanon to just $
13.50 per person a month. Half of Syrian refugee children are unable to go to school. So of course loving parents strike out for Europe.
■ Driven by xenophobia and demagogy, some Europeans have done their best to stigmatize refugees and hamper their journeys.
Bob Kitchen of the International Rescue Committee told me he saw refugee families arriving
on the beaches of Greece, hugging one another and celebrating, thinking that finally they had made it — unaware of what they still faced in southern Europe.
"This crisis is on the group of world leaders who have prioritized other things," rather than Syria, Kitchen said. "This is the result of that inaction."
António Guterres, the head of the U.N. refugee agency, said the crisis was in part "a failure of leadership worldwide."
"This is not a massive invasion," he said, noting that about 4,000 people are arriving daily in a continent with more than half a billion inhabitants. "This is manageable, if there is political commitment and will."
We all know that the world failed refugees in the run-up to World War II. The U.S. refused to allow Jewish refugees to disembark from
a ship, the St. Louis, that had reached Miami. The ship returned to Europe, and some passengers died in the Holocaust.
Aylan, who had relatives in Canada who wanted to give him a home, found no port. He died on our watch.
I do not believe many refugees will return to Syria once the war is over. Whatever remains in Syria, after years of destruction, will not...
Guterres believes that images of children like Aylan are changing attitudes. "Compassion is winning over fear," he said.
I hope he's right. Bravo in particular to Icelanders, who
on Facebook have been volunteering to pay for the flights of Syrian refugees and then put them up in their homes. Thousands of Icelanders have backed this effort, under the slogan "Just because it isn't happening here doesn't mean it isn't happening."
Then there are the Persian Gulf countries.
Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates haven't accepted a single Syrian refugee (although they have allowed Syrians to stay without formal refugee status). Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's bombings of Yemen have only added to the global refugee crisis.
We Americans may be tempted to pat ourselves on the back. But the U.S. has accepted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees since the war began, and the Obama administration has dropped the ball on Syria — whether doing something hard like using the threat of missiles to create a safe zone, or something easy like supporting more schools for Syrian refugee children in neighboring countries.
Granted, assimilating refugees is difficult. It's easy to welcome people at the airport, but more complex to provide jobs and absorb people with different values. (In Jordan, I once visited a refugee family hoping for settlement in the United States and saw a poster of Saddam Hussein on the wall; I wondered how that adjustment would go.)
In any case, let's be clear that the ultimate solution isn't to resettle Syrians but to allow them to go home.
"Stopping the barrel bombs will save more refugees dying on the route to Europe than any other action, because people want to return to live in their homes," noted
Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American writer and architect.
There has been a vigorous public debate about whether the photo of Aylan's drowned body should be shown by news organizations. But
the real atrocity isn't the photo but the death itself — and our ongoing moral failure to save the lives of children like Aylan.
And that is the crux of the matter, the inability of millions of people within western countries and throughout the world to recognize that there is a difference, a difference from the people that are fleeing from the war torn countries and you or me. This is not new this has been an ongoing for millennia.
How long does the west think can hold back dissent and collapse in there own countries.
How long before this envelopes Europe. Not because of the migrant crisis. This is a reaction of the degradation of humanity of the many for the few. Humanity is on the march. Given the current economical, and environment that is engulfing our world. This is just the beginning.
The world, mother earth is capable of sustaining life on the planet for the billions of it's occupants. We have been led falsely to believe that there are only finite resources. Not true this is a modern day myth created by an avaricious group of monsters that care nothing for humanity. All they are interested in is acquisition of whatever resources they can get there greedy paws on.
And now are witnessing the reality of that greed. To look upon the body of a child, so perfect in his death. An image that should be so abhorrent, that in reality could /should be called infanticide. The death of future generations
The west argues about quotas well that says a lot, we are just numbers, your SS number your driver license, your credit card number. Why not just call it a tracing number, after all that what is the vast majority of humanity is we are just numbers.
Collateral damage in the great game, not my game not your game but the game played by the masters of the universe.