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Why Syrians?

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Clarissa

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I’ve been listening to NPR while driving on the highway, and there was a show on about – what else? – Syrian refugees. The entire show was about Syrian passports and whether the refugees had real or fake Syrian passports.

And I don’t get that at all.

If the basis of accepting refugees is the hardship they experience, then why is everybody so stuck specifically on Syrians? How are Iraqis, or Afghanis, or anybody from the really miserable African countries less deserving of compassion? Come to think of it, how are people from the Donbass any less deserving of being accepted as refugees?

Where is the logic? Why are we fixating on Syrian or any other passports?

11 responses to “Why Syrians?”

  1. Dreidel Avatar
    Dreidel

    Was the NPR discussion sympathetic (about Syrian refugee hardships) or wary (about ISIS members carrying Syrian passports) — two very different discussions?

    If it was about security concerns, the focus is on Syria because much of that country is now under ISIS control, and refugees from there supposedly carry a higher risk of being terrorists.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Can’t you guess? 🙂 NPR is all about hardship. Where I get confused is how hardship is measured and decided to be more or less painful than another hardship.

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      1. Dreidel Avatar
        Dreidel

        You’re right, NPR is all about lefty liberalism, which has its psychological roots in guilt and victimhood.

        I can’t read “progressive” minds, but my guess is that Western liberals feel more empathy toward Syrian refugees than Ukrainian ones because of misplaced guilt:

        After all, “we” created ISIS and the resulting Muslim refugees through our evil meddling in the Middle East, whereas an external villain (Putin) is responsible for the crisis in the Ukraine.

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        1. Dreidel Avatar
          Dreidel

          SORRY! I meant “in Ukraine,” NOT “in* the* Ukraine”!!! 🙂

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            As long as you weren’t stressing the first syllable, like in “cucumber”, we’re fine. 🙂

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Here’s the problem: these same progressives kept throwing royal tantrums here on my blog, on the NPR, in The Nation, etc arguing that the Ukrainian revolution was organized by the CIA. So when it was convenient, they claimed to believe the US was responsible for the events in Ukraine. So where’s the guilt?

          I believe it all has to do with race. Refugees are (insanely) perceived as being “black.” And that makes them easy to pity, patronize, and condescend to.

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          1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
            J. Otto Pohl

            According to the US census bureau Syrians and all other Arabs and people of Middle Eastern or North African origin are “white.”

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              Exactly. Because they are. It’s deeply weird to me that anybody would position them of being of a different race than myself.

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Technically “refugee” refers to people fleeing war or documentable oppression. Also, tradtitionally the idea was that refugees receive shelter until the situation on the ground changes enough to be safe enough to send them back.

    But in an age where the feeeeeeels dominate everything these distinctions are lost as is the basic distinction between refugee, immigrant and border hopper (I reserve the word ‘immigrant’ for those who go about the process formally there is no such thing as an “undocumented” immigrant).

    If Germany were treating people from Syria as refugees they would set up camps including schools in Arabic for the kids (since that will be more important for them when they return to Syria) along with survival German so they can get by while waiting for one side to win. That’s a fool headed concept when it should be much easier to do in neighboring countries like Turkey or Jordan.

    Instead they’re being treated like people who’ve chosen to restart their lives in Germany and who will be expected to pull their own weight economically (despite no existing immigrant muslim community in Europe doing so).

    It’s all very, very odd.

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  3. Dreidel Avatar
    Dreidel

    As someone who grew up in the 1950s American South, where “race” was considered very important, and groups like blacks and American Indians, and the (very few) non-white Hispanics around, and the white but-separated-by-religion Jews and Catholics were set aside as white-but-misguided, I remember my community welcoming “white” refugees from the Communist suppression of Hungary’s 1956 attempt to escape totalitarian tyranny.

    I guess the definition of “white like us” is still fluid after 60 years, but those Caucasian Hungarians were fully accepted as white into my small Tennessee town, and their descendents are still prospering there today.

    (And so are the Jews and blacks and the vastly more newly arrived Hispanics and Asians and everybody else, after all the ridiculous barriers melted down. Anybody who tells me that the world is getting worse rather than better when it comes to human relationships — except at a few nutty universities — is a goddamn LIAR!)

    Take my world as an old man, Clarissa! The world gets a bit better every year. It stumbles about, and takes a few steps backwards, but its projectory is in the right direction. If you look at the long picture over time, that’s the way it’s going. 🙂

    Take the long view, and be pleased!

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I agree completely! The march of progress is slow but it’s inexorable.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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