We are watching Syria die
Terry Glavin in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday:
“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”
There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare – the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples – among Syrian Canadians there is also an unquenchable sorrow.
…
But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the western countries, the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”
Drowning in the sea: a little boy in a red t-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The boy was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.
Nobody is innocent.
…what we are all doing – Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism – is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians these days.
We in Britain seem to have the attitude that all immigrants do is take, that immigrants are somehow a net loss to the place. Our Prime Minister certainly has that attitude, he said exactly that yesterday. Is anyone really convinced by the ‘argument’ that if you don’t accept refugees, there’ll be no market for sending them out on rickety, overloaded boats and it’ll just stop happening?
There’s going to be a short-term cost associated with taking refugees. These are people with literally nothing and they’re going to need help to get on their feet. So politicians are exactly the wrong people to make decisions about it. They’ll be in a different job by the time refugees start making money. What we need is a Prime Minister whose days are numbered and with nothing to lose… To be fair, that hasn’t exactly worked out for the best in our recent past, but there’s always hope.
“In the western countries, the civil society groups – it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well.”
Exactly.
They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”
“Stop the War” … eh? You had a chance. Instead of (…ooh, I’ll use a bad word) intervening when it would have a made an important difference… before ISIS! (And these are the same “bien-pensant” people who are NOT Charlie.)
Useful idiots!
I saw this story yesterday. You really have to hand it to the Icelandic people. “This week, 10,000 residents of Iceland volunteered to house refugees coming from Syria. The outpouring of basic, decent hospitality from this tiny nation stands in stark contrast to the treatment of refugees across the rest of the European continent…”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/10k-heroes-open-homes-to-syrian-refugees.html
Unfortunately, what Orwell called ‘turn the other cheek pacifism’ ends up collaborating with aggression and tyranny. The dread of another Western Front abets the re-arming of Germany, which started before the ink on the Versailles Treaty was dry. The ‘peace’ movements of the post-war era that refused to mention Soviet bombs and aggressions. etc. etc.
The Spanish Civil War, too – they did that “no arms for either side” thing that always works out so well.
At the risk of propagandizing…:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2015/09/quote-of-day-hope-that-these-humane.html
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2015/09/needless-to-say-theyre-not-sincere.html
Homage to Rojava…
There are some nations’ leaders that are more guilty than others.
And on and on goes the obstruction from Russia and China. Show of hands on who would like to escalate the war and humanitarian crisis in Syria into a world war between nuclear weapons countries? I’m holding my hands down for that. Thanks to geography my life will be very short after that happens. You can’t intervene when 2 superpowers oppose it and support the Assad regime.
The problem is there is no good military solution. Military solutions from outside seem to backfire in cases of civil war. ISIS was created by the Iraq war. Maliki made it worse by being sectarian. He is Shiite so he hates the Sunnis. Removing Assad form Syria would just create more chaos. It would help quite a bit if the world wasn’t so dependent on oil but that’s not going to change any time soon. But no matter the situation we should always care about refugees and take care of them. This country worries about illegal immigrants but is a drop in the bucket compared to what Lebanon is facing. Maybe we need to spend more money on refugee centers and less on bombing by drones. But I just don’t know what the solution is.