Aiding Syrian Refugees

"Left on its current trajectory, Syria is on the path to state failure and sustained sectarian violence, featuring mass atrocities and cleansing that could amount to genocide in some areas."
Center for the Prevention of Genocide, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

In fact, as it happens, there is ample evidence and with it reason to believe that Syria is well on its way to becoming another Rwanda, another Darfur, another Cambodia. These were brutishly chilling state-sponsored events that destroyed countless lives, events that the international community was incapable of preventing. And it looks as though Syria under the regime of its President Bashar al-Assad is keen to reproduce that volume of mindless slaughter in Syria.

President Assad's father waged a chemical war on his protesting opponents in Homs province that succeeded in killing a mere 40,000 Syrians who failed to agree with his sectarian totalitarian government. The current President Assad is on track to making his father's legacy as a statesman puny by comparison. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights feel the number that adequately reflects deaths in Syria in the last two years to be 100,000 -- but of course they're biased.

But they're right in saying that over four million desperately frightened Syrians have fled their homes. They've become both internal and external refugees, displaced from those areas of Syria which have traditionally been their homes because of fierce government shelling and artillery; bombs that have levelled their districts to rubble and left many of their relatives dead or wounded. Some end up in refugee camps within Syria, many flood over neighbouring borders into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

"And we don't want to be opening Canada's doors to people who are essentially from al-Qaida-style militias, either. Our intelligence is that a critical mass of the Syrian opposition is from groups whose motivations and strategies are extreme and violent, and that there is not a critical mass of secular forces in the opposition."                             Jason Kenney, Canada's Citizenship and Immigration Minister

Critics of the government of Canada invoke the past, when desperate Jewish men, women and children of all ages and backgrounds attempted to flee what had become for them the charnel house of Europe, where death camps were set up by the Nazi occupiers of much of Europe, with the intention of destroying the Jewish population, as a sidebar to the prosecution of the Second World War, in Germany's pursuit of extending the Third Reich worldwide.

Just a moment: Jews never did find haven. No country of the western world would agree to accept them. Japan, on the other hand, part of the Axis powers, fighting alongside Germany as an honourable "Aryan" country, saw no glory in persecuting and murdering Jews. Japan facilitated a rescue of Jews from the European death factories and found them haven in China.

And, despite their reputation spelled out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews singly or collectively have never posed an existential danger to any other population group.

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for the kind of pathological mind-set that grips the Arab world. Which distinguishes itself by tribal antipathy and sectarian violence, exhibiting viral hatred toward one another and an unabashed penchant for slaughter, one tribe, one sect of Islam against the other which they claim to be representative of a heretical faith, not the true faith of pure Islam and thus, deserving of death, the more gruesome the better.

A people so clutched by hatred and revenge, violence and mass murder that they present as collective psychopaths. Victimizing one another, the fate of those among them who have no wish to rampage, to slaughter, to torture their enemies, is sealed. Unwilling to join the ferocious killing, wanting to live normal lives with their families in security and to be able to contemplate a future for themselves, they live now in refugee camps.

Yet not without the virus that afflicts their persecutors. Europe and North America have experienced ample situations which point out that people of the Middle East and Muslims do not leave their culture, their heritage, their antipathies and their prejudices behind. They bring it all as baggage with them, and the culture, the social conditioning, the religious fervency, demonstrates their incapacity in large part to live in harmony with the indigenous populations of countries to which they migrate.

The world looks on in dismay and with misgivings and heart palpitations over the plight of the millions of Syrians of all ages who have become homeless. Aid agencies, primarily the United Nations, but other NGOs providing humanitarian aid to afflicted populations, have been busy attempting to provide needed medical aid, medicines, potable water, shelter and food.

Those Syrians who have fled with money to tide themselves, have not endeared themselves to the people whose countries they have entered as refugees.

The international community has pledged financial support to aid and assist the refugees. Given their experience in the past in welcoming tides of Muslims to their shores, a great many countries are no longer willing and eager to accept them as refugees. They now host more than enough Muslims in groups large enough that they feel empowered and entitled to demand that the host societies alter their customs and culture and social contracts to reflect those of the immigrants.

Additionally, there arise among them individuals and groups who adhere to the Islamist concept of jihad and who present as ready conscripts for the militias distinguishing themselves as mujahadeen, noble warriors of Islam, battling the Western forces engaged in a mission to destroy Islam. An pervasive "Islamophobia" which the faithful must respond to, violently, with deadly force called terrorism.

The advance force has already established itself. It is called the Ummah. And it is the weight of Muslims that increasingly present as larger and more numerous representatives of the faith that have infiltrated nations that have trusted them to accept the laws and customs and values that they themselves hold dear, to become model citizens who value their heritage but do not seek to impose it and their religion on others.