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Ambrose: Compassion and rationality

Migrant response must relieve suffering without causing more

By Jay Ambrose
Published: September 20, 2015, 6:20am

Compassion, we need you, but don’t come alone.

That’s an entreaty to keep in mind as Middle Eastern migrants flee from terrorists, from war, from hunger and other tortures to find rescue in Europe, sometimes finding something else. Sometimes finding a sea to drown in. Sometimes finding a smuggler’s truck in which to suffocate. Sometimes finding a Hungarian camerawoman who maliciously trips a running man with a child on his back.

What’s happening is massive. Tens of thousands, mostly Muslim and something like half from buffeted and bleeding Syria, have lately been streaming across the Mediterranean and then across European borders. Not everyone is saying welcome. Hungary is putting up a fence. While Germany’s leaders have shown deep sympathy, saying they’ll bring 800,000 Syrians aboard before year’s end, even they have stepped back from where they were.

The receptive stance led to an utterly unmanageable inundation. And so Germany was recently 1 of 4 countries setting up entry-limiting border checks within the European Union that is struggling to devise a workable, acceptable overall plan. Compassion matters, but it must be accompanied by realistic, alert, informed, objective analysis that cautiously looks at a number of issues and perhaps at some point says arms should be folded instead of always open.

Some contend Europe can easily handle the numbers coming at it. But even in the short run, as columnist Peggy Noonan points out, increased unemployment and additional welfare costs are hardly the uplift Europe’s slogging economies are looking for. Newcomers with the best of intentions are unlikely to navigate these new societies with ease and will be in cultures at odds with many of their beliefs. The record of Muslim assimilation is not shiny.

Columnist Thomas Sowell notes past strife and the likelihood of clashes to come. Any number of observers have pointed to the near certainty of jihadists being in the mix. Lots and lots of European terrorism, anyone?

A comparative trickle?

In the long run, the deluge we’re seeing today could seem a comparative trickle. John O’Sullivan, an editor at large for National Review, points out that many of the arrivals are not refugees but simply young men from a broad swathe of the world looking for more opportunity. There are hundreds of millions who might want to move in Europe’s direction, especially considering the inviting words of some, and there is no way they are easily absorbed.

The role of the West, including the United States? Encourage other Middle East countries to keep taking in refugees, but help them out with enough funding to enable an end to much of the pain, says Sowell. When wars are over, many can move back home, and in the meantime, it is also said, the West can do a better job of dealing with the smugglers whose evil multiplies the misery.

It would, in the meantime, help if crass critics quit beating up on President George W. Bush for supposedly bringing all this about with the war in Iraq. They might try to remember that terrorism antedated the war, that Saddam Hussein had killed as many as a million of his own people, fostered equally devastating war with Iran, financed terrorists, and sought weapons of mass destruction. Far more culpably than Bush, President Barack Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq, leaving the door open for the Islamic State, and dealt with Syria by drawing a red line it crossed with impunity.

There’s much more to be said, but the point now is for us, Europe and our Middle East allies to do as much as we reasonably can to alleviate the suffering of refugees without causing more suffering down the road. The point is to have compassion accompanied by rationality.


 

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.

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