A little more than a year ago, the Dallas Morning News ran a picture of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach. The photo accompanied a column I had written about the rhetoric of the
A little more than a year ago, the Dallas Morning News ran a picture of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach. The photo accompanied a column I had written about the rhetoric of the recent presidential campaigns. I couldn’t help but think about how our national political rhetoric might be causing waves of international consequence.
At the very least, I hoped 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi did not die in vain.
The picture wasn’t gory, yet it reminded me of the graphic photo of 9-year-old Kim Phuc, who was running away from an aerial napalm attack on June 8, 1972. Could you imagine if you were Kurdi’s father? Or Phuc’s mother?
Both of these harrowing pictures were taken overseas, but it is hard to deny that we bear some blame. Before we implemented a “total and complete shutdown” of Syrian and Muslim refugees from seven countries yesterday, our refugee intake was already criminal.
Since the conflict in Syria began in 2011, until the photography date of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body, the United States had taken in only about 1,500 Syrian refugees. That is not a typo: 1,500 Syrian refugees total. When Obama raised the Syrian ceiling to 10,000 — a more reasonable number I suppose, but still an unbearably low moral figure, he faced a massive outcry from conservatives.
Last week, many politicians paid tribute to Holocaust Memorial Day and the millions of innocent lives lost, and these politicians pledged, “Never again.” Yet they turn a blind eye to our current refugee crisis.
Last September marked the one-year anniversary of Kurdi’s haunting beach picture. As of last September, the death toll from Syria’s five-year civil war reached 300,000 victims, according to the war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and has risen since then.
On the one-year anniversary of Kurdi’s death, Abdullah Kurdi, the father of Alan Kurdi, pleaded with the international community to act to stop the bloodshed in his home country, saying that the attention paid to his family’s tragedy had changed little.
Here are some things you might not know about Kurdi’s tragic death sentence. He was not the only victim on that fateful September morning, his mother and brother also died when their small rubber-boat capsized. And although many in America remain unmoved by this death, Canadians have responded quite differently.
According to news reports, when Kurdi washed up onshore, he and his family were making a final, desperate attempt to flee to relatives in Canada even though their asylum application had been rejected. His death and the wider refugee crisis became an issue in Canada’s federal election.
How can neighboring countries, so similar in many respects, approach this humanitarian crisis so differently? Whereas Canada has accepted almost 40,000 refugees to much celebration by its citizens, Obama’s 10,000 target has now become, under President Donald Trump, a complete and total shutdown of many Muslim refugees.
The current refugee crisis is the issue of our lifetime and we have met it with little to no fanfare. America was once viewed as a beacon of hope. Lady Liberty represented freedom and opportunity. But now we have plans to build a much vaunted wall while we permit our most at-risk communities to drown in lead-contaminated water.
We pledge to never let millions of innocent lives suffer again or deprive our communities of their most basic needs. But how easily we forget. Humanity washed along the shore, and we walked by. We are witnessing many refugee hands reach out, but we refrain from reaching back. For the first time in my life, I don’t recognize this country.
Shortly after Kurdi’s death, his relatives were admitted into Canada as refugees. At least, in Canada, Aylan Kurdi did not die in vain.
Renwei Chung is a contributor to The Dallas Morning News.
