{"id":5350,"date":"2016-09-20T08:38:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-20T14:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=5350"},"modified":"2016-09-20T08:40:13","modified_gmt":"2016-09-20T14:40:13","slug":"nick-kristof-anne-frank-and-the-syrians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/09\/nick-kristof-anne-frank-and-the-syrians.html","title":{"rendered":"Nick Kristof, Anne Frank, and the Syrians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ASyrian_refugee_camp_on_theTurkish_border.jpg;<\/p>\n

So over the weekend, Nick Kristof had an article asking, \u201cWould you hide a Jew from the Nazis?<\/a>\u201d \u00a0Now, as it happens, I read this over the weekend, and closed out, and when I attempted just now to re-read it I\u2019d hit my monthly article limit. \u00a0 But the flavor of the article was very similar to something he\u2019d written back in August, in which he said, \u201cAnne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0In both cases, his point was that the same moral obligation the United States had to accept Jewish refugees in danger of their lives due to Nazi persecution, the United States now has with respect to Syrians.<\/p>\n

Now, that same case has been made by others, and I wrote about it back a year ago<\/a>, but I\u2019ll rephrase and repeat some of my points from the prior article and say a few new things.<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>, in the immediate pre-war years, or, really, up until the Nazis moved westward, Americans could have felt reasonably comfortable with the statement, \u201cIt\u2019s a European problem. \u00a0Let France, the Netherlands, and Belgium take the refugees.\u201d \u00a0The infamous St. Louis<\/a>, whose passengers sought refuge in Cuba, then in the United States, ended up offloading its passengers in those countries, and one really shouldn\u2019t scold prewar Americans for failing to recognize those countries would fall like dominoes and were unsafe harbors.<\/p>\n

But Kristof raises the issue (in his August article \u2014 which I opened first and was presumably article #10 for the month) that even as late as April 1941, when the Netherlands was occupied but the United States wasn\u2019t yet at war with Germany, Otto Frank was desperately seeking a visa to the United States, or to Britain or Cuba.<\/p>\n

Which does pose a meaningful, if hypothetical, question: \u00a0what should the United States have done? \u00a0Remember, they were on the verge of war, but were not actually at war. \u00a0And, though Germany had prevented Jews in its own territory from leaving long before\u00a0(I think), Kristof\u2019s Frank family example implies that the Nazis were still letting Jews leave from occupied territories.<\/p>\n

Now, in hindsight, we know that their ultimate aim was genocide, but it\u2019s not really fair to say that Americans in the year 1941 should have known that. \u00a0At this point, however, it was clear that the persecution was terrible, and, in Poland, the Nazis has already moved the Jewish population into ghettos, and, while I\u2019m not sure exactly when they started up, the Einsatzgruppen were certainly in operation in the summer of 1941.<\/p>\n

So the question I asked back a year ago was this: \u00a0should the United States have, indeed, established an emergency rescue plan, to bring over every last Jew whose departure the Nazis would have permitted?<\/strong>\u00a0 Polish Jews, Dutch Jews, French Jews, even German Jews, if permission could have been managed, though likely only upon payment of a ransom.<\/p>\n

Never mind the political feasibility of a program like this, or the cost. \u00a0Would this have been the moral answer?<\/p>\n

In the end, December 1941 wasn\u2019t too far away and, in the meantime, the United States was drawing closer to war with the lend-lease program.<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>, is this really comparable to the situation today?<\/p>\n

When we say, \u201cSyrians,\u201d were are really speaking of three groups of people: \u00a0those in refuge camps, in stable but unpleasant living situations; those in rebel- or government-occupied territory, facing various kinds of persecution there; and those in active war zones.<\/p>\n

Now, as I said, I can\u2019t tell you any longer which of these three groups Kristof was referring to, but let\u2019s address these three:<\/p>\n

Those in refugee camps are not the \u201cnew Anne Franks\u201d \u2014 they don\u2019t like their present living situations, and understandably so, but the biggest need, and the best way to help the most of these individuals, is not refugee resettlement, but directing more financial resources to those refugee camps. \u00a0After all, 10,000 Syrians in the United States is a drop in the bucket compared to the 60 million refugees and internally displaced folk worldwide. \u00a0(Which I also wrote about back last November: \u201cSo what about the other 59,400,000?<\/a>\u201c)<\/p>\n

With respect to those in active war zones, well, I don\u2019t see how refugee resettlement is an answer here. \u00a0It\u2019s a frickin\u2019 war. \u00a0If we want to let the multiple parties fight it out amongst themselves, then there will inevitably be pictures of injured children coming our way. \u00a0If we want to put a stop to the war, we have to make up our minds to do so, and act with more resolve than at present. \u00a0And we have to ask the question: \u00a0what\u2019s our ultimate goal? \u00a0Is it to bring the rebels to victory? \u00a0That\u2019s not working out too well, both militarily, and because we\u2019re discovering that we\u2019re doing a sucky job of picking rebels who themselves would govern justly. \u00a0Or is it just to stop the war, because life under Assad was, in the end, better than life in a war zone, or a lifetime in a refugee camp? \u00a0(Again, prior post: \u00a0\u201cShould we give up on Aleppo?<\/a>\u201c) \u00a0And, if so, should we just let Russia have free rein to prop up Assad? \u00a0\u2014 but no matter the answer to these questions, deciding to resettle more refugees wouldn\u2019t help a single soul now trapped in Aleppo<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Third<\/strong>, well, actually, come to think of it, there\u2019s another reason why\u00a0none of these are \u201cnew Anne Franks\u201d \u2014 they\u2019re victims of war, not of a genocide campaign. \u00a0Or, rather, the religious minorities (Christians, Yazdis, etc.) in Syria and Iraq have pretty much been forgotten about, all the more so now that the refugee-resettlement debate has been cast in terms of whether you\u2019re an Islamophobe or not. \u00a0What happened to the religious minorities I\u2019m not sure, as there has not been a drop of news coverage in a long time; some time ago I remember reading that they weren\u2019t eligible for resettlement because, being persecuted by Muslims in refugee camps, they avoided them entirely, and thus were not registered as \u201cofficial\u201d refugees. \u00a0I don\u2019t quite know what to make of it, but the debate about Muslim refugees seems to have erased the religious minorities entirely.<\/p>\n

So, the bottom line is this: no, we are not killing Anne Frank all over again, but, on the other hand, there is no simple bottom line, either.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ASyrian_refugee_camp_on_theTurkish_border.jpg; By Voice of America News: Henry Ridgwell on the Turkish border [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So over the weekend, Nick Kristof had an article asking, \u201cWould you hide a Jew from the Nazis?\u201d \u00a0Now, as it happens, I read this over the weekend, and closed out, and when I attempted just now to re-read it I\u2019d hit my monthly article limit. \u00a0 But the flavor of the article was very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":5351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[449,448],"class_list":["post-5350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-refugees","tag-syria"],"yoast_head":"\nNick Kristof, Anne Frank, and the Syrians<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So over the weekend, Nick Kristof had an article asking, "Would you hide a Jew from the Nazis?" \u00a0Now, as it happens, I read this over the weekend, and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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