Since the Syrian Civil War began, heart-wrenching images of the conflict have been seared into the eyes of the world. Refugees from Syria have left the region and have poured into Europe and elsewhere. A public issue, which looms large today, is America’s role vis-a-vis the refugees.
This situation is not a simple one. Advocates of admitting Syrian refugees to the U.S. often try to liken the situation to that of European Jews from the 1930s. This event saw the U.S. turn back a passenger ship, the MS St. Louis, filled with Jewish refugees. Subsequently, many of its passengers perished in Nazi Germany and numerous death camps.
Not surprisingly, most who make this ignorant comparison cannot name the ship. The 1939 incident occurred in peace time, and its passengers sought refuge because they were subject to discriminatory laws solely based on their ethnic and/or religious background (being Jewish is widely accepted as both an ethnicity and religion, an “ethnoreligious” group).
The vast majority of Syrian refugees are Sunni Arab Muslims who are not subject to oppression by ISIS on the basis of practicing Sunni Islam or being of Arab ethnicity. Most of them are simply fleeing from the collateral damage of a violent conflict or political opposition to ISIS.
The only subset of Syrian refugees who compare to 1930s Jews are the Yazidis; an ethnoreligious group that has seen its women sexually enslaved and its men beheaded on video solely on the basis of their ethnic and religious background, as per ISIS’ words.
American opposition to Jewish refugees of the Third Reich era was based in conspiracy theories that posited that “the Jews” were a monolithic group seeking to control and corrupt the world. Opposition to Syrian refugees is based on the lack of information available on them, given ISIS’ control of civil databases and records. The poor track record of Muslim immigrants’ integration in Europe and aggregate Muslims’ views on a host of societal issues, as shown in Pew’s 2013 survey “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” factors heavily into such opposition.
Furthermore, as a Jew, aside from being insulted by the MS St. Louis comparison, I am personally scared for my well-being should large numbers of Syrian refugees be admitted here. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual Global 100 Survey, which measures public attitudes and opinions toward Jews in over one-hundred countries, 74 percent of people from the Middle East and North Africa, of which Syria is a part, harbor anti-Semitic views. The experience of the remaining European Jews in the several decades since immigration to Europe from that region spiked (and not immigration of Yazidis), typified by the Labour Party anti-Semitism row in the UK, the Hypercacher attack, and others, is something which I’d rather not happen here.
John Goldman
