Arab Gulf States Close Doors to Syrian Refugees
1st April 2016
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has surfaced, once again to lecture the Anglosphere and the Western world about its “duties” to hurriedly absorb nearly half a million more Syrian migrants. The war-torn country’s surrounding nations, he argues, have done the heavy lifting already. Now the U.N. chief wants you and your communities to do more.
Why? What business is this of ours? They never say. It’s just assumed that the Great Souled International Crust has an unlimited claim on the resources of Everybody Else for whatever feel-good project they’ve dreamed up.
The New York Times reports that the Sec. General opened a conference in Geneva today, demanding “an exponential increase in global solidarity”, insisting that “Neighboring countries have done far more than their share” and imploring “Others [to] now step up.” And, of course, the stress was on European Union member states and the United States of America to do more.
Who gets to decide what each party’s ‘fair share’ is, and on what basis? They never say. Whatever it is, it’s never enough.
But while the United Nations lumps the responsibility onto the West, you might ask why countries like Saudi Arabia, which claims to have absorbed around half a million Syrians, do not provide any data to support their statements. Indeed, in 2013, net migration of those deemed to be Syrian nationals stood at around just 20,000, with criticism aimed at the country for only accepting Syrians who already have families in the Kingdom.
In fact countries that could take more, and haven’t remain free of criticism, presumably because they aren’t signatories to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. This isn’t a sign that we are better. It’s a sign that we are dumber. We as Western nations afford moral and political equivalence for almost all other countries around the world nowadays (most recently, Cuba and Iran) but we don’t make the same demands of these countries as we place upon ourselves.