As historians, we see the Syrian refugee crisis and the brutal terrorism of Daesh (ISIS) as an extraordinary moment in world history. As academics, our first response was to organize talks and panels to consider the origins and meaning of the crisis.
Then we did something perhaps less expected of academics — we joined many fellow Victorians and Canadians to privately sponsor a Syrian family to start a new life in Canada.
Trained to scrutinize every alternative, we couldn’t help asking ourselves: Is it worth all this effort to bring a few thousand families to safety when 50 million people are displaced worldwide? Isn’t this a Band-Aid?
We were moved to form a private sponsorship group (working under the Inter-Cultural Association) by the same forces that moved so many other Canadians. Who could be immune to the images marching daily across our screens — a tiny boy face down in the surf, a ramshackle boat packed slave-ship thick with people fleeing violence and mayhem in their homeland?
At the same time, we are moved by political beliefs informed by history. We are convinced that a generous response to refugees is the most powerful rejoinder Canada can make to dogged efforts by Daesh to drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Daesh seeks precisely to sow hatred and sharpen divisions between the West and predominantly Muslim regions of the globe. A key element of its political campaign to create a self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq is the ideological campaign to force people to choose sides. “They hate Muslims,” is the group’s insistent message about the West. Daesh seeks every opportunity to reinforce that narrative of us versus them, of irreconcilable religious difference.
As historians, we are all too familiar with the horrors such narratives can spawn. We have to stand up to this ideology. One of the most effective methods at our disposal to demonstrate the falseness of the Daesh narrative is to open our doors wide to refugees fleeing the scourge of Daesh and civil war. Welcoming Muslim and other Syrian refugees as our brothers and sisters is the right thing to do, but it is more than that — it also undermines Daesh’s ideological campaign.
A generous response to refugees — whether from Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan or Somalia — helps build bridges between people, challenging racism, suspicion and fear. My Muslim friend bears no relationship to that man with the black flag in the grainy online videos, any more than my Christian friend is linked with the Ku Klux Klan.
Our children can lead us. At school, kids from a wide range of backgrounds and religions learn and play together. They are learning and modelling acceptance and diversity — essential lessons in a global age.
Let’s follow their lead and build an inclusive Canada by welcoming refugees as friends and neighbours.
The authors are members of the History Refugee Committee (historyrefugee.org), University of Victoria. The History Refugee Committee is holding a benefit auction for Syrian refugees at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 9 in the UVic Student Union Building.
