Jacob Bender
Executive Director
CAIR-Philadelphia
Sept. 4, 2015
I was on vacation last week. My wife, daughter, and I spent the time in a beachfront hotel in Montauk, a lovely little village at the tip of Long Island. Vacations should be a welcome relief from the tensions of the world, but this year, the world found a way to make its pain known through the ubiquitous electronic devices that litter our contemporary environment.
The stories came one after another, each seeming to outdo the previous one in its magnitude of horror.
First, 71 corpses were found locked in a truck left roadside in Austria near the Hungarian border. The local police say the dead, women and children among them, were “Syrian migrants.” The truck driver and three others, all Hungarian, have been arrested. Investigators trying to identify the bodies of the would-be refugees found they were so decomposed it was impossible to even take fingerprints.
The next day, over 200 bodies were found drowned, some in a small fishing boat, others floating nearby, off the Libyan cost. Officials said the dead were migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Syria, Morocco and Bangladesh, all risking their lives in a desperate attempt to reach Europe.
Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, are stranded in the Central Railway Station in Budapest, seemingly trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, as Hungarian officials announce the migrants will not be allowed into the rest of Europe.
Finally, in a photograph that immediately captured the essence of the migrant crisis and echoed round the world, the body of drowned 3-year Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi is seen floating in the surf, having washed ashore on the Turkish coast.
It is hard not to note that many, if not all of the above victims, were desperate Muslims fleeing countries in various states of disintegration. And although the European refugee crisis very obviously speaks of the Continent’s xenophobia in general, I detect an insidious anti-Muslim bias lurking just below the surface. Indeed, The New York Times of Friday, Sept. 4, reports that Poland and Slovakia announced that they “would accept only Christian” refugees, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated that “Europe’s Christian roots” were being threatened by the refugees. This clearly Islamophobic statement totally ignores Islam’s 800-hundred-year presence on the European continent, as well as the vast influence of Muslim writers in fields such as philosophy, theology, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, poetry, and grammar, on the emergence of Western Civilization itself. And I wonder if protecting “Europe’s Christian roots” was also responsible for the deportation and murder of 565,000 Hungarian Jews by the Nazis, with Hungarian assistance, during the Holocaust.
Writing as a Jew, I am daily honored, through my work as CAIR-Philadelphia’s Executive Director, to be helping the Muslim community repel the Islamophobic canards that proliferate through the media, as well as providing individual Muslims with CAIR’s legal support in combating employment discrimination and defending them against US government profiling, entrapment, intimidation, and harassment.
CAIR continually partners with other organizations that provide direct support to Syrian and other desperate refugees abroad. Among these organizations are:
Finally, I urge you to read the following CAIR Press Release, “Syrian-American and U.S. Muslim Groups Call for Immediate Action on Syria Crisis.”
Jacob Bender
Executive Director, CAIR-Philadelphia
