Here’s why I don’t like people comparing the Holocaust to the Syrian civil war:
The problem is that in order to help Syria, we have to find a way to safely deal with:
1. Hezbollah, who has been helping Assad, and therefore expects Assad to give them their share of the power when things get better for him;
2. ISIS, who is fighting on the other side and is another dangerous terror organization;
3. the chemical and biological weapons both sides have no scruples about using to harm anyone and everyone who stands in their way.
I am starting to think the only way to deal with the situation is for all powers to get together and bomb all of Syria. But that doesn’t help the children involved, not at all.
The other issue is that refugee quotas often exclude many of those who need them, and include terrorists and extremists (surprise, surprise).
There really is no simple solution.
And the situation is not comparable to the Holocaust (even though everyone likes to compare the two) because:
1. During the Holocaust, Jews were rounded up from various occupied countries and brought to concentration camps, to their deaths. Here, the women and children happen to be in the way, are not let out of the siege – but they are killed where they live, not brought anywhere specific, and are also not targeted for killing in a specific way. So theoretically, if we could parachute them out of there, the two fighting sides would not know or care (whereas in the Holocaust, they tracked down individual Jewish names and kept track of who was killed etc.).
2. There was a very clear line, in the Holocaust, between victims and perps. The perps did not pretend to be victims in order to gain rights. They were proud to be perps. Here, there are perps and victims but unless you understand and speak Arabic, you will not be able to tell the difference between them – and even if you do speak Arabic, you might still be fooled, and that would be the point.
3. In the Holocaust, four people died every minute, on average. That doesn’t include the people who died in the war – it JUST includes the actual genocide victims, sans soldiers and sans civilians.
Syria’s civil war has claimed 321,000 lives (true to March 13, 2017), with 145,000 missing (most of whom have probably joined the fighting). So we’re talking about one person dying every ten minutes, on average. Except that people don’t die every day – they only die when they are hit, or when they get sick but have no doctors, because all the UN doctors have left the area (surprising, right?).
4. Part of the issue with the Holocaust is that *no one* was willing to stand up for the victims and the Jews. But the Shiites here have supporters, who are paying for them to defend themselves. And the Sunnis have supporters, who are paying for hem to defend themselves. The whole WORLD is “up in arms,” literally, about what the best way to help the Syrian citizens is.
Everyone cares about the Syrian victims. But NO ONE cared about the Jewish and gypsy victims of the Holocaust, until they were forced to care. (For G-d’s sake, no one cares about Jews today, either.)
Point being, my heart hurts for the Syrian victims, but I don’t see a real solution. Israel does what it can to help, including sending medical clowns to work with the children, treating wounded Syrians in Israeli hospitals and funding it through Israelis’ taxes, at the expense of Israeli citizens who are forced to wait for treatment while the doctors work with the Syrians (which makes many Israelis mad).
My husband has said a few times that the only real thing we can do is recapture large parts of Syria, and that would be the best thing for those Syrian citizens, to become citizens of Israel. (Think about it: To go from living in a war-torn country, full of conflict, strife, and even in good times – Sharia law – to living in a modern democracy, which gives you all the rights and privileges of the Western world. Yes, it would be to their benefit, and they probably know it.) But I don’t think we have the army for it, or the guts for it, and I don’t think it would go over well with Hezbollah or ISIS. Sooo I don’t think it’s going to happen.
So I wish the carnage wasn’t happening, wish we could do more – but I don’t really think there is a solution. And it’s not really comparable to the Holocaust, in which several nations fought several other nations, and victims and perps were clearly separated.