The Syrian Migrant Crisis

is whispered across the Internet, across North America, across Europe—months across September 2015, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened borders to migrants trapped in Hungary, years across 2012, when Germany agreed to resettle 5000 refugees for two years.

With Merkel’s approval ratings in the German Infratest Dimap political research polls dropping lower than they have been in four years and her statement that refugees should return home after the war comes a time for introspection on the current situation in Europe. After all, 121,967 migrants have arrived by sea alone since January, with 410 dead or missing, while anti-migrant protests erupt throughout Europe.

Despite evidence of concern on too-rapid cultural change in Europe ranging between Norway’s immigration department hiring a nonprofit organization, Alternative to Violence, to hold a program on teaching migrants recognition of sexual harassment to rising arson attacks on asylum centers, according to the Swedish Migration Center, they are still coming.

Päivi Nerg, the Finnish administrative director of the interior ministry, and Anders Ygeman, the Swedish interior minister, announced last month plans to deport tens of thousands of migrants. Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration reported helping 779 Iraqis return from Europe in November, twice the number from October.

And Merkel’s open-door policy, wrote Christiane Hoffman for der Spiegel, Germany’s most popular magazine, failed when the chancellor’s “opponents” closed down the border in Macedonia, the Balkan mountain route into West and Central Europe after the sea route. Less migrants are reaching Europe, she noted, but the wave is still coming into Lesvos.

“It is unstoppable,” Michele Brignone, scientific secretary of the Oasis International Foundation, a Venice-based research center on Christianity and Islam, said. “It has to take place, it is taking place.”

“I’ve met people from Syria,” wrote Nadia Hararah, a volunteer at the end of the sea route in the Greek island of Lesvos, “Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Morocco, but I’m sure there are some from other countries as well.” Lesvos is eight miles from the coast of Turkey, where migrants have been staying in increments since a siege in Syria in 2011; this is only one of the countries Syrian migrants in particular have been staying since the first 5000 fled the May 2011 Talkalakh uprising against the government for Lebanon.

Afghan and Syrian, the majority nationality according to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s regional overview, migrants can at least register as refugees, Hararah said, while north African refugees are barred.

Hararah recalled meeting a refugee, whose remote village, including his family, was killed by Daesh in northern Iraq. Because he only spoke Kurdish, volunteers struggled to help him with medical treatment and finding services. And, she added, the registration policy by Frontex, the European Union-aligned border authority, does not include ethnic Kurds, who come from Iraq and Syria.

However, while many Kurds are arriving, she noticed, ethnic Arabs from Syria are coming in in lesser waves.

But the arriving migrants, many refugees running from war, are only the ones who can afford to leave, she said. Smugglers, according to National Public Radio, can charge hundreds to thousands per person to put migrants on boats to Lesvos. The death toll, according to the UN Refugee Agency, is often due to the boats capsizing. Furthermore, said Hararah, it costs 50 euros for the bus to Athens, and 50 more for the bus to the Macedonian border, from which migrants could reach countries with more open immigration policies like Denmark, Germany and Sweden.

The poor in war-torn countries can only walk. “They are still there,” Hararah said. “That means there are still people who are suffering, who cannot leave.”

However, she said, along with the 47 percent of migrants who are men, the demographic does not matter. “Just because you’re an able-bodied man,” she said, “doesn’t mean you deserve less of a chance for life. It doesn’t mean you deserve a less of a chance to live, doesn’t mean you deserve a life less than a Long Islander.”

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echoes across the Internet, across North America, Europe, Asia; across 724 years from the fall from fall of Acre and perhaps even 96 from the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Since the Crusades against Islam, Europe has long been at odds with its overlapping rival and neighbor, the Middle East.

Last month, the city council in Randers, Denmark made pork, a taboo Muslim food and central food in Danish cuisine, mandatory for public institution meals including kindergarten and daycare centers claiming an effort to “preserve Danish identity and culture.” Meanwhile, Chinese human rights activist Ai Weiwei closed an exhibition in Copenhagen and opened a life jacket exhibition over the Berlin Konzerthaus in protest after the Danish parliament approved a law proposal that would allow confiscation of refugees’ cash over $1450.

“We have to imagine a way of modelling our institutions,” Brignone said, “and our way of life to include these people. The problem now is many issues are overlapping.”

One is sexism.

There are stories, confirmed Victoria Kloska, a native resident of Bonn, Germany, of migrant children who refuse to obey female teachers at school. Her father, a middle school teacher, confronts these students often as a teacher of the German system’s “special help” classes.

Brignone remembers Muslim students of the opposite sex refusing to even shake hands when he was studying at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. “Islam is self-sufficient,” he said. It is important now, he said, to learn from secularity incidents like in France, where a girl was banned from class for wearing a long black skirt deemed to be openly religious by her teachers in April.

In an extreme case Merkel’s statement that refugees should return home after the war came as a reaction to when 500 women throughout the western German city reported being sexually harassed on New Year’s Eve. Thirty suspects of North African origin, Ralf Jäger, the state interior minister, said, including 15 refugees, were identified in connection to the incidents.

But the news is countered by Muslim protestors holding signs like “Islam gegen Sexismus”—“Islam against sexism”—between the Cologne Cathedral and Central Station, photographed by the European Pressphoto Agency. On the other hand, Syrian refugees like Hesham Ahmad Mohammad, according to the Independent, countered the Cologne attacks, afterwards telling the New York Times,

“When I hear that in the news, I am sad. Because we know that there were bad boys and bad people. But the good people, nobody speaks about them.”

Alongside stories of unsupervised young men running amok in Swedish refugee centers, including the stabbing of refugee worker Alexandra Mezher, there are stories of like that of Alex Assali, who after fleeing Syria and Libya now serves soup and rice to the homeless in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

But even as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau opens up to refugees, effectively letting the wave flow to North America, there is no one way to look at the situation.

Hararah, a former account executive in San Mateo, California, worked in Lesvos for two weeks before travelling between Israel and Palestine, from which her father migrated to America. Most Palestinians, she said, are refugees.

Some of the most distinct challenges she faced as a volunteer translating languages like Kurdish, and overcoming the passiveness of the migrants, who would not actively ask for help until approached. “Cultural understanding and education is so important,” she said. “Take for example, the fact that Americans don’t know more than one language is the reason why Trump is winning. We look open on the surface, but deep down we’re not.”

As for the cultural change in Europe and possibly the United States, she said, while the concern is valid, it isn’t “fair” for them, especially the latter, to meddle in affairs in the afflicted regions, “control their governments” and “benefit from their resources,” then not expect the people affected to find a safer place.

If anything, the migrant crisis is a test of time. “Let’s see how quickly they can resolve the war now,” Hararah said. “With the crisis coming into Europe now, maybe it’ll pressure them to give a fuck. And you can quote me on that.”