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Melanie Phillips

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Melanie Phillips,

Melanie Phillips

Opinion

The response to the migration crisis is blinkered emoting

September 10, 2015 13:22
2 min read

The pictures of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, whose drowned body was washed up on a Turkish beach after his Syrian Kurdish parents set out for Europe in a dinghy, produced an outpouring of sorrow and a clamour to "do something" to which politicians have been scrambling to respond.

It is very difficult for any diaspora Jew to deal rationally with Europe's migration crisis. Like many others, my own forbears migrated to Britain from eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. More subsequently fled to Britain during the Shoah. How could we possibly argue against welcoming this tidal wave of human misery?

Yet the arguments made by certain Jewish community leaders have left me uneasy. In particular, the comparison with the Kindertransport, when some 10,000 Jewish refugee children were brought to Britain from Nazi Europe, seemed particularly inappropriate.

The Kindertransport rescued children from almost certain murder by a regime aiming to kill them simply because they were Jews. Today's migration crisis is different. Many pouring into Europe are fleeing societies consumed by war or terror. However, even if they are not economic migrants, most are not fleeing for their lives. Aylan Kurdi's family did not journey from Syria but from Bodrum in Turkey, where they had already found a safe haven, because they wanted a better life in Canada.