"The panicked flight into rightwing ideologies and crass xenophobia we see everywhere in Europe today..."

“The panicked flight into rightwing ideologies and crass xenophobia we see everywhere in Europe today might also be a frenzied refusal of the fact that, if human rights can be denied to some people, then nobody is safe. Anxiously glancing at the human misery of others from within the blubber of our own historical amnesia, now more than ever we need to understand why their misfortunes are also our own. This is not impossible. Other parts of the world take in refugees, host the permanently stateless, always at some cost but also with humanity. Today’s politicians might do well to look beyond the myth of Europe’s generously compassionate past and to the example of the Eritrean camps in Sudan, the Somali camps in Kenya, to Baddawi camp in Beirut, Amman in Jordan, and Gaziantep and Hatay in Turkey, for some contemporary lessons in humanitarian solidarity.”

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Lyndsey Stonebridge, What history tells us about the refugee crisis

from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/136038095672