Four Reasons Syria Refugees are a Bigger Story than Malaysian Air MH 370

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/reasons-refugees-malaysian.html

Four Reasons Syria Refugees are a Bigger Story than Malaysian Air MH 370
By Juan Cole | Mar. 15, 2014

~snip~

1. There are some 2.5 million Syrian refugees, so the scale of the human tragedy there, in which 140,000 have died, dwarfs that of one missing airliner.

2. There is most likely nothing anyone can do about the airliner. But the welfare of the Syrian refugees, many of them children, depends on our donating and organizing to help them. In turn that philanthropy depends on the world public knowing about their plight, i.e. depends on the news channels to get out the word. (Mosltly, they aren’t).

3. The airliner may have been the victim of terrorism. But the Syrians who fled their homeland for Lebanon and Jordan have definitely been the victims, either of state terror or of the terrorism of groups such as the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

4. The airliner cannot actually be reported on from the field, since it is likely at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. But reporters can freely go to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to interview those made homeless and penniless by the Syrian civil war.