It was fairly recently that I felt the need to correct the record of what was being reported from the Middle East, with a family member who was getting all of their information from conservative media, which was tainting her perspective.
I reminded her that there were reports about the Kurds -- just prior to the Paris attacks and the ones in Beirut -- running Daesh out of the Iraqi city of Sinjar, which as I had guessed, she was not aware of.
Now, there are reports about what they're finding in the city which is to be expected, but tonight PBSnewshour had a story about Yazidis returning to their homes in the city of Sinjar.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HweezI3X0IU&feature=youtu.be[/embed]
As of this writing, extremists are getting more press around the world, confronting refugees and telling them to go home. Many who are not from Syria but refugees nonetheless, are also getting killed in places such as Africa, which I will link to here when I get it.
How unfortunate that I have to agree with those bigots but only as far as to agree that everyone who has a community to maintain, should do what they can to protect it, especially when it comes to overwhelming force against them.
But this reminds me of a comment made by our other blog on the Disqus board on a page for the Diane Rehm show, where they talked about Syrian refugees in the United States.
I don't think people really understand this refugee as crisis if they don't know to look past the simplicity of the fact that they're fleeing the atrocities committed by Daesh.
The point past that -- that Everyone needs to understand -- are the overwhelming incidents that cause them to flee in the first place because there is no doubt that every family or group has to come to some hard decision, at some point and depending on their circumstances, that they're gonna have to get the fuck out of there. I mean, it's not like they're nomads who are used to travel, always moving from one place to another.
It's ridiculously obvious from that story by PBS that they're coming back to rebuild and considering all the shit they've been going through, that's about as optimistic as you can get.
And then we come to the United States where people are starting a new life and there are plenty of stories like that coming out over the Thanksgiving week, but we saw one over on NBCnews, which talks about some Yazidis settling in the United States, starting a new life.
The question here is, what kind of ridicule are they going to have to endure? If the right-wing politicians are going all the way with their Anti-Islamic message that "Christian" refugees should be accepted over Muslim ones, then perhaps Yazidis will be treated a little bit better but, they might still be called terrorists by the hateful extremists who seem to have overrun public opinion, setting us back more years than I have the time to count.
[Featured image by DVIDSHUBS via Flickr is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License]
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