The White Helmets

[Dill]

(01-01-2017, 02:02 PM)bfine32 Wrote: I have provided an alternative to fighting and still being able to serve your country and countrymen in time of conflict; however, the T-Shirt does not have an answer for this, so you all reply with the non-germane point of killing folk. Frankly because that is all you got. A liberal sure does like attaching names to folks: homophobe, racist, xenophobe, sexist, bigot. ect...and really doesn't need must substance to back their label; however, suggest an able-bodied man that abandons his country and countrymen in time of conflict is a coward. and boy do they get riled up.  

Evey one "attaches names to folks." If they did not, we wouldn't be able to discuss anything. The only question is whether the labels fit. If someone who hates homosexuals is called a "homophobe," the label fits. If someone calls Obama a "Muslim" because he won't support a Muslim ban on immigration, the label does not fit because he is demonstrably a Christian. Attaching labels is not some special liberal problem. And it is not the problem here.

Everyone on this list will admit that sometimes people deserve the label "coward". The only question is how appropriate is its blanket application to refugees of a broken country of hopelessly warring factions. When a country is no longer a country, it is not clear what "fighting for one's country" means.
 
Imagine that you are the 3rd son of a Sunni family in Al Raqqa just before ISIS takes over. Your father gives you and the 2nd son almost all the family's money and orders you both to flee to the UK for three reasons: 1) to keep the family name going in case the family in Raqqa is killed; 2) to get jobs and send back money;and 3) so that ISIS does not force you to fight for them.

Becoming a White Helmet for "your country" does not even cross your mind. There are no white helmets in Al Raqqa, as there are in Aleppo or Damascus. But you could not get to Aleppo or Damascus without risking death at the hands of Assad's Alawites on the norther route or Al Nusra on the southern. And if you did make it there, you would be protecting people who are not your neighbors, family, community. You do what your father asked you to do for your family.

The road ahead is daunting. You must pay human traffickers to get you out of Turkey. Your brother dies when your boat capsizes in the Agean. In Greece the police steal the remainder of your money and on the border of Hungary you are beaten by police. You spend six weeks living in a cardboard "tent" in the notorious refugee "jungle" at the port of Calais in France before you finally smuggle your way across the channel in the back of a refrigerator truck. Because you are only 15 years old, the British give you a residency permit for three years, in which time you learn enough English to get a crappy job which allows you to send your family the equivalent of 100 US dollars a month, which allows them to survive. 

Then one day your are in an internet cafe noodling around American websites because you are interested in American football and happen upon this thread where you learn you are a coward who abandoned his country. . . .