Rajiv Raman. All rights reserved.Earlier this year, Jordan made the world a proposal: government speaker Mohammed Momani promised it would help any country that pledged itself to take in several thousand refugees currently camped out in the wilderness between Syria and Jordan. Jordan had reached its limit of capacity. But still there weren't any takers and so 27,000 refugees have been waiting in this no-man's-land until today.
Jordan’s offer to help the international community in shipping off its refugees was to be sure disingenuous. Not an invitation but rather a request from a country whose own population of about six million people faces the challenge of hosting roughly three million refugees, according to the latest census. Among them 1.3 million Syrians. A country which realized that the rest of the world had scarcely cared about this huge burden before seeing photos of a dead child washed up on a Turkish shore. The realities of the Arab present foreshadow Europe's own future.
The deserts of the Middle East are a regular backdrop for drama. But as Europe plummets into desperation about dealing with Syrians, the region no longer makes the continent's front pages. So little attention is paid to its current tragedies that they no longer reach the public consciousness. This is a shame, because the realities of the Arab present foreshadow Europe's own future. The people that flee violence even during the cold winter months and arrive at European shores in their thousands, are driftwood in a merciless tide of globalization.
