 Thank you so much for coming and attending our panel about Syria Dialogue on the Syrian Crisis. My name is Sirdar Malkoroy. I'm a Juhan Fellow. And I'm Kerry Byne, another one of the Juhan Fellows. So tonight we'll hear from experts about the historical and political background of the conflict in Syria, as well as from a representative of an NGO who's helping those affected by the crisis. This discussion is even more relevant after the events of last Friday and the backlash experienced by refugees as a result. Our hope is that through tonight's dialogue, it becomes clear that this issue is drastically affecting the lives of people and that we need to come to the aid of those people. We would like to read some remarks from Julie Mugal, Assistant Director of the Center for Faith in Public Life, Director of Fairfield's Juhan Program, who did so much to coordinate this event but is unfortunately unable to be here tonight. I would like to welcome everyone to this panel, which wraps up Juhan's Humanitarian Action Week at Fairfield University. Each year, Juhan, the Jesuit University's Action Network sets aside this week in November to host events in many of our 28 campuses in the U.S. and our colleges and universities across the world to support those in need and advocate for heightened awareness and action regarding humanitarian crises. Unfortunately, this is our third awareness in action. This is our third year in a row that we are hosting a panel on Syria as a terrible tragedy continues to unfold in Syria, as neighboring countries and across Europe. As many of you know, we have a dynamic Juhan student group here at Fairfield who recently starred in a Juhan video which we would like to show now. Juhan is the Jesuit University's Humanitarian Action Network. Since 2006, students from a growing number of Juhan clubs from Jesuit colleges and universities around the world have worked together to create awareness of humanitarian issues and serve people and communities in need at home and abroad. Juhan prepares us for careers in humanitarian action and to be global citizens. Together, we effectively coordinate responses to humanitarian crises and take action on humanitarian concerns related to global development. Working with organizations like Save the Children, the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, AmeriCares, and Jesuit Relief Services, we've helped rebuild communities after natural disasters, trained students and staff to be first responders, and participated in immersive disaster relief field training exercises. During alternative spring breaks, we've worked in Joplin, Missouri, supporting our recovery efforts after the devastating tornadoes. And in Atlanta, Georgia, we work with the International Rescue Committee helping recent refugees start new lives. We educate our campuses on global humanitarian issues such as Syrian refugee crisis, fundraise for global causes like earthquake relief for NEPA, and attend conferences and international gatherings as local advocates for pressing humanitarian concerns. Every two years, Juhan clubs meet at our Student Leadership Conference, where we learn from each other, share ideas, and create strategies to increase our positive impact on the world. Join us by starting a Juhan club on your campus. Visit us at juhanonline.org. Juhan, stronger together. I would also like to thank our wonderful Juhan student fellows, Deirdre McElroy and Kerry Bein, who both work so hard to ensure that our humanitarian work touches our students on campus. I also would like to extend an extra special thanks to Deirdre, who was the driving force in putting yesterday's very successful refugee camp simulation event together and in organizing tonight's panel. It is truly thanks to her efforts in spearheading these events that so many students have a better understanding of the situation in Syria and that the trials that millions face as refugees. One final thank you to the faculty who will speak tonight and to my wonderful former colleague Wendy from Save the Children for their participation this evening. Now before we begin, we'd like to have a moment of silence for those who lost their lives or were impacted by the terrorist attack that took place in Paris and all over the globe on Friday. Thank you. Our first panelist is Marcy Patton, Professor of Politics. I'm just going to give you a few pieces of information about Syria and then I want to talk about the Syrian borders and sort of how some of the different countries in the Middle East are involved in the issue. But to begin with, I'd like to sort of say that I think there are the three most alarming issues we have that pertain to the Syrian crisis today are first the growing militarization of the region and of the conflict. And I think Professor McFadden is also going to be speaking to this issue when he talks about Russia. Another significant issue is the issue of refugees and internally displaced people or internally displaced persons. Now the number of people who are either displaced or have left Syria are roughly 50% of the Syrian population before this conflict began. And third, the other alarming development is ISIS and the fractious debate in Washington about over what to do about ISIS and in light of the attacks that took place in Paris. We seem to be having a growing momentum for further militarization of the region. So let me give you a little bit of facts about Syria. It's a nice map up here. It's a territory that's roughly the size of North Dakota. It's a little less than half the size of Iraq. And it is split by two major cleavages. So the first cleavage is ethnicity. Roughly 90% of the population are ethnically Arab. About 9% are ethnically Kurdish, which means it's a different ethnicity, different language. And just under 1% are the Armenians, Jews, and the various Christian groups like the Yazidis. Sorry, not the Yazidis, they come in the second category. The second category that divides Syria is the category of religion. About 10% of the population is Christian, 90% of the population is Muslim. However, increasingly this conflict has become sectarianized, which means that the conflict has been increasingly centered on rivalry between Sunni groups and Shiite groups. And of the Muslims in Syria, about 74% are Sunni, and about 16% are Alawite, which is a sect sort of close to Shiism. It's also important to note that all of these ethno-religious groups have lived in the region for centuries under Ottoman rule without running into any significant sectarian problems. So this is not a problem that's of long historical vintage. This is a problem that's been manufactured fairly recently, particularly since the Arab uprising in 2011. And that's when events began to unfold in Syria, when in 2011 there were a group of youth in a southern city of Syria that wrote graffiti on the walls, and they were arrested by security forces, and a few days later their parents couldn't find anything out about them, and a few days later their bodies were dumped in the road and showed signs of torture. And this led the families of the community to kind of organize a big demonstration protest, and that protest kind of snowballed across Syria. Without there being any organization between the various villages, there was no leadership, this was spontaneous outbreaks across the region, and largely because they've lived under an authoritarian regime for a number of decades. So I want to point out the borders that Syria has here. So it's hard to do it, not turn around. On the north, Syria has a border with Turkey. Turkey's involvement in this conflict plays out two ways. One, early on, and perhaps to some extent still ongoing, Turkey provided a lot of material support to ISIS. For two reasons. One, Turkey is very anti-Assad, and two, because ISIS was, is a Sunni group, and the Turkish government was Sunni in character. They felt some kind of brotherhood with the ISIS group, and so they funneled supplies to ISIS. This has come back to bite them, since ISIS did a horrific bombing in Ankara not that long ago. And at that point Turkey agreed that it would cooperate with the United States in opposing ISIS, and it proceeded to carry out a number of bombing missions in Syria. However, they didn't bomb a single ISIS target, instead they bombed Kurdish groups, because Turkey is afraid that the Syrian Kurds will establish a separate state, an autonomous region, in northern Syria along the borders of Turkey. And that might be some motivation for Turkish Kurds as well as Iraqi Kurds to also declare independent statehood. So unfortunately for the position the United States has taken, it's kind of caught in the middle here, but the Kurds have been the best fighting force against ISIS so far. So the fact that Turkey is bombing ISIS while the United States wants to support ISIS, I mean that Turkey is bombing the Kurds and so on, you get the picture. It's very problematic. Another border. Here is this very significant, obviously, is the border with Iraq. This is significant, one, because ISIS controls territory, both in Syria and in Iraq. Two, because the origins of ISIS can be traced back to the aftermath of the US invasion in 2003, and specifically when the leader of the American Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, decided to, on a policy of debathification, which meant that everybody who was a member of the Bath Party, which included anybody who wanted to have a job in Iraq, was immediately fired from their positions and were left without pensions, salary, nothing. And a very large chunk of those who were fired were military officers in the Iraqi Army. And so the fact that ISIS has some good strategic capabilities can be attributed to the fact that these Sunni military officers have joined forces with ISIS. Not because they believe in ISIS, but because they are fighting for their own space, so to speak. And that's because the government of Iraq, since the elections took place after the Americans, when the Americans left, the government in Iraq is dominated by Shiites. Shiites have always been the majority sect in the country. However, for centuries, including Ottoman period, the Sunnis governed. And so what I'm saying was a Sunni. So there's a bit of sort of revenge politics going on, where the Sunnis who were the majority in number over the years were treated as a lesser group compared to the minority Sunnis. And so you now have a Shiite government that is quite divided. The current prime minister of Iraq, Al-Badi, very much wants to be pro-United States, but his own government is significantly divided, not only internally, but also against him. And the groups that are against him are pro-Iran. Iran is another country that we should mention in terms of the borders here. Iran, people have heard a lot about it because of the nuclear agreement. Iran is a majority Shiite country. And I think the most important thing about Iran and the reason for its involvement in the region is that since the United States eliminated Saddam in the region that left only one strong regional power in the Middle East, and that was Iran. So Iran is clearly trying to basically captain the regional ship of the Middle East and assert itself as a regional hegemon. The other borders here that we see, borders with Jordan and with Lebanon, there are, these two countries are not taking part in significant ways in this conflict, but they are significant repositories of, there are significant numbers of refugees in both countries. Maybe 40% of the Syrian refugees have fled to Lebanon. I'm sure these numbers are going to be updated. Minor little old Jordan, about 20%. A small percentage have fled to Iraq because Iraq's not exactly a stable place to flee to. So if you're fleeting to Iraq, you're really desperate. And about a third have fled to Syria. It's also important to note that Europe, in terms of these numbers, has taken, I would say, no more than 5% of the total refugees, Syrian refugees. So although it's all over the headlines, refugees, and the United States has taken less than 1%. So in terms of humanitarian response, the United States and Europe really should be ashamed of themselves. The last country I want to mention is Saudi Arabia. Because at one level this conflict is about countries and groups that want to depose the ruler of Syria, Bashar Assad. And so you have pro-Assad groups and anti-Assad groups that are fighting one another. At another level this conflict is a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni country. It's adamantly opposed to what it sees as Iranian expansion or Iranian involvement in the region. That's why Saudi Arabia has sent forces into Yemen, because it has claimed that Iran has been sending assistance to the fighters, the Houthi fighters in Yemen, although there's absolutely no evidence to support this claim. And lastly I would say about Saudi Arabia is that recently the United States has just signed a arms deal with Saudi Arabia to sell the Saudis $1 billion worth of armaments. This is the largest arms sale in the history of the world. So if we're expecting to see a reduction of militarization in the region, if we're expecting to see a reduction in problems with ISIS, if we're expecting to see a reduction in the problem of refugees, then we're not being realistic about the Middle East. Our second panelist is Sylvia Marcin-Sackley, assistant professor of history. Thank you for that context. Two years ago, when I first participated in this panel, I had one conclusion. As you heard, the Syrian conflict is complex and multi-layered with diverse regional, local, and transnational powers, each with its own competing interests, and that the resolution, if there was even a political will to implement it, would be long and bloody. This was before ISIL or ISIS became a player, and now it seems that ISIL is the hub around which competitors realign themselves. So my part of the presentation is going to focus on ISIS or ISIL. It's the same, it's a different, whether you emphasize the Levant or you emphasize the Arabic word, which is Shem, and this is where the S comes from. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the history, which Professor Patton already kind of framed for you, mobilization, what are some of the reasons for mobilization, and how it looks on the ground. I've been watching a lot of alternative news sources, a lot of people who are journalists who have spent significant time documenting what it's like on the ground in the region, so I'll be giving you my impressions of that. There are believed to be as many as, if you think that the great powers that are operating here that are numerous and multi-layered, you should see the opposition. They're believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters. Many of the groups are small and operate on a local level. I mean, we only hear about ISIS, but ISIS really only has from 3,000 to 5,000 armed soldiers that they can command, so it's not a large army by any means. The groups are operated, they operate on a local level, and a number have emerged as powerful forces with affiliates across the country or formed alliances with other groups that share a similar agenda. You have a really messy on-the-ground reality. There are a lot of divisions on the battlefield, there's a lot of infighting among the groups, and the populations are caught in the middle. The refugees that you see fleeing across Europe are the ones who can afford the passage with the smugglers, so they are the ones that are actually well off. The poor are stuck and vulnerable and caught in the middle, and they are submitting to ISIS through fear, or they are sometimes joined in despair, hoping for some sort of protection or security on the ground for the aerial bombardment that is directed ostensibly at ISIS, but actually the bombs are not that smart and they kill innocent civilians in the process. We never hear about that either. When the numbers dwindle in one group, the groups realign, and so this fluid set of alliances creates the enemy of enemies. The enemy of the enemy is my friend, and as is also paradoxically the case with the great powers, where we now find Russia affiliated with France and the U.S. Okay, so when did they appear on the scene? ISIS is about the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, right? So there's an affiliation with the Iraqi situation, and as Dr. Patton said, the roots of this are in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. So the U.S. invades Iraq in 2003. It takes six weeks to topple Saddam Hussein, but the U.S. stays as an occupation force until 2011. You have in there the Abu Ghraib scandal of prisoners, the horrific abuse of detainees, and when that camp closed, you had another camp near the Kuwaiti border called Camp Bukhah, and this was in use from 2003 to 2009. And this is where Al Jazeera, the Arabic news channel, claims that it was paradise compared to Abu Ghraib. Prisoners got an education, they got exercise, they got vocational training and health care, but it was also a place where they formed networks. So this is where detainees who were part of the Baathist regime, generals, formed alliances with the Jihadis, and it was in Camp Bukhah. So the incubation of ISIS was in these camps, right? Particularly that camp. From 2004 to 2006, you had al-Qaeda in Iraq formed. It wasn't formed before. I mean, we were told that one of the reasons that, you know, for the Iraq war was because al-Qaeda was there and that it had something to do with the 9-11 attacks. In fact, you know, most people believed that even though there was no evidence for it. So you had in there a split. Al-Qaeda did become active in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion. So from 2004 and 2006, you had a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and he was declaring, you know, kind of the Sunni caliphate, almost, the Islamic State, right? 2006 to 2013, they renamed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq. By that time, they had reaped the benefits of the revolt in Syria that shares, as Dr. Patton said, a long border. And then there was the Maliki regime, which was extremely sectarian, and they were, it was in power from 2006 to just 2014. So the Sunnis felt completely disenfranchised and then joined up in these, in this organization. You had the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham is the Arabic word for Greater Syria, which includes the Levant, Greater Syria, what is now Israel. And so that was, and then there's the caliphate that was declared from 2014 to the present. By the way, the caliph, Al-Bardadi, was also a member of that Camp Bukka contingent and actually used to teach Islamic theology there, right? So the ideology is jihadi selephism, which, what does that mean? It has this very strict, and among the jihadis, it is even hard-line. ISIS is even considered hard-line by Al-Qaeda. And in fact, Al-Qaeda just owned them. So you were really talking about the extreme of the extreme. So selephism is about, and we can go into that later, but it's principled on the idea of the oneness of God. So it's very puritanical. Paradoxically, the nerve center of Salafi ideology, Salafi Wahhabism is in Saudi Arabia and where the scholar Ibn Taymiah has an intellectual home. Okay, so how do they rule? So ISIS rules by fear and coercion, but it also gives recruits the promise of security. Oftentimes, they build alliances with local tribes. So I've seen this actually play out in videos, you know, where tribes, you know, in order to get security, locals will marry off their daughters to ISIS leaders because they're perceived as strongmen, because they're fully armed. A lot of these arms have been taken from the Iraqi army, particularly in 2014 when there was an encounter. And the Iraqi army that we spent so long to try and bolster and train melted into thin air and ran and left their equipment for ISIS to take. So it had no legitimacy whatsoever. Okay, you also have, it's interesting because although, I mean, it's not really a state. It controls territory. And you also have, you know, within it tries to kind of set up an order. They have courts, local courts. They now control an area the size of Jordan, but you have disagreement with the scholars that among the scholars who say, you know, some people say, well, you know, they control millions of people in these borders or that this territory is actually empty desert. So there's not really many people to control. There are a lot of jihadis coming from different places to fight and join in the struggle. Chechnya, you have all over the Maghreb, Tunisia, the home of the Arab Spring has sent 3,000 known jihadis. So, you know, you wonder, how do they finance their operations? One of the things is, you know, you have two oil producing states there. Iraq is the second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia. And you have pipelines that go through the territory. So they can siphon off the oil, the crude oil, and sell it on the black market. They sell, they have sold antiquities. You have some of the oldest cities in the world with all of their treasures are there. And so they sell it on the black market. You have taxes that are imposed on locals, on local populations that are extracted for security. There is also this talk in the establishment of the so-called Islamic State, taxing non-Muslim religious minorities to kind of echo or kind of mirror the jizya tax that was common when there was an Islamic empire around in that region. And then there is also ransom money for captives. They are known to kidnap people before they kill them. And then they try and attempt to negotiate and get price, a head price before they actually behead people. And then there are donations. There are private donors donating. So the question is, you know, who are the buyers? Because, you know, yes, they can sell the oil, but they have buyers. They have local buyers. And, you know, some analysts believe that even Assad is a buyer if you can believe that. This is how contradictory it gets of ISIS oil that's being sold. And Turkey is also a buyer of, because this is cheap oil. Okay. People have been singling out Islam. You know, it's kind of like, you know, that this is actually a battle for the soul of Islam. But Islam doesn't live in a vacuum. And you cannot battle for the soul of Islam without also tackling Western imperialism and war mongering. So regardless, you know, whether we have boots on the ground or not, we are a player in the Syrian Civil War. The beheading of two American journalists was marketed here, and I'll use that word, as an attack on the American people, not on individual journalists. We cheer when, you know, when some people get killed and when our allies, and then we decry when allies get killed. Islam plays a part, but it's not necessarily in the rigid Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State. We are really focused on ideology and the supposedly Islamic religious dimension, and we don't focus enough on the political, social, and economic dimensions of the small number of people who actually join or support such groups. So in the mind, so what does the group promise? Why do people, why does it have a recruiting ground? So one of the things it promises is to overturn the corrupt political systems and offer a new life in an Islamic State, and it offers a utopian vision of a caliphate that would protect all Muslims and provide them with a decent life, if you can believe that, right? Bombing by outside powers creates the impression that they are under attack as a member of a State or a Muslim and not as ISIS. So this is also a really important ideological recruiting ground. In some cases, the assault against ISIL reinforced really one of its main attractions, and that is the sense among Sunni Muslims that their religion is under attack and must be defended, and only ISIL and similar groups are ready to defend them. This is why the military option is not going to work. Military attacks against Muslim majority states, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya create, just to name a few, create new zones of anarchy. And this is the zones of anarchy in the Middle East are the recruiting ground for ISIL, for groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda. So why do they join? So one of the really interesting things that I've read about why they join is a piece by Rami Hori, who is a Lebanese journalist. One of the things is to overcome, so I'm summarizing here, overcome Sunni victimhood and the perception that the Shias and foreign powers now dominate the Middle East, as Dr. Patton described that. They want to live in a society that practices true Islamic values, such as justice and security, the rule of law and citizenship, righteousness and good governance, that is often absent in Arab Islamic lands with nation states ruled by dictators. So this is where the goals of, you know, it can appeal to goals of, you know, the failed, in their mind, the failed revolts of the Arab Spring. They want to build an Islamic state and expand the caliphate, which are necessary for a kind of millenarian promise. There's a deep-seated feeling that the end of times is near, that the Redeemer or the Mehdi, this messianic figure, is coming and will usher in this permanent peace and justice. But there's actually, but there's also this nihilism. You know, nihilism meaning that they have no hope. They've been, they've given up trying the possibilities that Western economic and political models, trying to implement Western economic and political models because they haven't delivered, even though they have tried to implement them, however imperfectly. The other reason, one of the historical reasons, is to avenge past grievances, such as the Western powers drawing of artificial Arab state borders, foreign military attacks against Arabs, and I keep singling out Arabs because it really is an Arab issue, of what is also, you know, what is perceived as the Israeli humiliation of Arabs and Arab regimes, dictatorial, brutal and corrupt rule. And also there's the idea of experiencing daring adventures. These are young men, right? So there is, and the appeal is also about, you know, some sort of heroism. There are, so scholars have tried to explain why it is that young men, that some of them married and with children, you know, joined these groups. Many of these people have grown up with war, occupation and in general insecurity. And this is the generation of boys that came of age during the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. They are the children of occupation, whose fathers were either in jail or detainees. They were either executed or fighting. They're not primarily fueled, although there is this idea, you know, the religious ideology kind of plays into it, but they're not really fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders. ISIS, like Al-Qaeda before it, offers humiliated and angry young men a means to defend their dignity, their family and their clan. As irrational as it might appear to us, because in joining ISIS, they're actually bringing on more bombs, as is going to happen very, very soon and as already happening. At least they are not silent while being beaten. And it's better to die fighting and with pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs than to do nothing, to flee or wait for the coalition to strike. So there's a deep religious, cultural and tribal identity here that gets touched in. In this way, I think they share a commonality with the Taliban generation, who grew up under years of Soviet occupation, living in the borderlands of Pakistan. Now we face the possibility that the U.S. is preparing to strike and the coalition is increasing their military. And so I almost have to conclude with the same assessment as before. Hopefully people will, the powers will try and reach a political solution. But the future looks long and bloody. Thank you. Our third panelist is Janie Leatherman, Professor of Politics and International Studies. Okay, thank you. Well, it's a daunting task to follow up on the two previous presentations, but it does give me some context, so that's good. I'm going to focus more on the implications of what my colleagues have said for the European context and to a larger extent to the American context or the Western context as well. What we see quite clearly in the news coverage of the outpouring of people from Syria, half of the population, some 11 million people, either displaced within Syria or at least over 4 million displaced outside of Syria, as well as displacements from Iraq and exchange borders, people moving fluidly across borders seeking safety and then not finding it where they fled and returning someplace else. Not to mention people fleeing violence in Afghanistan and violence in other countries in the Middle East or in Africa. So there's literally a flood of humanity. That's the kind of terminology that the media would use that's moving. And the response of much of the West is simply to wall up and wall out. So that's how I want to frame this, to put it in the context of this last week. In particular, since the tragedies in Paris and not to mention Beirut and Turkey and the Russian plane and so on, the fusing of the refugee with the image of ISIS, the conflating of a refugee as a terrorist, as it were. So I'm going to try to briefly cover a number of broad kind of arguments here. And first, I'm going to ask the question, why are Western countries barricading themselves against the figure of a refugee as a terrorist? And so I'm going to look briefly at this phenomenon of walling up. And I'm going to show you that this is just really not something happening in the West. It's actually a global phenomenon. And we're going to talk a little bit about the links between patriarchy and male-dominant structures of authority linked to the state, to the nation state. But we could also talk about that in the context of a religious authority as well. And then we will talk about what are the disruptions to state or masculine control and the kinds of hegemonic response which we see, which I have summarized here as war and walls. And then we'll briefly consider what could be some alternatives. Well, here's an image of Hungary's border barrier, which they erected very quickly and were unable to respond to the increased inflow of refugees across their borders this summer and to early fall. And I think probably Hungary was one of the countries that received the most media attention in relation to this kind of situation and their quick response to simply wall up and wall out. But it's symbolic of a much broader trend. So I have here for you a map which, if you can see, is really aspiring to be a global view of the wide range of walling up and walling out that's going on across the world. So we're very familiar with what's happening in the American South, Southwest, with our border with Mexico. But you can see it's also happening with Mexico and Guatemala, partly or much to the credit of U.S. military strategy. But then also in South America and in South Africa against Mbawwe and others and in northern parts of Africa, in the Middle East and much of the Middle East, the Saudis against the Yemenis, for example, the Ukrainians against the Russians or the Baltic states against the Russians or the Indians against the Bangladeshis and on and on it goes around the world. And some scholars recently have estimated there are as many as 65 countries around the world that have created walls or fences against one or more neighbors of theirs. And so here you see a closer picture of the situation in Europe. So it's worth remembering, you know, these images of these barriers because we're going to see shortly what are the routes that refugees are taking and you'll see how they're confronting these kinds of increasing obstacles. And then just this last week, well, in the last couple of days and even today, I guess the House adopted a resolution which is kind of our wall of words that we're erecting against receiving Syrian refugees to the United States and indeed our reception today has been paltry would hardly even capture the minuscule kind of response. I think we've received less than 2,000 Syrians and President Obama is projecting we would receive as many as 10,000 over the next year, but this is the rapid response now from so many states over 30 in the U.S. against receiving refugees from Syria conflating them with ISIS terrorists. So how is this possible? Why do we have this kind of global phenomenon of walling up and walling out? So I thought one strategy to or one approach to try to understand this is to look at the nation state in the context of nationhood and nationalism which in the event of war is often resurrected to epic proportions and you see very quickly that the nationness of people is deeply linked to a reproduction which has a lot to do with the sexual relations of men and women and how those relations are controlled and if you look very closely at what's happening in the areas of the Middle East which are torn by war you will see that sexual violence is pervasive and indeed having studied this topic and written a book about it I can say that it's pervasive in most wars around the world but really that kind of horrific violence that occurs in war time is more permissible I would say and facilitated by the kinds of controls over reproduction and sexual violence in times of peace and so you could say that the masculine control of society through the vehicle of the state occurs at multiple levels in countries around the world in the household, in society in the structures of the state the state authorities and into the international system itself so it's only been in the last 15 years since the adoption for example of the international criminal courts Rome Treaty that we have a provision in international law that finally forbids the use of rape as a weapon of war or a tool for genocide this is the 21st century only now could we consider this an abomination so it's taken a long time for this kind of consideration to become part of the norms in human rights standards in the international system and of course it will take much longer to really give that kind of provisioned teeth and make it real in the lives of people underground in war zones around the world where they could actually get justice and go to a court system and find a judge and a doctor and a lawyer and police and so on who would actually make it possible to enforce the kinds of laws that have been adopted so you could say that sexual violence is a key mechanism of dominance at all levels of the system and in a way if you understand that the state has certain kind of historic functions around these notions of nature and in belonging and reproducing the nation then the border itself is critical because the border is the edge it's a liminal space it's where what's familiar ends and what's uncertain begins it's anxiety producing you could say from a national perspective if you're trying to preserve the unity of your people vis-a-vis others so we see here in this illustration the construction of the fence in Hungary and I thought this photograph was particularly illustrative because it turns out that the men who are constructing the border are prisoners and that reminded me that the system of patriarchy depends on multiple forms of masculinity that includes allied masculine ways of thinking so masculine allies as well as subordinate masculinities and so certainly prisoners being forced to construct this wall here would come under the category of subordinated masculinities and we've heard fairly substantial account already tonight of the humiliated nature of the masculinities that are at stake in much of the Middle East and I can't help but think that that gives rise to much of the violence that we see including the kind of sexual control and sexual violence that's involved and so borders in this sense are edgy and anxiety producing and here's another image from Hungary which I labeled here Uncomfortable Gestures where the refugees are being gathered and I thought in particular the refugees that are in the front row here look very uncomfortable with what they're doing they're looking down and sort of their posture kind of gives away the extreme discomfort that seems to me so what are the kinds of disruptions and reassertions of masculine state control that are at play in global politics today that could help us understand from just one perspective some of the things that are going on with respect to the violence from ISIS and many other factions in the Middle East and the western militarized very militarized response well, one thing we should take into account is globalization and of course it has a long history we tend to think that it started in 1980 or something like this but you can follow that thread back a long ways each other over millennia and centuries but there's a more recent history here which is critical and that's the history of imperialism and so we see the kinds of grievances that that has engendered in the region that contributes to the insecurities and to the anger that can fuel some of the mobilization that you see and the recruiting that you see that we've just talked about in addition with globalization we have so many more points of connection around the globe with technology and transportation and communication and so on so these points of connection also make us more vulnerable so if we were more isolated there would be less means of leverage against us I think and indeed as I'll mention in a minute with the ISIS strategy that's called the management of savagery they really used this to their benefit so that's a consideration and I think that's also part of the response to wall up and try to wall out also we face unprecedented challenges that was really struck in the last year reading any number of international reports that the word unprecedented comes up over and over and over again everything is unprecedented so what does that mean really to me it means that the hegemonic system is in trouble hegemony means that the top dog sets the rules and everybody else goes along with them so that means the system is very legible right to the top dogs and the underdogs have to figure out how that system works so they can survive their survival depends on understanding that system even better than the people in the hegemonic state itself I think so this system seems to be really on some kind of precipice I think and that's also why I think borders seem to be edgy and very exciting provoking today too and what is what are some of the elements of this unprecedentedness well the number of refugees this last year hit almost 60 million unprecedented since world war two we don't have figures like this and the rapid increase of numbers of refugees from one year to the next and the long lasting nature of wars around the world also unprecedented we don't seem to have the capacity to get it together to set parties down at a table and say work this out and then what happens to the lives of the people who are torn apart by these conflicts they live in limbo they live in a liminal state they live somewhere on the edge for years if not decades and decades and the congress being concerned or the governor being concerned we will bring in some of these Syrian refugees like tomorrow this will be a great concern in fact would take like a couple years to vet each refugee at this rate you can do the math how long would it take us to accommodate some substantial number of refugees from Syria so the global response is so slow in response in relation to the need to the urgency of the moment and all this is a sense of unprecedented nature of challenges and also some of these conflicts are intertwined with climate change factors including Syria and other areas Yemen and other areas in the Middle East and water shortages and crop failures and drought and Yemen had an unprecedented typhoon yeah unprecedented I'm like my god in the middle of this conflict there's like 1.4 million children severely malnourished in Yemen like who's talking about that and on top of that they get an unprecedented typhoon so the scope of the challenges are enormous and besides that then conflicts are and twined with criminal enterprises and black marketing as we've already heard from ISIS the ISIS perspective and so this makes it a really complicated kind of mess right to sort out and the response the kind of the hegemonic projection has been to launch what some scholars that Derek Gregory in particular has called the everywhere war so war kind of is going on everywhere and other scholars would say perpetual war and I would say invisible war I mean invisible to us not the people on the ground who are seeing the bombs hit them but I've said to my students like when have you when have you heard news about what places were bombing now we know the French are bombing but what about us, what are we doing we don't know and of course we have people operating drones and I've studied where they are and what they do and they can work very securely from remote locations and target other people we just targeted and now ISIS person right one of the leaders occasionally we hear something about this but for the most part we have kind of invisible war for us and that makes us too comfortable and also doesn't bring upon a sense of responsibility either for what's going on and then we have walls and some of them are very visible and someone like Donald Trump would like to make them way more visible somehow it seems because it's not enough to have a wall along the border with Mexico that in many places is three layers deep so he envisioned something even more dramatic so this is a kind of hyper masculinity that we see as the response to the sense of insecurity vis-a-vis these kinds of challenges to hegemony well so ISIS then has a plan that you can read this online I would caution you to be careful where you download stuff that has anything to do with ISIS really because they may come to try to recruit you I'm totally serious about this I downloaded it from a site from Harvard but this handbook is somewhat chilling and it explains in there about how this is like more than a ten-year-old document but it seems to inspire some of the ISIS approach that you would go after oil, you would go after the media you would try to vex the enemy as it were so operations of vexation and you would target the enemy in all kinds of different places we're saying about tourism for example we're all over the place with tourists that makes us extremely vulnerable so they can spread out our focus all over the planet responding to attacks on our tourists just one simple strategy right so that's part of the disruptions that we're seeing and in the context of all that then this kind of refugee flow so a few quick slides then to give you a sense of what's going on there here's a picture of what's happening in Europe in terms of asylum claims this year you see Germany has the most but you can also see Hungary is quite prominent in this context and actually I have a friend who works in the state in Germany that has the highest percentage of refugees being resettled there in Baden-Württemberg 21% and here you can see that in proportion to the population actually Hungary is like way outpaced everybody else maybe it's not as surprising then that Hungary was like so desperate to take measures but the Hungarian authorities themselves felt humiliated by the failure of the European Union to come to their aid so again a kind of masculine humiliation responded to with the type of hyper-masculine response through walling up and trying to wall out and here's where most of the people are coming from so you can see Syria is in the lead but filed by Afghanistan and well Kosovo so even the persisting problems of the Balkans are echoing in Europe still today here are the eastern routes that people have used to flee through mostly smuggling operations at great risk and then what probably most people don't know about is the northern route which is through Russia and then into Norway and that entry point is by bicycle because the Norwegians require that you cross the border on some mode of transportation you can't go across the road from Russia and when they get on the Norwegian side they have to abandon their bicycles because they don't meet the safety standards of Norway and so a company has been hired to come and collect the tons and tons of bicycles that have been abandoned at this crossing point to apparently recycle them for reasons that they're not quite sure so instead of life jackets it's bicycles here's the Mediterranean sea route and as you see from many different points as well and the number of deaths so already in 2015 the date I must put the date up on this slide well up to November so up to about now already exceeding the number of 2014 despite concerted efforts to save lives more concerted efforts than there had been in place before so I'm going to end where that's a bit provocative perhaps I find it painful to show this image I couldn't bring myself to even look at it when it was first published but I think we should feel pain because we don't because we the war is invisible to us so I thought we should feel pain we should know what pain feels like to have a sense of responsibility how can we have a sense of shame about what's happening in the world and we're not doing enough so this photograph to me engenders a lot of pain but I also thought that it speaks a lot to the anxiety provoking and edginess of borders this is a very liminal situation this child is so close and yet so far you know and what could have been done to save this life and this image resonated around the world again and again in all kinds of communities it spoke to so you know that there's something very powerful about this image what does it tell us about our failures or responsibilities or who's bearing witness in this photo if you see it and you think about it and you do something are you bearing witness and what does that mean does it take us to some kind of action so to end here on a better note there are many people across Europe who've stepped up like a friend of mine in Germany for the government but civilians who stood out on the streets and passed out water broke up their day and said I'll go buy water because these people need water or somebody said here's a disabled person I'll take them in my car and here in Budapest in the train station underneath somebody figured out a way to show Tom and Jerry cartoons to entertain the children and I thought that's brilliant to take them out of their suffering their anguish, their anxiety their pain and give them a moment to be a child what could be more powerful and important than that so I think that should those gestures that the Europeans took should inspire us to think about what is our accountability what is our responsibility how could we exercise an ethic of care as opposed to resorting dramatically to a militarization of response as our first line of thinking and so I think that's probably a good segue to our next speaker talk about children our fourth panelist is David McFadden, professor of history I'm going to leave that Janie slide up there because it's in a way it's a good segue to what I'm going to be talking about and you may think oh that's not so you're going to be talking about Russia Russia is one of the problems in this situation and I guess I beg to differ with that and I want to remind you of some of the same statistics that other people have mentioned because everybody in this room should rivet them in their mind half of Syria's population over 12 million people have been displaced 300,000 dead 4 million have fled the country now we quite rightly get upset when 129 die in Paris when 224 die in an airliner from Egypt when a number of people die in a remote and elsewhere this humanitarian crisis in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II exceeding all of the genocides individually of the 90s and yet it remains invisible now I submit that the best way to reduce the refugee crisis to isolate ISIS and bring the world and Syria back from the brink of wider war is to double down on the diplomacy in order to do that we have to involve Russia and Iran especially Russia first we can work with Russia and the rest of the international community to relieve the suffering of the refugees funding needs to be tremendously increased and more countries not fewer need to be persuaded to increase the number of refugees they will accept most observers have pointed out the US could accept 100,000 not just 10,000 secondly and most importantly we and the Russians need to put pressure on our allies publicly there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria none military increased military action which both the Russians and the French and the Americans are engaged in only impedes the progress toward the diplomatic solution because the two sides of the conflict and I talk here about the US and its allies the Saudis Jordan the Gulf States, Turkey and Russia and its allies Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian government those those allies the only way for the conflict to be settled is to get those parties together the various rebel forces and Syrian opposition groups Hezbollah the Syrian government and Iran, Turkey and the Gulf States now there are negotiations going on in Vienna right now there's even talk that there may be a 15 day a short term ceasefire that is imminent we can only hope that this is true now this has been tried before of course there was a Geneva communique in 2012 that involved the UN and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that collapsed the Geneva conference of 2014 collapsed the major sticking point seems to be that the US is demanding that Assad leave and Russia is refusing to force that outcome Russia has pointed out and I might mention this to everyone that the two famous times in the last 10 years that the US and its allies forced a dictator out in Iraq and Libya resulted in bad outcomes resulted in chaos resulted in the recruitment of more Islamic terrorists but the gap between Russia and the US has to be bridged and in order to do that you got to spend time doing it I was very heartened to read that after the recent meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia Kerry went away from those meetings saying that Russia played a very positive role and that he was hopeful the current idea seems to be ceasefire Syria wide and especially in the number of local ceasefires cooperation among the Syrian government, Hezbollah and others to reduce the recruitment of militias and terrorists and extremists and an arms embargo now we're the furthest thing from an arms embargo now, we're going the other way and I think the key is really the US needs to commit itself to a serious working relationship with Russia Russia has a long history of Syria since the 19th century and Russia recognized was one of the first countries to recognize the independent government of Syria after decolonization in the 1940s Russia has been committed to the Assad regime for years Russia has a naval base in the Soviet Union and is the major supplier of the military equipment to Assad but I think if the US and Russia can agree they can press their allies to do the same you may wonder, well now why is Russia interested in this well I think the strategic position is clear and we also forget 14% of the Russian population 18 million people are Sunni Muslims they recently opened a new mosque a magnificent mosque in Moscow and Russia has fought their own battles against Islamic militants in the southern parts of Russia Russia is open to a unity government and to elections and I think the only way Assad will agree is if Russia agrees and I think Iran will go along with that so I'd just like to turn from Russia briefly here to a couple of other notes one report on BBC the other day that the only hope for a solution in Syria runs through Moscow and I think and I'm very worried about the attitude of many people in the United States against the refugees and calling for more military assistance down that road is going to be further in Syria and now I'd like to hear about the children so I'm Wendy Christian and I would save the children as they mentioned and our objective our goal is to make sure every child has a healthy start an opportunity to learn and protection from harm here in the United States and in 122 countries around the world so we have been involved in helping the children and families affected by the conflict in Syria since it began almost five years ago inside Syria and in the bordering countries of Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey and then this year of course have really ramped up our efforts as we're responding to these families virtually on the run who are fleeing across Europe and we've deployed teams and have country offices in Italy and Greece, Macedonia Serbia and Germany and so I thought at this point after you've heard about this very politically charged situation and you've learned about the history it should be my job to really put the face on this situation and especially the child's face because we know that in any conflict it is always the child who is the most vulnerable the greatest victim who has the most to lose they're not political and yet they're the ones who suffer the most and so I wanted to take you kind of through a journey through the eyes of a child who's making that journey who's fleeing Syria right now and I'll tell you that after this you can go to our website SaveTheChildren.org I took some of the photos from there but there's an interactive photo essay that you can see where we had a journalist follow a family from across the desert of Turkey and all the way to a refugee camp we also have a virtual reality video there that you can download the app the riot app on your phones and watch that it's a two minute video that again takes you right through the eyes of that refugee child so I think we get more understanding more empathy in a situation when it becomes closer to us and we can see it that way so here's a refugee boy who has just come off this dingy my group there and Ile of Lesfos saw this dingy coming up as they were driving along the highway they ran down to the rocky coast there and helped people coming off the dingy this is as you know one of many many that are arriving on some of the busiest days 22 of these rubber boats are arriving there on the coastline packed with people elderly children babies this little boy's mother was coming off the raft with a two month old infant in her arms and she was limping as our team helped her get off in the crush her ankle had been broken so here's a mom with a two month old infant a toddler a broken ankle and I just hear that story and think how bad must it be that a mother will get on that terribly unsafe journey knowing she might not make it we know many don't you just saw the bodies there washing up and that seems like the best choice the safest route for her children how bad must it be but if they make it across the water and our groups are there to give them some temporary housing there dry clothes, blankets dry them off they are just at the start of their journey they have a long way to go and from this point they are walking miles they are waiting on crowded train platforms hoping that they can get on a train many of which have no bathrooms by now all the food and water they brought with them have been depleted and if they make it that far they get to the border and hope that they get across and many of them are turned away even after that journey and if they get across that's where we have teams of people who are helping them not just save the children staff members but people in the countries so you keep hearing about countries closing down and not helping so many volunteers are there and being generous and trying to help those families who are fleeing who are on the run here they are giving them food and water we distribute hygiene kits so they can try to keep their families clean and healthy and then the real waiting begins they are waiting here to get their registration to be declared refugees camps in Germany that's their final kind of dream in this particular journey and this is where we see a lot of the children really break down because they kind of can gather all their little energy and resources to make it through that harrowing journey but when they get here they just don't know how long they're waiting or what's going to happen next there's so much uncertainty and that's where we're seeing the kids kind of break down and crying they have to be there for hours and days and if they have to spend the night there in shelters like this in giant warehouses with army cots certainly no place for an infant or a toddler and so Save the Children maps out what we call child friendly spaces safe spaces we use kind of police tape to have a little area where we've got trained staff who can protect them, parents can trust that their kids will be safe there and so we do a lot of the difficult traumatic situations that they've been through come out through their art and drawing through music they can play, have a semblance of a childhood in the midst of this chaos that's all we can really offer them at that point while they wait and the lucky ones get to crowd on this bus this bus that's going to take them to the refugee camp in Germany but when they get there as we know and as we're hearing even more this week their fate is really still so uncertain they have no idea if a country will open its doors to them and let them resettle and rebuild and start a new life in safety for their family one 10 year old boy who met our CEO Carolyn Miles in Greece she asked him what do you want when you get to Germany what are you looking for most and he said I just want to have a place I would really like to be able to play outside again I haven't played outside in three years and when you hear those kinds of stories from a 10 year old and you see the effort these parents are going through to try to give them that safe life it's hard to imagine that this might be the end that they might not get an opportunity to rebuild in a new country and I think when we see what's happening in the house today and in social media as people are trying to kind of process what's going on and they have so many concerns and so much fear sometimes it helps to take a couple of steps back to get perspective so I wanted to end with a story of one more refugee not from Syria but from a crisis that was happening when I first started at Save the Children in 92 probably when many of you were just right before you were even born and this is Ayla she's a refugee as I said not from Syria but in Bosnia another country very different than what's going on in Syria and yet so many things the same a country divided by ethnic differences and different religions and Ayla as the daughter of Bosnian Serb mother and a Bosnian Muslim father was targeted for the genocide there as it was called her family fled in the middle of the night as many Syrian families are they ran to the border of Croatia and were turned back as many families today are being it was just a UN commission that took some of these targeted children in a special convoy that got them across the border where they waited on a train platform for days and weeks to be able to go to a refugee camp in Germany sounds kind of familiar doesn't it they did get to that refugee camp Ayla arrived in a got to a barracks it was a former military training center there in Germany a giant barracks with lots of bunk beds and one shared bathroom and Ayla's family and 14 other families went into that barracks and they shared that barracks those bunk beds that one bathroom together at three year time she became a teenager that was her middle school time and they had no idea if they were going to get the opportunity to rebuild their life in another country and one day they got the big news that they were going to Cleveland and so they got to go to Cleveland, Ohio Ayla went to high school there she had about three words of English when she started imagine being 15 and starting in high school of words I tell her that it helps that she looks something like a supermodel but still she had to work really hard finished high school finished with a scholarship at Ohio University went on to grad school at NYU got her degree in journalism became a journalist in New York got married there and decided it was time to use her skills to give back and that's when she joined my team and that's when she started working at Michigan with me and Ayla's been there for five years and the first three years she's worked at Save the Children she really insisted that she work in our U.S. programs that she work for kids living in some of the worst impoverished areas in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta because she wanted to give back to kids who were struggling in her newly adopted country and then we trained her to go on to some of the biggest disasters here she's in the Philippines hit wherever kids were suffering Ayla was there to help them she has a baby now she and her husband live right here in Fairfield County they work right here in Fairfield this is the face of a refugee when it sounds like it's somebody far away it might be your neighbor it might be someone who's contributing in this way this week Ayla had her dream fulfilled a dream that began when she was in those barracks in that barracks in Germany she got a job offer and took it to work at the United Nations in the same division that saved her life 23 years ago and that's what can happen in America isn't it a young child can come here as a refugee with just nothing but a dream and we give an opportunity to that child and look what she can do Ayla's story inspires me and it makes me think what this child do if we give her that opportunity thank you thank you so much to all of the panelists we will now be taking questions so just raise your hand if you have a question and we'll come around with our microphone questions so I have a question with the Paris attack I heard most people think that that was a bad move for ISIS so what will happen with ISIS right now is in the eye of the world right now Russia is talking with the United States to unify ISIS so what is official of ISIS and Syria overall I guess that's for me huh so if I could peer into the crystal ball there's a paradox here because on the one hand their predicted response as you've already seen is going to be increased bombing on Taraka planes have left France and you know some of the planes have some of the missiles have from Paris with love written on them and on the one hand they're going to be able to kill some ISIS members but the more that they bomb because these are not smart bombs and people the more that they do the more it feeds the ideology of being attacked by a group of you know imperial powers bigger powers and unfortunately it's going to create a bigger recruiting ground I mean one of the most powerful and I've told this to my classes too one of the most powerful images that I have because I watch Arab TV all the time two weeks before well two weeks before the Russian plane went down when the Russians were bombing supposedly ISIS targets one of the bombs fell on an elementary school and Al Jazeera broadcast images of parents searching through the rubble and one particular man with this little plastic grocery bag looking for the pieces of his child after the bombing so that broadcast to 40 million viewers in the Arab world is a powerful image of what can happen to the innocent so it's a paradox on the one hand you can get the 100 or so terrorists but you also pay a price in recruiting this is why I think all of us strangely enough our agreement on military solutions is not going to bring a solution if I could add one thing the other really really sad thing another part of the US response is closing the borders and not receiving refugees and thinking that refugees are ISIS and that kind of response from the United States and Europe is also recruiting for ISIS because all they can just say you shouldn't go to Europe you shouldn't go to the west look what they don't want you we're your salvation and we've seen the situation in Iraq Libya, Yemen and now Syria when the destruction of the state the inability of the civil fabric to stay is creating ISIS you cannot destroy ISIS that way President Obama had a good idea a couple of years ago it's gotten lost the Republicans have pummeled it it's probably dead which is the major response we have to have to ISIS is ideological we have to deal with poverty we have to deal with education we have to work with the moderate Muslim communities to transform that image and if we're not welcoming to refugees and the Muslim world it's just going to it's just bad policy it's just going to make it worse we have time for probably one more question so I just have a question that I wrote down during throughout the presentation and it was regarding what we as individuals can be doing to make a change in the next week months, years today because it seems as if the government has always been making the decisions and that seems like the military is going to be the answer and if we want to make a change how is that going to come about a lot of people say social media protests, rallies they always seem very superficial and I don't know what your recommendations are for moving forward I think that our approach at the moment is to speak to our representatives in government and if you feel that we should be welcoming to refugees then send that message it's a really critical time to use your voice in those ways of course we can support Save the Children and other organizations that are working on the ground and you can make your own choices in your own lives if you want to commit yourself either professionally or through your own vocation to support refugee calls and peacemaking human rights kinds of causes, social justice causes in your own communities not to mention internationally there's an international institute in Connecticut that always needs resources for resettled refugees sometimes we can place students there as interns and service learning projects Stanford that also does similar kinds of work with immigrants so I think there's opportunities in our own community that we can easily live our commitments as well as look for other opportunities internationally and by the way, Janie was going to mention this we have a new humanitarian action minor at Fairfield University that was just approved by the academic council I want that to be as big as the health sciences I love health sciences, but we need to make that a really powerful minor and students need to step up declare that minor, come see Professor Leatherman take the courses that are offered and get involved with Juhaan and make this campus a force in the community for humanitarian issues I have more information about the minor public and probably a week's time with the most looks like so we're excited to go on with that but Juhaan is ready for you today I was just reminded I had a conversation with the Fairfield faculty member not that long ago and she told me that her plans this summer were to travel to Italy to spend and work with refugees in the camps in Italy so for those of you who are thinking about the grand European tour you could maybe stay in one location and invest those funds in hanging around one particular location in Italy, Germany, Sweden take your pick and helping you know work with refugees or with kids and we would love your support but also to again go to savethechildren.org and download the video share it with people we really think that getting that information is really important to building the understanding and when people are informed and aware of what's going on we know that the United States is the most generous country in the world and I think just to bring it down to the personal level never underestimate the power of a conversation especially when you are informed and you seek knowledge like you're doing here you are trying to get a different perspective that's why you're here so have your conversations with the people you know you are in a privileged situation you are college students or are in influential positions have those conversations with people in your circle because that transforms and really the power of how we structure a situation how we view a situation you can't underestimate that and how you transmit it in social media although you may say that it's superficial but truly social media has refocused you would not have heard about the Beirut omission had it not been for one person who protested on social media one person can really really make a difference and you have so many so many tools at your disposal so use them use your knowledge and use your curiosity and keep learning there's a really cool site called D-I-M-E-O it's you want to talk about it it's these guys who are actually on the ground and they're going around and sort of secretly having conversations with people in everyday life and they post them they're short they're really short and it's really interesting also if you want to learn a little bit more about and I know I've shared this with my classes Al Jazeera has a great website interactive website of what life is like for refugees it's called life on hold and you'll see profiles of different refugees in Lebanon and their lives and you'll see a lot of it is breaking down the stereotypes we are closing the walls because we have stereotypes so a lot of it is break down those walls this has come up before but I think it's a good time with all of you here to mention this I think Fairfield University should make a public statement and should reach out to sponsor some students, some Syrian students to come to Fairfield and I don't see why we can't make that happen and with Juhaan and with the Center for Faith and Public Life I think that would be a tremendous statement at this time to take an initiative in that direction do you think we can do that? Yeah I've said the same thing I agree that we need to put our efforts together Student voices are really important initiatives like this you don't underestimate the power of your voice and my challenge to the Juhaan students was like reach out to the other other Jesuit university campuses and I don't know if you had a chance to do that in Washington but you can imagine that an idea can grow and flourish and we can shoulder some of the responsibility to those campuses in those states that have said they're going to reject refugees to raise holy hell there we've got a great state here in Connecticut you should thank Governor Malloy you should thank Senator Murphy and Senator Blumenthal and our congressman Jim Himes they're all on the right side of this but they're under tremendous pressure Two quick notes before we close for tonight if you are interested in using your student voice to help those in need stand in solidarity and contribute towards humanitarian action please come see me and Carrie we can talk to you about the Juhaan student group we meet every other Wednesday at seven and finally if you are a first year there is a laptop in the back and if you're looking for FYE credit all the way in the back next to the pink bag just put down your name and your ID number but once again thank you so much and thank you to everyone for coming