"American Misconceptions of Syria"
Download PDF About the AuthorFeras Aboukhater is a third-year undergraduate student with a Biology major and a minor in Medicine, Health, and Society at SUNY Stony Brook University. He wrote this research paper for his WRT 102 class in his freshman year. Feras plans to go into medical school when he is done with his undergraduate degree and he aspires to become a Cardiologist. ContentsHow Fox News Frames the War in Syria What Living in Safe Parts of Syria Looks Like Balancing Between Conflict and Peace |
Effect on Syrians in the USYou will never believe that this wrong view is a real problem until you see what Syrians in the US experience on a daily basis. I have conducted some interviews with Syrian students living in the US to ask them about their experiences with the misunderstandings towards Syria and Syrians, and their responses were noteworthy. The method of choosing interviewees relied upon my own network of Syrian international students. I found subjects through acquaintances and connections of those acquaintances and did not have any requirements other than being a Syrian student living in the US. What makes these subjects reliable is that they all are Syrians and they experienced the misunderstanding about them with their own eyes. Another thing is that they are living in different parts of the US, and all three had instances of a wrong view towards them, which proves that there is a real problem. I need to emphasize that every person who lived in Syria in the days of war was affected by this war in one way or another depending on their circumstances such as location, economic status, etc. However, people who were extremely affected by the war to a devastating effect can rarely be found in the US due to the restricted policy on immigrants and refugees from Syria. According to the US Department of State’s Refugee Processing Center, a very small number of Syrian refugees were admitted to the US in the calendar years 2011-2015. However, as the conflict in Syria intensified in 2016, President Obama’s final year in office, there was a big spike of 14,192 Syrian refugees admitted, and then this number began to decrease drastically in 2017 and again 2018, with 3,024 and 38 refugees respectively, followed by a slight increase in 2019 that showed that 588 refugees were admitted. That dip in the number of refugees after 2016 happened in part due to President Trump’s 120-day refugee ban, which made it almost impossible for any refugee to be admitted to the US in the summer of 2017. After this ban expired there was a pause on the admission of Syrian refugees, and then there was the travel ban issued by president Trump on countries like Syria, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, North Korea and Venzuela (Amos; Lind). The first interview was an email interview with Sami Nazha, a Syrian student living in California. Sami talked about an incident in which he discovered that his friends were shy to ask him about Syria, thinking that it is an extremist country due to the war that is happening there. Sami felt as if someone slapped him in the face because of what he had discovered. He could not accept anyone talking about his country in this way and was very irritated and depressed; however, he tried to conceal those emotions so that he could change his friends’ views and talk about his country in a realistic and persuasive manner. He started asking them questions about how they imagined Syria so that he could know what they really meant by an “extremist country.” The responses varied: “You cannot be anything other than Muslim because you will be murdered,” “ISIS is killing people everywhere,” “you cannot go out with women unless you are married,” “you cannot drink alcohol,” etc. Sami clarified, first of all, by saying that in Syria there is great diversity and not all people are Muslim and gave an example of himself because he is a Christian. He then started saying that ISIS is in control of a very small part of the country, not the whole country and that there is war in Syria but there is normal life too. He also said, “There is normal life other than what you see on TV. I used to have friends from the opposite gender, drink alcohol, play tennis and swim, all during the war years. Life should continue.” The second interview was a phone interview with Fozi Massouh, a Syrian student living in Rhode Island. Fozi once had an incident where he was thought to be a refugee because he is Syrian. The stereotypical view of relating Syrians to refugees was very pervasive in the last seven years because of the framing of news on TV and social media. Fozi was at work when his coworkers asked him if it was hard coming to the US, assuming that he was a refugee. Fozi’s response that he was not a refugee shocked his coworkers: he clarified that there are no Syrian refugees in the US because the government does not allow them to come to the US. He also added that not every Syrian abroad is a refugee. He felt extremely miserable because of the first impression he had from his coworkers, who judged him without even knowing the truth and felt enraged at the same moment because his country is thought of as a refugee’s country; however, he still believes that this misunderstanding can be altered one day. The third interview was an email interview with Ramy Ghawji, a Syrian student living in Ohio. Ramy talked about an incident where his college friends were shocked that he was going back to Syria during the winter break because they thought that traveling to Syria was like committing suicide. Ramy had a very rigorous job of trying to persuade his friends that what they see on TV is not the full story of what is going on in Syria and that there is normal life other than war there. He began by saying that all of his friends and relatives are still living there, determined to live a normal life, and continued by showing them pictures of the bright side of Syria in the war years. They were shocked by the things Ramy was saying and the pictures he was showing because they had a totally different image in their minds, but the good thing is that they now know the full story and not part of it, and that's what I am trying to do in the next section by speaking about my own experiences in Syria and the ones of a reporter. |