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“This is a war against normal life.” So said CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, describing the situation at this moment in Syria, as well as in other parts of the Middle East.

The New York Times reported in 2014 new immigrants are more often to be found in midsize cities, like Dayton, Ohio than in New York, Chicago, and other large cities. Like Youngstown, Dayton had lost over 40% of its population. But city officials embraced immigration by establishing a Welcoming Dayton plan in 2011. New immigrants and refugees were encouraged to relocate in this community and developed support groups to help newcomers adjust to their new community.

We must not let Isis’s crimes dictate how we address the refugee crisis – or privacy. Some want to exploit the Paris attacks in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political ends. We should not let that happen.

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Anti-Syrian sentiment, along with economic hardship and a growing sense that the civil war will rage on for years to come, helps explain why many refugees are willing to risk everything by leaving Turkey and heading for Europe.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming response to the refugee crisis won her accolades as Europe’s most humane leader. But with few European Union countries agreeing to accept even small numbers of refugees, Merkel performed an about-face, re-imposing border controls and further exacerbating the crisis. And still neither Merkel nor any other European head of state acknowledges the refugee crisis is the result of wars started and supported by “western democracies.”

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Washington helped create the conditions with its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers keep on growing. The authorities are overwhelmed, as are the solidarity networks. The refugee crisis has revealed a different rift: between thousands of ordinary citizens, from Greece to Germany to Britain, ready to share their bread their homes, and governments determined to fortify their borders and protect their power, backed by both the anxious and the frankly xenophobic.

Images of Czech police inking the skin of newly arriving Syrian migrants, and the government says they were unaware that this brought back memories of the Holocaust, when prisoners at Auschwitz were systematically tattooed. While in the north of Europe, in 24 hours, responding to a Facebook campaign, 10,000 Icelanders opened their doors to their Syrian brothers and sisters.