This is my new friend — let’s call him Bob. Only a year my elder, he is much more polite and reserved than I am, although he laughs like a gleeful child if you provoke him with even the silliest of jokes. He grew up in a nice house with loving parents. Bob was inspired by his father, a successful psychiatrist, to dedicate 12 years of his life to studying neurology in order to become a doctor. When I needed a minor emergency surgery on my hand last week, the hospital wouldn’t do it without insurance. Bob, admittedly not a surgeon, still jumped in to save the day — and my hand. He has made efforts to check up on me every day since then, even though he is already overworked by the busloads of people he treats daily — none of which he is paid for; he says it is “his duty” to volunteer here 7 days a week, tending to health concerns of strangers. He doesn’t believe that this in any way makes him a hero. He dreams not of saving lives, but living his own life peacefully.

Would your impression of this compassionate, hard-working man change if I told you Bob’s real name is Muhammad? What if I told you his best friend from med school was imprisoned and horrifically executed for being Muslim, and Muhammad still has nightmares about it? Actually, most of his friends have been killed or kidnapped, even though they came from all religious backgrounds. Muhammad has no toys or photographs remaining from his childhood. He spent 30 icy cold hours lying flat in the storage space above the driver’s area of a truck, without food or water, crammed against 4 other men, unable to as much as twitch a muscle until they were smuggled into the EU. Even when a fellow passenger could no longer contain his own excrement, there was nothing Muhammad and the others could do but wait. A part of him wished he too had died in war instead of suffering through the smuggling, which he likened to a living grave. Because his father was Palestinian, Muhammad was never issued a passport and therefore faced tremendous bureaucracy whenever he landed in a new airport, always being turned away even though he possessed temporary travel documents.

Muhammad wonders if it was a blessing or a curse that his family had enough cash to afford the smugglers, because those without money have no chance of fleeing the war. His mother, a once-vibrant woman 62 years young, obstinately refuses to abandon her hometown. Muhammad phones her every day, despite the hardship of hearing his widowed mother narrate anecdotes of bloodshed, while the vociferous booming of deadly shells echoes in the background.

Dr. Muhammad is a Syrian refugee, and his story is not unlike many of the others. They are not all doctors (there are lawyers, police officers, business owners, writers, English teachers or other educated professionals) and they are not all Syrian, nor are they all Muslim — in fact, many lifted an eyebrow at me in sheer perplexity when I asked about religion, because they couldn’t understand the correlation between religion and Americans’ anti-refugee stance as of late.

I try to keep Facebook limited to light-hearted toilet humor and the occasional cute animal video, but my feed has resounded with so much misinformation and bigotry I felt compelled — no, obligated — to express my gratitude towards my new buddy Dr. Muhammad for treating my hand. He doesn’t even want to share his story; he just wants to focus on studying German so he can better assimilate to his new home. He wants to receive his asylum papers, practice the medicine he studied so hard for, and keep to himself in peace. He wants the nightmares to go away. He wants to be reunited with his fiancée after being separated for almost a year now. Many of the other refugees are patiently awaiting their official papers that will allow their wives and children to legally and safely travel here and rejoin them. They just want to be allowed to work, rent an apartment, and rebuild their tattered lives that have been so tragically and unnecessarily dismantled. Some of them even see our efforts as officious; they’ve never been poor, never asked for someone to feed them lukewarm soup in a styrofoam cup or hand out donated clothing with that lingering smell of indifference leftover from a dusty storage box. They just want the basic respect of common human decency.

If you think being born in a different place than you makes someone less human, you need to reconsider the spectrum of emotions and social interactions that make someone human indeed. I’m not saying we should ignore those already hungry and homeless. (But last month when the Senate voted to cut veteran benefits, I didn’t see any selfies in my newsfeed of valiant humanitarians protesting outside politicians’ offices…but rather, a deluge of comments criticizing Bernie Sanders for his “socialist” tendencies.) To see so many people that I consider friends blatantly manipulated by internet media and Facebook comments, adopting an anti-human attitude in a time that so many people are denied the basic human rights granted by the universe, is eminently revolting to say the least. To be manipulated into believing that people fleeing from terrorists are terrorists themselves is utterly ridiculous and, frankly, frustrating. Most of the terrorists in recent attacks in Europe were European nationals. The anti-refugee argument among state governors hit the news in October — before the Paris attacks — but no one cared until it was on Facebook a few days ago. Statistically, refuge-related asylum is the least likely way for a terrorist to enter a country: of the 745,000 refugees resettled in the USA since 9/11, only two have been allies of terrorists. And has everyone forgotten about all the white male Christians in the US who have shot up schools and set off bombs in our proud, patriotic homeland? (If you have, let me remind you: it was a lot more than two.) And yet the politicians who argue against the USA accepting refugees (Syrian Muslim refugees, as if there were no other kind), are the same ones fighting to keep it legal for Americans to purchase guns without a background check. Let’s not overlook how the US has been bombing the Middle East for a number of years now. Children growing up in Iraq and Pakistan have come to prefer cloudy skies to clear ones, because the deadly drones can’t fly overhead in bad weather.

IS wants you to say “no” to refugees. The success of their crusade depends on the perpetuation of the bigotry that separates Muslims from the rest of the world. Muslims are IS’s biggest target, even more so than other religious groups; if Muslims can easily seek refuge elsewhere, IS has less victims over whom to exert their control. And it’s so much more complicated than “Us vs. Them” or “IS vs. Muslim.” There are six different parties fighting the war in Syria in addition to foreign troops (and it’s interesting to note that the USA is concurrently funding more than a few opposing armies). To assume that all Muslims are terrorists is just as rationally preposterous as it is mathematically — by IS’s own estimates, their followers make up less than 0.01% of all Muslims worldwide. That’s hardly “all,” by anyone’s standards. Should we also assume that “all” Christians are terrorists because the KKK tortured and lynched ethnic minorities, rooting their motivations in Christian ideology? What about the thousands of Muslims massacred by Christian terrorist groups in Africa just last year? I don’t recall seeing any memes about that.

Dr. Muhammad never asked for any of this. He dearly misses his mother and friends and he was visibly reticent in recounting his misery to me. Just like me, he wonders how people become so deluded by misinformation that they perpetuate the hateful and unjust ideals that lead to violent genocide. This kind, gentle man spoke with me in confidence as a friend, not as a spokesperson trying to incite a movement. He never intended anything he said to be quoted or shared. But we bonded over the agreement of some very basic wishes we share for the world. “Sometimes I wonder, why did I have to be born in Syria? I feel depressed at times, but I try to stay positive,” he confessed. “I wonder why we all need passports. Borders aren’t real, they are lines painted with a ruler. I know it sounds like a silly utopian ideal, but we are all people, human beings. We are all the same.” Despite not sharing my native language, he was able to steal words that I too have spoken in my past.

To argue against the welcoming of refugees to your state or country is a pitiful demonstration of having fallen into the trap that terror has set for you. War and violence are much less effective without the propaganda that separates humans from humanity. If you believe that all refugees, whether Syrian, Muslim, or whatever, are terrorists, or somehow inferior beings less deserving of the right to appreciate a sunny blue sky, then the only words I can ascribe to you are darkly disparaging and accompanied by a slew of f-bombs. You should be ashamed of yourself. If we were to truly reunite the concepts of “humans” and “humanity,” we should all be striving for the same dream as the humble doctor in the photo above: peace.

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Originally published at cjcrucial.wordpress.com on November 20, 2015.