The last few weeks I’ve hardly been able to sleep. I feel so much guilt and shame that we somehow still live in a world where people are so indifferent to the suffering of others and that I’m not doing enough to change that.

More specifically, the suffering faced by millions of people as a result of civil war in Syria.

Why Syria?

The prevailing sentiment in the U.K. is of widespread intolerance to immigrants, with the media talking about an “immigration crisis”, fuelled primarily by people from Syria & other Arab states who are here to sponge off our benefits system, commit acts of terrorism and destroy everything that’s “great” about Britain. That somehow, they’re the ones to blame for everything wrong with our country, despite those in power showing us time and time again that they’re greedy, morally bankrupt individuals with no concern beyond themselves.

From an estimated population of 22 Million people, the UN has identified 13.5 Million displaced individuals who require humanitarian assistance.

The true scale of the crisis is almost incomprehensible, with around 12 million Syrians living under conditions of severe food insecurity, and more than two-thirds of those displaced being women and children.

This is not an immigration crisis.

This is a refugee crisis exacerbated by foreign government intervention, and while I agree that there is some responsibility to protect civilians in other countries from human rights abuses, we then need to accept that part of that responsibility will be to help support those that chose to seek a better life in the country that intervened in the first place.

That help doesn’t mean we house those seeking asylum on floating hotels, or shipping them on planes to Rwanda, another country that ranks among the lowest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties and quality of life.

I tweeted about this almost three years ago, and I’m even more outraged now than I was then.